Lahat ng Kabanata ng The Omega's Crown: Kabanata 41 - Kabanata 50

Selene's POV"I need to tell you everything."He said it at the fire after my mother had gone to sleep in the second tent and Riven had taken the perimeter watch and the camp was quiet.He sat across from me. The firelight caught the silver at his temples and the lines at the corners of his eyes and the scar I had not noticed until now, running from the base of his left ear to the edge of his jaw. It was old. Twenty years old. The kind of scar a man carried when a blade had missed his throat by an inch on a night when missing was the only difference between the man he was and the body in a grave."The faked death.""Yes.""Start there."He started there."I stayed with you until you were three. Your mother and I ran the eastern woods for four months after the massacre. We found a farmstead. We lived there. You learned to walk in the kitchen of a farmstead owned by a woman named Helin who never asked our names and fed us every day and refused payment.""Helin.""She died six years late

Selene's POV"Run it again."Riven cleared his throat. He had been clearing his throat for three hours. He had been running the strategy session since noon in Kael's study with the full team around the table and the map on the wall and the evidence files in order and the senior secretary's pen scratching at the inkwell.He ran it again."Diana will challenge bloodline. We let her. You present the Ashvale family documents. Diana will reject the documents as forged. You name the Archive. Three of the elders will demand proof. We opened the Archive. The original founders' records confirm your lineage. The Council votes. We win.""Or?""Or they prevent us from reaching the Archive door."The room was quiet.Kael sat at the head of the table. Kade at his left. My mother is at the far end. Renick at the small desk. Riven at the map.I sat at Kael's right. The chair that had been empty for three years. It was furniture now. The Keep had stopped noticing."The Archive door," Kade said. "Is th

Selene's POV"Eat, Lirien."My mother set the bowl in front of me.The soup smelled like the kitchen at Draeven Keep and like the farmstead where I had learned to walk and like the Ashvale household where I had been born, and I had not been to the Ashvale household, and I did not remember the farmstead, but my body remembered the soup. My body had remembered the soup since the first morning the cook had set a cup of broth at my door and I had not known why the taste had made me cry.I know now.I ate.Kael ate beside me. Kade across from me. My mother is at the head of the small table. Riven at the door with a bowl he was eating standing up because Riven had decided that the door was his post and the eating was secondary.We ate in silence.Nobody spoke about tomorrow. Nobody spoke about the Archive or the pendants or Diana or the three bought elders or Seraphine in her inn on the western edge of the city. Nobody spoke about the forty-year campaign or the massacre file or the hex or t

Selene's POVThe staircase was narrow.Six elders. Thirty observers. My team. Diana and her delegation. All descending three levels below the Hall of Six in single file. I could hear Diana breathing four people behind me and Kade's hand on his blade and the sound of the archivist's keys jingling at the bottom.Kael was at my left. He had not spoken since the chamber.The Archive door was at the bottom of the third level.Stone. Iron-banded. The lock was set into the center at chest height. Two pendant-shaped slots. Side by side. The metal around the slots was dark with age.I stopped at the door.Thirty people were standing behind me. Every one of them is watching. Every one of them waiting for a woman they had been told was an omega to open a door sealed since before most of them were born.I pulled the pendants from my collar.Two slots. Two wolves. Two halves separated for twenty-one years.I set the first pendant into the left slot.Click.The sound of a lock recognizing a piece of

Selene's POVThe Council chamber was full at noon.The same six elders. The same thirty observers. The gallery had filled to twice its size, because the news had moved through the city overnight, and every alpha and beta and elder who had not been at the hearing yesterday had paid for a seat in the gallery today.The chamber stood when we walked in.I had not been expecting that.The elders did not stand for the Alpha King of Draeven. The Alpha King stood for them. That was the order of things. That was the order of things every time the Council had ever met.The chamber stood for me.Not for Kael. For me.Vance was the first up. He did not say anything. He stood. He set his hand against his chest. The other five elders did the same. Then the gallery. Then Diana's old delegation, who had not been arrested with her. They were standing at the back of the room with their hands at their chests and their heads bowed, because they had decided overnight that the only way to survive this morn