Page 1

It’s dark, and I am absolutely drowning in the scent of Emin Argent.

I know this nightmare—I’ve been here before.

Dread fills my throat, my chest tightening to a painful point. This is the nightmare that loops in my head, no matter how many times I try to tell myself I’m over this.

Here I am, my teenage body crouched in his closet, peering out into his bedroom, heart hammering in my chest. Emin’s room is not what you’d expect from a teenage boy—it’s tidy to a fault, clean, orderly. I know this is because of his parents—mostly his dad—and their expectations for him.

Kellen Argent’s voice fills the room, “I just want to make sure you’re doing homework. Like you said.”

“Of course I am,” Emin shoots back, voice casual, relaxed, like it’s the strangest thing that his father is asking at all. It’s easy for Emin to pretend I’m not here. We’ve never met at his house before—for obvious reasons.

It’s a summer night, the sweet scent of the lilacs floating in through the open window and reaching me, even all the way in the closet, tucked behind Emin’s crew necks and sweaters, swathed in his clothing and the scent of him.

When his father knocked on the door, Emin had practically shoved me inside, telling me to go as far back as I could. He thought that would be enough to hide my scent, but I’d started casting under my breath.

To this day, I’m shocked that my meager casting was enough to fully hide me. That, or Kellen Argent was willfully ignorant, pretending like his son would know better than to have something to do with me.

Because if Kellen Argent had found me in that closet, there’s no doubt in my mind that he would have grabbed me by my hair, dragged me through the house, and thrown me out on the street with a warning not to come back.

It would be one thing for a teenage alpha to have an omega in his room, and a completely different thing for him to have me, Veva Marone, child of the town drunk—a nobody—tucked away in his closet.

There’s the sound of Kellen walking away, then the closet door is opening, and Emin is peering down at me, his face red, flushed.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he hisses, reaching down and grabbing my wrist, pulling me up. He’s not rough, but he’s not gentle, either.

I know this is just a dream, but all the feelings come rushing back to me. The dread, the shame. The stupid, mindless hope.

“Emin,” I clear my throat, bite my bottom lip. “I have something to tell you. Something important .”

The inflection is clear, as is the way I glance down at my stomach. I’m late, need to talk to him. I’ll need a test. For some reason, I’m stupidly thinking this might be the thing to break through the barrier for us. To show him that I’m not just something to climb.

I know Emin’s father wants him to climb the ranks. To use his position as an alpha and friend to Dorian Fields to help the family improve its standing. I know that Kellen would rather kill me than let Emin be seen with an omega like me, from a family like mine.

But for some reason, I naively think a baby might change that.

“There is nothing ,” Emin glances downward, in the direction of my stomach, “that could be important enough for you to come to my house. Do you get that?”

It would have been less painful if he’d slapped me across the face.

“But I thought—”

His hand is on my wrist again, though loosely, like he’s trying to avoid contact with my skin. “You need to get out of here, Veva. And listen— this is done between us, okay? It’s been a massive mistake.”

Now I’m climbing through the window, feeling the final push of his palm against my back, then the snap of it shutting behind me. I’m crying—partly because of what happened, and partly because I should have known better.

Why would Emin care about me being pregnant? It doesn’t change a single thing between us. In fact, it only makes it worse.

I’m stumbling through his front lawn, knowing I’ll have to leave. That there’s nobody here for me—no other choice.

But the street morphs below my feet, and instead of the familiar concrete in the Ambersky territory, it’s where we live now. The camp, the dusty ground, and Sarina standing right at the edge of it all.

I stare at my daughter—nearly ten years old now, and the brightest young woman I’ve ever met.

Her knees are knobby in the way youth shapes them, her usually bright eyes flashing with fear.

She knows something is coming, but she doesn’t know what.

She’s always been small, from the first day she was born, a tiny little pink thing that nearly fit in my hand, to now, wrists and ankles with delicate bird bones.

Whatever is coming for her, she knows she can’t take it.

And I’m much, much too far away from her.

This part of the nightmare is familiar, too. It always happens like this. From the closet in Emin’s bedroom, trying to protect myself, to seeing Sarina, and being unable to protect her.

Like I always do, I open my mouth, trying to scream for her, trying to tell her to get out of the way. Above us, the sky darkens and grows heavy with black clouds. Dirt whips around her ankles, twirling like a tornado is about to form with her at its epicenter.

“Mom!” she calls, but her voice is swallowed, whipped away from the storm, so I’m only imagining the sound of it, twinkling and light, a sound that normally puts me at ease instantly. A sound I’m suddenly very sure I will never hear again.

“ Mom !”

When I snap awake, Sarina’s face is bent over mine, her eyes still sleepy and half-shut, it only takes me a few seconds to drink the details of our little hut—the camp stove propped up on a table on the other side of the room, the wash basin, the jug of purified water.

Our clothes, folded neatly and stacked on a shelf.

Groggily, I watch as Sarina takes a few steps, then climbs back onto her own cot, still rubbing at her eyes.

“It’s just that same nightmare,” she says gently, using the same tone I’d use with her when she was a kid. “Go back to sleep, Mom.”

I blink again, scrub my hands over my face, and look at the door. Pale light is already seeping under the crack, dawn hinting at the horizon. There’s no way I’m going to sleep now, and besides—it’s market night. We need to get our things together.

When I step out of our hut, the entirety of the camp sprawls out before me. While to most people, the home that Sarina and I share might not look like much, it’s practically a mansion compared to most of the homes in the camp.

Carefully, I step through the dirt, watching the ground for scorpions as I make my way around tents and even some people directly on the ground.

Sounds of sleep breathe through the space, snores and exhalations, shifting and turning.

There are a few early risers, like me—another mother, already scrubbing at clothes in a wash bin.

A man is rolling up a sleeping bag, his face haggard, his beard scraggly.

Every time I wake up here, I’m reminded of what it was like the first night.

“Veva!”

I look up and see the very woman who took care of me the first night I was here—who knew I was pregnant even before I told her. When I’d started to cry, she took my head in her hands, looked me in the eye, and said, “You have options, dear.”

Willow—now wrinkled, gray eyes twinkling behind her glasses—wraps her arm around my shoulders, like she always does, and draws me in close, already pushing a hot cup of coffee into my hands.

“Good morning, it’s going to be a hot one,” Willow says, her voice more feeble than the last time I heard it. It seems like every day I blink and she ages right in front of me. It’s already been ten years since I met her—when Sarina turns ten, it will be nearly eleven.

I play along, raising my eyebrows. “When is it ever a hot one around here?”

She laughs and drops heavily down into her chair—a faded old thing she saved from the dump, cleaned up, and planted right outside her shed.

She’s sat in it every morning since. Two years ago, she found a companion for it, and it’s the chair I lower down into carefully, after checking to make sure there’s nothing on or around it that might pinch or bite me.

“Got some more gems for you,” Willow says, blowing on her coffee and glancing over at me. Despite the fact that we’re out here in the desert, it’s surprisingly chilly. This is nothing new to me—the weather was just like this at home, too. No moisture in the ground to hold the heat.

“That’s great,” I finally say, mind catching up to what Willow said. “I could use a few more to imbue before the market tonight.”

A beat passes, then Willow says, “You given any more thought to it?”

I know what she’s talking about. My gift—the one I inherited from my grandmother when she died. The gift I have no idea how to use. I blow on my coffee, shake my head.

Willow has a friend she thinks can help me learn to use it. I’m not sure it matters—casting is enough for me, and it feels a little too late to make anything of the clairsentience.

“Just let me know,” Willow says, snapping, “and she’ll come over like that.”

After that, we fall silent. If it weren’t for the market tonight, I’d see Willow for dinner. We don’t have much to talk about, because she already knows everything there is to know about me, Sarina, my plans for the future.

When we finish our coffee, I bring the mugs into Willow’s hut—slightly nicer than ours, with more insulation and, somehow, a set of rain-collecting plumbing—and scrub them out, setting them up to dry on the rack by her sink.

Willow’s little hut is full of trinkets, odds and ends. Back when her knees were good, she’d spend a lot of time out at the dump, picking out perfectly good pieces, hauling them back here, and giving them to the folks who needed them.

Sarina and I were often the recipients of those items, and that’s part of the reason why I managed to procure a tent before she was born.

By her fifth birthday, we’d already started piecing together the little home we have now, with the real wooden floors, insulated walls, and separate cots for the two of us.

“Did Willow have anything good?”

When I duck back into our shed, Sarina is already awake, face scrubbed pink, her fingers working her hair into French braids as she sits on the edge of her cot, a book propped open on her pillow.

“Just coffee,” I say, crossing through the room and dropping a kiss on her forehead. She does something between a sigh and a laugh, and doubles back to fix the braid where it slipped.

“No eggs?” Sarina practically whines. I pop open our cooler and peer inside, knowing she’s not going to want the cold oatmeal I’ve been prepping in glass jars.

Ten minutes later, we’re standing outside the large black grill in the center of camp, gratefully receiving a scoop of scrambled eggs cooked in bacon grease, and a surprise slab of breakfast ham.

“Wow,” Sarina says, eyes wide as she looks down at her plate. Meat like that is rare around here. And when it comes around, Herold usually throws it into a chili.

Herald, the large man standing behind the grill with an old spatula in his hand, gives her a gummy smile and waves the spatula at us. “You’re my best customers. Plus, Rina, you’re the one who’s gonna get out of here, make something of yourself.”

Sarina dips her head the way she always does when someone around here says that. Like she’s not accepting the compliment, but is accepting the responsibility of it. As if she genuinely owes it to Herald to make something of herself each time he slips her a little more food.

Before we leave, I hand him a stone, imbued with magic that should ease his aching back.

“Thanks, Vev,” he says, winking at me. “Keep ‘em coming.”

We head to a picnic table and slide in beside a few other women and kids. While the other kids laugh and play, chatting, Sarina pulls out her book and cracks it open, propping it up on a rock in front of her plate.

“Always reading,” one of the women says, shaking her head and giving me a knowing smile, as though this isn’t exactly what I want for Sarina. “She’ll grow out of it, someday.”

I smile at the woman, but put my hand on Sarina’s knee under the table. She knows how some of the people around here see her constant reading. But it’s going to get her out of here, get her a scholarship to one of the omega-only colleges in the Llewelyn territory.

In our shack, magicked into near non-existence and trapped beyond belief, is the bundle of bills and tin of change, containing all the money I’ve been saving for Sarina since the day I found out she was growing in my stomach.

It was too late for me—I was already rejected, alone, having run off from the only home I ever knew. But the possibility for her, the new life growing inside me, it gave me hope. Sarina has always been the most beautiful thing in my life.

Even if her red-gold hair makes my stomach twist sometimes, when I catch it in the light. Even if she sometimes gets a wrinkle between her eyes I know didn’t come from me. Even if I see him always in the tiny turns of her speech, how she tilts her head.

I love Sarina, even if half her DNA came from the man who shattered my entire world.