All Chapters of The Omega's Crown: Chapter 81 - Chapter 90

Selene's POVHe came to me at the seventh hour on a Thursday.I was in the east study — my east study, though Kade had offered it, which still felt more like a generous permanent loan than possession. The room had not, yet, fully accepted that it belonged to me. The shelves still held the previous occupant's books in the order he had left them. The lamp at the corner of the desk had a small chip in its base that I had inherited and not repaired. The chair was new — Kael had brought it in the second week, without comment, and I had not asked where he had gotten a chair that was exactly the right height for the desk and exactly the right depth for the way I sat.I had the border proposal spread on the table.Three reference maps pinned to the wall board — the eastern territories, the disputed line, the proposed adjustment in red. A cup of tea that had gone cold an hour ago. The afternoon light was at the angle that meant I had been working for longer than I had intended to and would be

Selene's POV"You've never officiated a ceremony," Kael said."I've read every pack ceremony record in the archive. I know the sequence.""Reading it and doing it are different.""I know the difference. I did it for my own coronation."He looked at me."That's fair," he said.We were in the Luna chambers the night before. Mira had gone to bed early — Mira, who had never gone to bed early in her life, had announced at the eighth hour that she was retiring and had taken herself off to the small guest room she had moved into for the week, in deference to the formal observance that the betrothed slept apart the night before the bond. I laughed when she announced it. She had not laughed back. She had been, for the first time since I had met her, nervous in a way she was not trying to hide. I had stopped laughing.Kade had gone to bed early too, by all reports.The Keep had been settling for an hour."You'll do it well," Kael said."I know.""I just wanted to say it.""I know."He came over

Selene's POVThe eastern alpha gave it to me on the last day.He was sixty-eight, a third-generation alliance partner of the Draeven line, the kind of man who kept things for a long time and gave them carefully. He had been watching me for three days — not assessingly, the way the packlords had watched me, but with the particular attention of a man trying to decide whether a moment had arrived. I had noticed the watching by the second day. I had not asked about it. The eastern alpha was not the kind of man you asked about things; he was the kind of man you let arrive at a decision in his own time and then, when he arrived, you listened.He decided on the last day.The official business had been concluded the day before. The signed proposal was in my saddlebag, along with the three letters of accompaniment the packlord had written for the smaller eastern packs that took their cues from his position. The last day was the formal closing — a slow morning meeting, the small ceremonial exch

Selene's POVThe healer told me on a Tuesday.Not dramatically. He said it the way Cassa said most things — directly, without softening it, with the particular flatness of someone who had delivered this news so many times that he had learned the best version was the plain one."You're pregnant, Luna. Eight weeks, approximately. Everything looks correct."I sat on the edge of the examination table in the small infirmary off the east wing corridor and held very still for the count of ten.Eight weeks.Eight weeks ago had been — I did the math. Eight weeks ago had been the week after a quiet Council session, a week where Kael had come home with dried mud on his boots from the eastern road and had been insufferable with relief at being back, the week where the coffee had started tasting wrong and I had told myself it was the blend and not asked the healer because I had not been ready to know.Eight weeks."Thank you," I said."The first three months are the most variable. I'll want to see

Selene's POVI told my mother last.Not because she mattered least. Because she mattered most, and the things that mattered most required the most preparation, not for me — I had been preparing since Tuesday — but for her. I had been watching my mother for fourteen months, learning the particular architecture of a woman who had spent twenty-one years managing grief by managing everything around it, and I knew that this was the kind of news that was going to take the architecture apart.I wanted to give her the right room for it.The east wing kitchen. Her kitchen, by now — she had been the one who set the rhythm of it, who had reorganized the herb shelf by function rather than alphabetically and had made the assistant cook cry happy tears the first time she tasted the Ashvale bread and who had turned the small table in the corner into the place where the most important conversations in the Keep happened.I came in at the ninth hour on a Thursday.She was reading. The eastern packlord