When My Mate Tortured Me Before Discovering I’m Royal

I was still counting when the lock turned.

I didn't know the number anymore. Somewhere past six thousand, the numbers had melted into each other. Grey light spilled down the stairs. Then came the smell. Jasmine, cutting through the silver like a knife through butter.

Giselle came down slowly. She wore a white wool coat and fur-lined boots. Behind her shuffled three Omegas. Tessa. Pip. And a thin girl from the laundry whose name I never learned. Their faces were grey. Somebody had dragged them out of bed for this.

In Giselle's hand was a pair of shears. Long blades. Silver handles that caught the light.

"Stand them by the wall," she told the guard. "I want them to see."

I didn't get up. I couldn't. My legs had stopped belonging to me hours ago.

She crouched in front of me and reached for my hair.

It fell past my waist. My mother, the only mother I ever knew, had brushed it every night when I was small. For five years, I had braided dried lavender sprigs into it. Callahan used to pull them out one by one while he talked about his day. He said it made his whole room smell like home.

Giselle wrapped a thick rope of it around her fist.

"You won't need this anymore," she said.

The blades closed.

The sound was soft. Almost nothing. A crunch, like stepping on dry leaves. She didn't cut it clean. She hacked. Close to my scalp in one place, at my jaw in another. Twice the silver edge scraped my neck, and I felt the burn bloom.

Pip made a small noise. Tessa elbowed him quiet.

When she finished, my hair lay around my feet like something dead. A few crushed lavender buds were still caught in the strands. They smelled faint and sad.

Giselle stood up and brushed off her coat. Then she leaned down, close to my ear.

"He was never yours," she whispered.

I lifted my eyes and looked at her. I didn't blink. I didn't cry. I didn't give her one single thing.

Her smile slipped. Just a little.

*I know what you are,* I thought. *And I will still be standing when you are not.*

She turned and walked up the stairs. The Omegas followed. The thin laundry girl looked back at me once, eyes wet.

---

By noon, the whole packhouse knew.

By evening, Callahan had seen it.

I was carrying a bucket through the great hall when he walked in with his Beta. He stopped dead. His eyes went to my head. To the ragged patches. To the red line on my neck.

Something moved over his face. Something sick.

Then it turned ugly.

"Double her shifts," he snapped at Thomas Porter. "If she has time to stand around looking pathetic, she has time to work."

He didn't say it to me. He said it about me. Like I was furniture he wanted moved.

So I worked sixteen hours a day. Woodshed. Floors. Laundry. Dishes until midnight. I slept four hours on the cot and woke before the sky did.

---

One night, near the end of the second week, I carried a tray of dirty cups back toward the kitchen. The corridor was dark except for one wall lamp.

Callahan came around the corner.

We both stopped.

He was alone. No Giselle. No guards. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, and there was a fresh scrape on his knuckles. Border trouble, maybe. The kind of scrape I used to clean.

I waited for him to move. He didn't.

Instead, his nostrils flared. Just once. His pupils swelled, black eating the gold. Behind them, Ash lunged forward so hard I saw Callahan's shoulders jerk.

He was smelling me. What was left of me. The last thin thread of lavender clinging to my skin.

I held still and watched him.

His throat moved. He opened his mouth like he might say my name.

Then he looked away. He looked away first.

He pushed past me without a word. His arm didn't touch mine. He made sure of it.

I stood in the dark corridor with the cups rattling on the tray, and I filed it away.

My scent still moved his wolf.

That was information. And information was all I had.

---

The sickness started soon after that.

At first it was small. My food tasted bitter. The thin broth they gave Omegas always tasted cheap, so I didn't think much of it. Then my hands began to shake while I scrubbed. My skin turned the color of old ash. Twice I threw up behind the woodshed right after dinner, my stomach turning itself inside out.

*Silver,* I told myself. *A whole night in silver. And grief.* Grief made people sick. I had seen it before.

On the fifteenth day, I fainted in the laundry.

I woke up on a narrow bed in the healer's room. Clara Vance stood over me. Her face was tight and pale. She pressed two fingers to my wrist, then lifted my eyelid and stared into my eye for a long time.

"How long have you been vomiting?" she asked quietly.

"A week. Maybe more."

"After meals?"

I nodded.

She didn't say anything. She looked at the door. Then she looked at my fingernails. They had gone faintly blue at the base.

Her jaw clenched.

"Drink this." She pushed a cup of something warm and green into my hands. Charcoal and milk thistle. I knew the smell. It was what I would give someone who had eaten something bad.

"Clara," I said. "What's wrong with me?"

"Exhaustion," she said. Too fast. She didn't meet my eyes.

She sent me back to work an hour later. But before I left, I saw her pull a small notebook from her coat pocket. She wrote fast, her pen scratching hard. Then she knelt by the old wooden cabinet in the corner and pressed on the bottom board.

It lifted.

She saw me watching. Her face went white.

I looked away, like I had seen nothing at all.

Four days later, she called me in again. Same questions. Same green drink. Same scratching pen.

And when I walked back upstairs that night, my hands shaking so hard I had to grip the railing, I passed Giselle in the hall.

She was smiling at my dinner tray.