Chapter 27: The Other Omega

Merrick set the empty tray down in the servants’ washroom with more force than the metal deserved.

Water ran over his hands as he scrubbed the dishes, hotter than necessary. The heat bit into his skin, but he welcomed it. Physical sensation was simpler than the tight, ugly knot that had lived under his ribs since the full-moon ceremony and had only grown worse in the days that followed.

Five years.

It had been five years now since the Alpha’s forces had broken his pack’s lines and taken the survivors as spoils. He had been nineteen then—old enough to understand exactly what capture meant for an unmated omega, young enough that the first months in this house had been nothing but cold floors, heavier work than he had ever known, and the constant, grinding knowledge that his name no longer belonged to a free wolf. He had hated every corridor, every order, every dominant scent that filled the halls and reminded him he no longer had the right to refuse.

The hate had not lasted forever.

It had worn down under the weight of routine. He learned the rhythms of the house, learned which duties kept him beneath notice and which ones brought the wrong kind of attention. He learned to keep his head down, his answers short, and his presence unremarkable. The suppressants helped. They had started as a requirement, heavy, daily doses that flattened every trace of omega pheromone until even his own reflection felt muted. Without scent, without the biological signals that invited interest or pity or worse, he could move through the mansion almost like furniture that happened to walk.

And somewhere in the long stretch of invisible days, he had made the serious mistake of falling in love.

Not with the eldest, whose cold perfection made ordinary wolves step aside without thinking. Not with the youngest, whose silver-haired prince whose beauty made everyone stop and think about how unfair the goddess was. He had fallen for the middle one, the difficult one, the loud one, the one the rest of the household called the mad prince when they were certain no one important was listening.

Aaron.

Merrick had watched him for years from the edges of rooms. He had seen the temper, the restless energy, the way the second prince carved space for himself with volume and force because no one had ever simply offered him any. He had seen the moments after the rage burned out, when Aaron stood alone in training yards or empty corridors looking like a man who had won every fight except the ones that actually mattered. Something in that particular brand of loneliness had reached past Merrick’s carefully maintained indifference and taken root.

It was absurd. It was hopeless. It was the single most stupid thing he had ever allowed himself.

The suppressants made certain it stayed that way. They dulled not only his scent but the sharper edges of wanting. He could look, he could notice, he could carry the quiet ache of it, but the drugs kept the feeling from ever rising high enough to become action. He had never spoken. He had never lingered longer than duty required. He had never given the second prince a single reason to see him as anything except another pair of hands that kept the house running.

Then Levi Hill had arrived.

Merrick remembered the first day with perfect clarity. The new omega had stepped into the east wing carrying the unmistakable, unsuppressed scent of an unmated wolf under stress, and every carefully balanced rule of the household had seemed to tilt. Merrick had been assigned as guide. He had done the work. He had also disliked the boy on sight, not for any personal crime, but for the simple fact that Levi still had a scent to control, still occupied a category Merrick had been chemically removed from years earlier. It felt like being forced to stand next to a version of himself that had not yet been emptied out.

The full-moon ceremony had turned dislike into something hotter and more personal.

Merrick had not been in the great hall, but he had felt the aftermath move through the servant corridors like shockwaves. An omega in heat. And then the whispers that followed: the youngest prince had completed a claim. The middle prince had carried the omega out of the hall. The eldest had placed the boy under their protection in front of half the territory’s Alphas.

Three princes bound to one low-born omega who had arrived as payment for a dead Luna.

Merrick’s hands stilled in the scalding water.

Whyhim?

The question had no useful answer and still refused to leave. Why did Levi get to stand at the center of a Goddess-given bond that included Aaron? Why did the same house that had flattened Merrick’s scent and future into pure function suddenly rearrange itself around an omega who had not even been here a full season? The jealousy sat in his throat like something he had swallowed wrong. It made every subsequent duty involving Levi feel harder than it should have.

This morning had been the worst of it.

He had stood in that well-furnished room holding a breakfast tray while Levi offered, awkwardly, to take it from him. The imbalance had been impossible to ignore. Five years of suppressants and careful invisibility, and here he was serving food to another omega who still carried the residual attention of the one person Merrick had never been allowed to want out loud. He had heard the edge in his own voice when he refused help. He had felt the anger leak into his scent despite the drugs. He had left before he said something that could not be taken back.

Now, alone with the dishes and the steam, the anger had nowhere to go except inward.

It shouldn’t matter, he told himself. Levi is on suppressants now. Heavy ones. The bond is being starved. In half a year, maybe less, the pull will be gone and the princes will lose interest and the house will return to its previous shape.

The argument was logical, but it did not help.

Because status had already changed. Merrick had felt it in the way the supervised wing now required extra care, in the way senior servants spoke carefully around the omega’s name, in the simple fact that he had just delivered a meal to a room that looked nothing like the narrow servant quarters the rest of them returned to at night. Whether the bond survived the drugs or not, Levi had been lifted, however temporarily, into a category Merrick could not follow.

Merrick dried his hands with slow, deliberate movements and stared at the blank wall above the basin.

Perhaps he was overthinking it.

Perhaps the smartest thing he could do was what he had always done: take the next dose of suppressants, keep his head down, and wait for the current disruption to pass. The house had absorbed worse shocks. In time the princes would be steered back toward appropriate matches, the Hill omega would settle into whatever quiet function remained for him, and Merrick’s private, impossible attachment would return to the manageable ache it had been before.

Or.

The other thought surfaced quietly, dangerous in its simplicity.

He could stop taking the suppressants.

Not all at once, that would be noticed, but carefully, incompletely, enough for some fragment of his own scent and wanting to return. Enough, perhaps, to finally stop existing as pure function in the one direction that had ever mattered to him. He could find a moment, some ordinary corridor or late training yard, and tell the second prince the truth that five years of chemical restraint had kept sealed.

The idea was reckless. It was almost certainly doomed. Aaron had never looked at him with anything warmer than the vague recognition reserved for competent staff. The second prince was currently tangled in a Goddess-forged bond with an omega who had arrived as collateral and somehow become the center of a three-way claim. There was no version of this fantasy in which Merrick’s quiet, long-buried feelings ranked higher than that.

And still the thought did not leave.

Merrick hung the cloth to dry and stood for a long moment in the steam-thick air of the washroom, hands braced on the edge of the basin, listening to the distant sounds of the house continuing around him.

He closed his eyes, and drew a deep breath. The next dose of his own suppressants was scheduled for the evening, and he had just taken the bold and reckless decision to not take it.