Morning spilled into the chamber like molten gold, soft and merciless. Soren woke slowly, his body heavy, his mind still tangled in the remnants of last night the taste of inevitability lingering on his lips, the echo of a voice that had carved itself into his bones.
Ecclesias was already there.
He stood near the window, his silhouette carved against the light, posture calm yet commanding. When Soren stirred, the King turned, frostfire eyes locking on him with quiet certainty.
"Rise," Ecclesias said, his tone smooth, final. "We have much to prepare."
Soren pushed himself upright, the silk sheets whispering against his skin. His pulse quickened, though he tried to mask it. Ecclesias moved closer, his steps soundless against the marble floor.
"The coronation," he said. "It will be in one week."
The words struck like iron. Soren's breath caught, his chest tightening as if the air had turned to glass. *One week.* His mind reeled images of chains, whispers in corridors, the weight of eyes that would never see him as anything but a prize.
He wanted to protest, to say "Ican't", but the memory of Ecclesias' mouth on his silenced him. He swallowed the words, choosing silence not surrender, but survival. He would endure. He would learn. He would not push the King's patience.
Outside the chamber, armor clinked softly, followed by a low murmur. A guard's voice carried through the heavy door, respectful but firm:
"Your Majesty. Arven and Kael request an audience."
Ecclesias didn't glance toward the door. His gaze remained on Soren, weighing, measuring, claiming. A heartbeat stretched. Then another. The men outside waited in the corridor, held in place by silence and a closed door, while the King simply watched the omega in his bed as if the rest of the world could wait.
Only when he was certain Soren was fully awake and listening did he speak.
"Enter," he said at last, calm and unhurried.
The hinges moved at once. The door opened without a sound and two men stepped inside. One was tall and lean, his posture sharp as a blade, hair silvered at the temples, uniform immaculate Arven, Chief of Royal Servants. The other was Kael, the King's personal attendant, dressed in black, his presence quiet but heavy, like a shadow that could strike.
"This is Arven," Ecclesias said, his tone smooth, final. "He will oversee your instruction." His gaze shifted to Kael. "And Kael will remain at your side."
Kael bowed, his expression unreadable, his eyes cold steel. Soren felt the weight of that gaze and understood: this was not protection. This was surveillance. A leash disguised as loyalty.
Arven's eyes flicked to Soren, assessing, dissecting and then lingered. Soren was beautiful, but not in the polished way of nobles. His beauty was raw, unguarded, carved like marble left unfinished, carrying a tension that made the eye return again and again. His skin held the pallor of someone who had lived in shadows too long, yet ses yeux dark, deep, and defiant burned like embers under glass. It was a beauty that did not beg to be seen; it struck like a blade when noticed.
"Dangerous", Arven thought, adjusting his gloves with deliberate care. "Not because of what he is—but because of what he could become."
"You will learn," Arven said, voice clipped, devoid of warmth. "Posture. Speech. Bearing. Every gesture will speak sovereignty."
Soren swallowed hard, his throat tight. He wanted to protest, but Ecclesias' presence loomed like gravity. He chose silence. "Survive first. Speak later." Failure would not only cost him; it would stain the King who had chosen him. If he faltered in front of the court, they would not just mock the omega they would question the crown that raised him.
Later, when Arven crossed paths with Kael in the corridor, his voice dropped low, clipped with suspicion.
"You don't approve," Arven said.
Kael's jaw tightened. "Approval isn't required."
Arven's gaze narrowed. "But you'll guard him."
Kael's answer was measured, not cold: "I guard what The King claims. That is my oath."
Arven studied him. "Even if that claim threatens the crown?"
Kael's eyes flicked toward the chamber door, then back to Arven. "Then I watch. And I wait. My loyalty is to the King's will—not my judgment."
Arven walked away, his thoughts sharp as a blade: "Kael obeys, But he measures every move.That makes him a sentinel and a warning." But even Kael had started to notice the pattern: the postponed councils, the messengers turned away from the training hall door, the hours the King spent watching one omega stumble and rise again. This was no passing whim. It was an axis the court would one day feel tilt beneath their feet.
The week unfolded like a slow tide, heavy and relentless. Every day was a ritual, a stripping away of the man Soren had been and the shaping of something else something carved for display.
Posture drills left his muscles aching. "Straighten your spine," Arven commanded. "Shoulders square. A crown does not bend."
Soren obeyed, his body stiff, unfamiliar in its borrowed grace. His feet had learned to carry trays and scrub floors in silence; now they had to learn how to cross a room as if the world parted for him.
Ecclesias watched every detail the angle of Soren's chin, the tremor in his hands, the way his lashes lowered when their gazes met. "He bends, but he does not break. And that makes him mine." He should have been in the council chamber, buried under war reports and petitions, but each day he carved an hour from the kingdom's demands to stand here and watch Soren. Ministers waited; generals paced outside locked doors. Ecclesias stayed.
By the second day, Soren's back no longer screamed at every correction; by the third, Arven's "Again" came less often. His steps lost the hesitation of a servant waiting to be dismissed and began to carry the echo of someone expected to be watched.
Speech drills were worse. Words had weight now every syllable a blade that could cut or heal. Arven drilled him in greetings, in the cadence of authority, until his throat ached.
"Again," Arven snapped. "Not timid. Not trembling."
Soren repeated the phrases, voice low, steadying against the tremor in his chest. Each repetition felt like borrowing someone else's mouth trying on a king's tone over a servant's scars. By the fifth day, his voice no longer cracked on the formal titles; Arven stopped correcting every other word and only tightened his mouth instead of snapping. It wasn't praise, but it was proof: he was learning faster than anyone had expected a shadow-bred servant to learn.
Sometimes, alone for a heartbeat between drills, Soren caught his reflection in polished marble or a tall mirror in the hall. The boy from the Gray Lands stared back at him beneath the posture of a consort. Silk still sat wrong on his shoulders, but less wrong than it had a few days before. The sight unsettled him and yet, beneath the fear, a thin thread of pride pulled tight. He was still here. Still standing. Still his.
On the fourth day, Soren's body gave out. Hours of drills had carved fire into his bones; silk clung to his damp skin, breath snagging in his throat. He bit down on the urge to speak silence was survival.
Then his knees buckled. The world tilted. He caught the edge of the table, fingers clawing for balance, but the tremor betrayed him.
Arven froze mid-step, his reprimand dying on his tongue. Ecclesias moved first. His hand closed around Soren's arm, steadying him with a grip that was firm but not cruel. His voice was low, velvet edged with steel.
"Breathe."
Soren's chest heaved, humiliation pressing against his ribs like iron. He hated the weakness, hated the way his body folded under the weight of expectation.
Ecclesias' gaze swept over him every line of strain, every flicker of defiance buried under exhaustion. His thumb brushed the inside of Soren's wrist, feeling the frantic pulse.
"You've faltered," he said, voice deliberate, steady as iron. "It ends here. You will stand and you will not fall again."
-----
The physician arrived swiftly, his satchel clinking softly as he knelt beside Soren. Fingers pressed against his wrist, then his throat, measuring the frantic pulse.
"He's exhausted," the doctor said, tone clinical but edged with warning. "And weakened by years of suppressants. They've thinned his resilience muscle, bone, even his heart. Push him too far, and he won't bend. He'll break."
Soren's stomach knotted. The words struck harder than any drill. Fragile.
He loathed the sound of it, loathed the truth curling beneath it. His jaw clenched, nails biting into his palms as if pain could anchor him. He wanted to speak to say he wasn't weak but silence was his shield. Silence was survival.
The doctor's gaze flicked to him briefly, softer now. "You'll need to guard your strength," he said. "Not just for the coronation for yourself."
Ecclesias dismissed the physician with a glance, then turned back to Soren. His steps were soundless, his presence bending the air until the silence felt alive. He knelt not as a king, but as something closer, sharper, more dangerous and took Soren's hands in his own.
"Look at me," he said softly, his tone velvet edged with steel.
Soren hesitated, lashes trembling, then obeyed. Frostfire eyes held his, steady and merciless, yet softened by quelque chose de rare. Ecclesias' thumb brushed over the raw crescents in Soren's palms, tracing them like secrets.
"You are not weak," Ecclesias murmured. "You are enduring. And endurance is rarer than strength."
His tone dropped lower, molten and merciless:
"I will not let you break. Not in body. Not in spirit. If the world demands more than you can give, then the world will yield because I will make it."
The words hit harder than any order. Soren's first instinct was to flinch to search for the cruelty hidden between the syllables, for the price wrapped in silk. No one had ever said " I will not let you break* and meant anything except *bend further for me ". His throat tightened.
He held Ecclesias' gaze anyway. If this was another chain, he wanted to see it clearly. But what stared back at lui wasn't hunger alone. There was something steadier beneath the dominance, something that looked disturbingly like conviction.
His final words carved through the silence like a blade:
"I will protect you... from every hand that would harm you."
Soren's breath caught. Protect. The word didn't belong to his life. Protection was something given to treasures and heirs, not to boys from Gray Lands barns who learned to save themselves or die. A bitter laugh scraped up his chest and died behind clenched teeth.
"You can't protect me from yourself, "he thought, the words burning too loud in his skull to risk aloud. "And you're the one who put me in their sight."
And yet, under the bitterness, something traitorous stirred. A thin, stubborn thread of heat coiled in his chest, not desire this time, but a dangerous, aching hope. If the most powerful alpha in the realm said he would stand between Soren and the world… then for the first time, the fight might not be his alone.
That possibility terrified him more than the court ever could. Trust was a battlefield he had never survived on.
The chamber was steeped in silence, heavy with the lingering scent of sandalwood and the faint burn of myrrh. Shadows stretched long across the marble floor, fractured by the dim glow of crystal lamps. Outside, the wind pressed against the glass, whispering like distant voices but inside, the world was still.
Soren lay curled on the bed, silk sheets pooling around him like liquid moonlight. His lashes rested against pale cheeks, dark as ink strokes on porcelain. A faint sheen of sweat clung to his skin, catching the lamplight in fragile glimmers. His breath was shallow, uneven, yet steady enough to betray exhaustion rather than peace.
Ecclesias stood at the foot of the bed, unmoving at first. His gaze traced every line of Soren's face the sharpness softened by fatigue, the defiance dulled but not extinguished by pain. He had seen men broken on battlefields, kings kneel under crowns too heavy, but nothing had ever struck lui like this: fragility carved around a core that refused to yield.
The doctor's warning echoed like iron in his mind: Suppressants have thinned his strength. Push too hard, and he'll break.
Ecclesias' jaw tightened, the muscle ticking beneath his skin. He hated the truth in it. Hated that his own ambition had carved strain into Soren's bones. And yet, the court would devour him if he faltered. They would tear him apart with whispers sharper than blades and smiles honed like knives.
He moved closer, soundless, until the lamplight brushed his face. The air near the bed was warmer, heavy with the faint salt of sweat and the cool sweetness of silk. His hand hovered above Soren's temple, then lowered, brushing a stray lock of hair from his forehead. The touch was feather-light, révérent nothing like the iron he wielded in daylight.
His fingers lingered for a breath, tracing the curve of Soren's jaw without contact, as if memorizing the shape of defiance even in sleep. Under his gaze, the harsh lines in his own shoulders began to ease. The tension carved into the back of his neck loosened, fraction by fraction, as if watching Soren breathe was the only proof he needed that the world had not slipped out of his control.
Soren stirred once, a small twitch of his fingers against the sheets, then settled. His breathing smoothed, the stuttered rhythm evening out into something quieter, almost calm. As if, on some level beyond consciousness, il avait enregistré que la présence penchée sur lui n'était pas une menace ce soir, mais un bouclier.
For the first time that day, Ecclesias' own breath deepened. The storm of counsel, coronation, and courtly threat fell to the edges of his mind, blurred by the simple, steady rise and fall of Soren's chest. Watching him sleep was the only moment he allowed himself something like ease a fragile illusion that as long as his eyes remained on this bed, nothing could touch what lay in it.
"He is mine," he thought, not with the raw hunger of earlier, but with a grim, possessive calm. "And I will protect him from every hand that would harm him. Even if one of those hands is my own."
Ecclesias straightened, his silhouette cutting through the dim light, and spoke to the empty room a vow carved in silence, heavy as steel:
"They will not break you," he said quietly. "I will not let them."