All Chapters of The Omega's Crown: Chapter 71 - Chapter 80

Selene's POVThe priest arrived three days before the ceremony.He was the same priest from the silver hall — the same black robe, the same careful stillness, the same silver bowl that he carried in a wooden case and set on the altar with both hands, the way a man carried a thing he had carried a hundred times and had not stopped being careful about.He looked at me when I came into the great hall.He inclined his head."Luna."It was the first time he had called me that. In the silver hall he had called me nothing — had said only give me your right hand and touch your blood to him, the impersonal language of ceremony. We had bound ourselves in front of him and he had said it was done and had closed his book."Father Aldric," I said.We walked through the sequence.The order of procession. The position at the altar. The point at which Riven would deliver the inner circle acknowledgment and the point at which Kael would deliver his personal vow and the point at which I would deliver mi

Selene's POVMy mother braided my hair at the seventh hour.She had been in my room since the sixth, which was earlier than I had asked her to come and exactly when I had known she would arrive. She had the small wooden box with the hairpins, the same box she had described using on my grandmother before a ceremony she had not been permitted to attend, and she pinned my hair the way she had been described pinning other women's hair for thirty years, without asking what I wanted because she already knew.Mira was on the chair by the window in the green dress.She was not crying.She was adjacent to crying.She had been adjacent since she had watched my mother put the first pin in, and she had been holding it by sheer force of will for twenty minutes, and I could see the specific muscle at the corner of her jaw that activated when Mira was doing something hard without showing it."You can cry," I said."I'm not crying.""Mira.""I'll make it worse.""That's allowed."She pressed her hand

Selene's POVThe kitchen had been working since the third hour of the morning.I knew because I had been awake at the third hour of the morning — not from nerves, which I had been expecting, but from the smell of roasting meat and fresh bread that had been coming up through the east wing since before dawn, and from the small animal at the base of my ribs who had been too awake to let me sleep and had spent the last three hours pressing forward and going back and pressing forward again like a wolf who had been told something good was happening and couldn't hold still about it.The feast was in the great hall.The same room, re-dressed. The ceremony banners were still up but the altar had been folded back and the tables had come out — long oak, end to end, the same configuration the hall used for pack runs and winter feasts and the occasional disaster meeting when everyone needed to be in the same room. Five hundred wolves at the tables. Music from the gallery above. The kitchen sent ou

Selene's POVThe coffee was on the table when I came down.Not because Kael had sent for it. Because he had made it. He had been awake since the fifth hour — I had heard him on the other side of the room, the soft sounds of a man who was constitutionally incapable of sleeping past sunrise and had made peace with it — and by the time I sat up he had already been to the kitchen and back.Two cups. The lemon on the saucer.This was the new normal.It had been six days since the coronation. The feast had lasted until well past midnight. The pack had gone home the following morning. The banners had come down. The kitchen had recovered. The correspondence had resumed.The coffee was on the table every morning."Council letter," Kael said from his chair by the window."Which one?""Vance. He wants your schedule for the spring session. Also, there's a note from the eastern packlord about the border adjustment proposal you submitted. He has questions.""Good questions or stalling questions?""

Selene's POVI wrote to Diana three weeks after I'd filed the letter.I had told Kael I'd write when I was ready, and I had meant it — not as a courtesy, not as a performance of the generous woman I was trying to become, but as an actual statement of timing. When ready. Not before.For three weeks I was not ready.The unwritten letter sat in my chest the way an unsigned document sat in a drawer. I felt it in the mornings, when I drank the coffee Kael had left on the table. I felt it in the afternoons, when I worked through the eastern correspondence and came across her handwriting in the old archived files my father had kept on her family. I felt it at night, when I closed my eyes and the small animal at the base of my ribs lay quiet and watchful and did not press one way or the other.She was waiting.Not Diana — the wolf.She had her opinions about a great many things now. About Kael. About Kade. About the eastern packlord who had argued with me too long about timber rights. About t