# **A LIGHTHOUSE OMEGA WOVE HER UNANSWERED LETTERS INTO CLOTH WOLVES—UNTIL ONE FOUND THE ALPHA KING**

Downstairs, the atmosphere was thick enough to choke on. Brackon was currently pinned face-down against the wooden dock railing by Marith’s forearm, his royal tunic soiled with salt and grime, while two royal guards held his arms twisted behind his back at unnatural angles.

"You don't understand!" Brackon choked out, spitting seawater and blood from where Marith had casually introduced his jaw to the pilings. "She’s an anomaly! A defective vessel! Her bloodline was legally terminated by the High Council decree three years ago!"

"Terminated?" Marith’s voice was a razor-thin slice of ice. She leaned harder into his spine, hearing cartilage pop. "The only thing terminating today is your career, your title, and quite possibly your pulse. Who authorized the imprisonment of a royal-tier citizen?"

"She has no wolf!" Brackon shrieked, his composure completely evaporating under the pressure of imminent execution. "She was a dormant omega! If her bloodline woke, Greywater’s sovereignty reverts to the direct heirs! You don't know what she is—what her father was!"

"Try me," a voice rumbled from the staircase.

Brackon and Marith both snapped their heads toward the source.

Alpha King Torvin descended the steps with a slow, measured cadence. He wasn't alone. Behind him walked Sloane.

She had wrapped a heavy wool blanket—pulled from the king’s own supply chest—around her thin shoulders. Her dark hair was still a wild cascade of tangles, and her skin bore the pale, bruised map of long-term abuse, but there was something fundamentally different about her now. The hollow, defeated slump in her shoulders was gone. Her chin was lifted. And in her pale green-gray eyes burned a quiet, terrifying intelligence that made Brackon shrink back in horror.

In her hands, she carried her wooden crate filled with scraps of thread, wire, and unfinished sailcloth.

"Your... Your Majesty," Brackon stammered, his eyes darting wildly between Torvin and the woman he had tried so hard to erase. "She... she’s deranged. She hallucinates. She weaves madness into fabric—"

"She weaves truth," Torvin interrupted, stepping off the final step and coming to a halt directly in front of the cowering governor.

Torvin reached into his heavy coat and pulled out a damp, folded piece of parchment he had recovered from the hidden floorboard in the lighthouse office just ten minutes prior. He unfolded it with agonizing slowness.

"Let's talk about the Greymer founding bloodline, Governor," Torvin said softly, though every word carried the weight of a falling executioner's axe. "Let's talk about the birth certificate filed under false seals. Let's talk about the note instructing your enforcers to keep her locked away so the true lineage of this island would never be reclaimed."

Brackon’s knees buckled. The royal guards holding him merely adjusted their grip, letting his weight hang entirely on their arms. "It... it was for the stability of the province. If an omega with the primal sight wakes—"

"She wakes now," Torvin growled.

Without breaking eye contact, Torvin reached out and grabbed Brackon by the front of his tunic, lifting the heavy-set governor completely off the dock planks with one hand as if he weighed no more than a bundle of dry twigs.

Sloane watched in silence. For three years, she had watched this man dictate whether she ate, whether she froze, whether she lived or died. Now, suspended in the iron grip of the Alpha King, Brackon looked like nothing more than a pathetic, cornered rat.

"You locked me in the dark," Sloane said, her voice cutting through the roaring sound of the harbor wind. It was quiet, yet every person on the docks heard it clearly. "You told me I was nothing. You told me dead women don't ask questions."

Brackon choked, clawing uselessly at Torvin’s iron forearm. "Sloane... please... we’re kin, sort of... district management—"

"You aren't management," Sloane said, stepping closer, the hem of her oversized blanket dragging across the damp wood. "You’re a squatter."

Torvin looked down at her, a dark, dangerous approval flashing in his golden eyes. He turned his wrist slightly, shifting Brackon over the edge of the open slipway where the freezing, jagged rocks met the churning tide.

"What shall we do with him, my queen?" Torvin asked, the title slipping from his lips naturally, as if it had always belonged to her.

Sloane stared at the governor for a long, agonizing moment. The wind whipped her hair across her face, framing eyes that had seen through time, through fabric, through the very fabric of lies that held the province together.

"Don't kill him here," Sloane said calmly. "Send him to the salt mines on the southern rim. Let him work every day with a half-empty water skin and a chalk-mixed ration. Let him spend three years wondering if anyone is listening to his letters."

Brackon let out a high-pitched, hysterical shriek of absolute terror as Torvin casually tossed him backward onto the deck like a sack of garbage.

"Take him away," Torvin commanded without looking back. Two royal guards lunged forward, hauling the screaming governor toward the brig of the warship.

Silence descended upon the docks, broken only by the rhythmic crashing of the waves.

Torvin turned fully toward Sloane. The raw, desperate hunger in his wolf had quieted into a deep, steady hum of absolute possession. He didn't crowd her; he gave her all the space in the world, recognizing the fragility of a bird that had just had its cage door kicked off its hinges.

"The warship is heated," Torvin said, his voice dropping to a low, rumbling register meant only for her ears. "There are medical chests, warm food, and a clean berth waiting for you. You don't ever have to look at stone walls again unless you choose to."

Sloane looked down at the wooden crate in her arms—the bits of wire, the frayed threads, the last unfinished square of sailcloth resting on top. Then she looked up into the fierce, unyielding gold of the Alpha King’s eyes.