Chapter 2 Seventy-Two Hours Until the Execution

"You're still holding your chest." The omega across the bench from me doesn't look up from her bread, but her voice is pitched low, meant only for me. "You did that all the way home last night too. I watched you."

"It's nothing."

"It's not nothing. Half the courtyard saw his face when he looked at you." She finally lifts her eyes. "You should eat something. You look like you're about to fall off that bench."

I pick up my spoon and put it back down without eating anything. The dining hall is loud this morning, benches scraping, wolves trading gossip about last night's crowning, and I have positioned myself at the farthest table from the high dais the way I always do. It doesn't matter. I can still feel him the second he walks through the doors.

The bond flares so hard my knees buckle under the table.

"Liora." The omega grabs my arm before I tip sideways. "Breathe."

I breathe. I keep my eyes down and I breathe and I count the seconds until the fire behind my ribs settles into something survivable, and by the time I trust myself to look up again, Aurelian is seated at the high table with Seraphine Corvain beside him, her hand resting on his forearm like it belongs there.

"That's Sera," the omega says, following my gaze. "Corvain's daughter. They've been arranged since before he took the crown. Pretty, isn't she."

"Very."

Seraphine says something I can't hear from this distance, and Aurelian laughs, a low sound that carries across the hall despite the noise, and the bond in my chest twists so violently I have to press my palm flat against my sternum just to keep breathing through it.

"You're doing that thing again," the omega mutters. "The chest thing."

"I'm fine."

"You're the furthest thing from fine I've ever watched eat breakfast, but sure." She tears off another piece of bread and doesn't eat it either, just turns it over in her fingers. "My name's Wren, by the way. Since we're apparently sharing a table for however long you can stand to sit here."

"Liora."

"I know. Everyone knows, after last night." She says it gently, not unkindly, but the words still land like a slap. "You should be careful. Whatever that was up there, people don't forget a look like that. Not from him, not from anyone with that much power to lose."

"There's nothing to be careful about. He didn't choose me. You saw his face same as I did."

"I saw two faces," Wren says. "The one for the crowd, and the one for about half a second before he remembered the crowd was watching. I know which one I believed."

I don't answer her. I watch his shadow instead, the way it stretches long and dark across the marble floor whenever he shifts in his seat, and I hate that I've already memorized the shape of it in less than a full day. I hate that I know the sound of his boots now, a specific weight to his stride that I could pick out of a hundred wolves walking the same hall. I hate that some traitorous, starving part of me has spent the entire morning cataloguing him, piece by piece, like I'm building an altar out of a man who looked at me once and then closed his face like a door.

"Liora Ashenvale."

The guard's voice cuts through the hall, and every head near me turns. My stomach drops before he even finishes the sentence.

"You're summoned. Judgment chamber. Now."

"Summoned for what?" the omega beside me asks, but the guard is already walking away, and I am already standing, because there is no version of this where I get to ask questions.

The walk to the judgment chamber takes longer than it should, my legs moving slower than I want them to, and by the time the doors close behind me I am alone in a room of cold gray marble with nothing on but a thin white shift that does nothing against the chill coming up through the floor.

"Liora Ashenvale." Elder Matthias circles me the way a wolf circles something wounded, slow, unhurried, savoring it. "Do you know why you're here?"

"No."

"No?" He stops in front of me, close enough that I can smell the sourness of old wine on his breath. "Strange. Because I have a report here describing an omega who deliberately drew the new Alpha's attention during his crowning ceremony. Who positioned herself where he would see her. Who has spent twenty-six years cultivating exactly the kind of quiet that makes a man curious enough to look twice."

"I didn't do any of that."

"You didn't." He circles behind me, and I keep my eyes fixed on a crack in the marble floor because looking at him feels more dangerous than not looking at him. "And yet here we are. An omega with no name, no rank, no reason to matter, somehow catching the eye of the most powerful wolf in this territory on the single night it counted most. Do you understand how that looks, Liora?"

"I understand how you're making it look."

"Careful," he says, quiet in a way that carries more weight than shouting ever could. "I have spent forty years deciding what happens to omegas who become inconvenient, Liora Ashenvale. I would hate for your first real conversation in this pack's history to also be your last."

"Then get on with it. Whatever you came here to decide, decide it. I'm tired of standing on cold marble while you circle me like I'm already dead."

The words are out before I can stop them, sharper than anything I've said out loud in years, and for one terrible second the room goes completely silent.

Elder Matthias stops circling. "Careful."

I drop my eyes back to the floor and say nothing else. Whatever spark of nerve just surfaced burns itself out fast, buried again under a decade of practice, and I stand there in the cold and let him finish his list of crimes I did not commit, one by one, each accusation landing like a stone dropped into still water.

He is still talking when the chamber doors open again.

"That will be all, Elder Matthias."

Every head in the room turns. Seraphine Corvain stands in the doorway in pale blue silk, and she is not smiling the way I expected a woman who just watched her betrothed's eyes catch on another omega to smile. Her hands are trembling. There's a leather folder pressed against her chest like she needs something to hold onto, and when she steps into the room, the door closes behind her with a sound too final for my liking.

"Leave us," she tells Matthias, and something in her voice makes even an Elder obey without argument.

The room empties until it's just the two of us, cold marble and colder air, and Seraphine crosses toward me slowly, her eyes doing something I don't understand, something that looks almost like sympathy on a woman who has every reason to hate me.

"I'm not here to punish you," she says quietly. "I'm here to save your life. But you're not going to like how."

She sets the folder down on the stone table between us, and when she opens it, her voice drops to something low and deliberate, the kind of tone people use when they've rehearsed exactly how much truth they're willing to give.

"There is a way to keep you alive, Liora. It requires binding you to three warriors loyal to my husband's rule."

I open my mouth to ask what that means, what any of it means, but the words don't come. All I can do is stare at the folder between us, at her trembling hands still resting on top of it like she isn't sure she's allowed to let go, and wait for the rest of a sentence I already know is going to change everything.