All Chapters of By The Blood of The Omega: Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

AZIZAHe left before sunrise.I could hear the camp assembling from my room, the clatter of tack, the murmur of low voices, men who had done this enough times to do it without wasted motion in the dark. Three days, the runner had reported yesterday when he’d delivered the new timetable to Vessa’s rooms. Pack business in the northern territories. The Prince and a small retinue.I stood at my window and watched the last torchlight blink out past the outer gate and then went back to bed, my eyes open, and waited for the compound to awaken around me.The first day passed with no incident.The second morning Vessa had me in before she had even opened the correspondence and told me I’d filed a letter wrong.She held it between her fingers. The letter was from a mid-ranking supply administrator at Ashfen’s border – standard quarterly report, nothing confidential- and I had filed it administratively. I had filed it because it was an administrative matter.“It should be under cross-territory s

AZIZAI had been in Vessa’s employ long enough to know that none of it ever began with the real thing. It was always with a hem, or a misplaced letter, or a cup of tea allowed to cool by my failure to arrive promptly with it. Something small and fabricated which somehow gave the whole thing legitimacy.The hem was on the serving dress she had assigned me for the morning's household reception. It was a reception of four ranked wives from allied packs, of tea and correspondence and of the precise, deliberate architecture that Vessa constructed and maintained with an all-encompassing discipline. I had pressed the dress the previous evening. Checked it, twice.She discovered the hem undone at the back, three inches of thread, when she came for me to dress for the morning."I can't have you present like this," she stated to the room rather than to me. "Not before guests.""I can fix it here and now, my lady. It won't take long.""The guests will be here in eight minutes." She turned from t

AZIZAThe kitchen served porridge at the sixth bell.Not to everybody. The ranked staff got breakfast delivered. Vessa’s household had a table in the eastern dining room with cloth napkins and someone to fill your cup when it was empty without being asked. I had been in Vessa’s household for three weeks and I had a room with a window and a key and I still fetched my own breakfast from the kitchen window because the eastern dining room was for Vessa’s permanent household and I wasn’t that, not exactly, and Mara had seen to it that I knew the difference on my third day there.I carried my bowl to the farthest corner of the yard, sat on the low wall, and ate.The porridge was plain and hot and I ate it, staring out at the eastern gate and thinking about what I’d said last night and feeling my jaw go rigid every time another snippet of it swam back into focus.I won’t be a part of this.Said to the Crown Prince of the Ironfang Pack, in a garden, after midnight, after he’d kissed me, and I

AZIZABram posted the notice for the gathering four days prior. The invitation itself specified "a formal dinner and reception for allied pack members and arriving delegations, followed by a celebration," but the context for the celebration was implicitly understood: the pregnancy was the hot topic throughout the compound by week two and no wolf was unaware of it. Vessa with swollen feet kept her expression composed, even as her stomach churned with disgust at each new flower arrangement the kitchen staff brought in, received well-wishers at her place setting. "Get rid of them," she ordered, on the third bouquet. I removed them from the room.I spent those four days managing both her person and her domicile- cold compress and plain crackers from the kitchen, redirection of incoming correspondence, keeping Vessa sitting upright only for as long as was strictly necessary. She berated me twice and neither apology was tendered, but I said nothing; my focus had to be on what she could not

AzizaVessa decided the upper wing would be opened and catalogued.She said it plainly, as if it were a small adjustment to the day rather thansomething that hadn’t been touched in two months. “We’ll go through the upperrooms this morning,” she told me, glancing over a list as she spoke. “I want afull record. What’s worth keeping, what can be repurposed, what isn’t worth thespace it takes.”I was still finishing the line I’d started writing when she added, “You’llcome with me.”“Yes, my lady,” I said, and closed the book.The upper wing had been sealed since the night of the absorption. No one hadreason to go there. The rest of the house had already been turned over,reshaped into something that suited Ironfang. This part had been left behind,untouched.We went up together.The air changed as soon as we crossed into that corridor. It was faint, butnoticeable—rooms kept closed too long, dust settled into corners, somethingolder underneath it all that didn’t quite belong to the