Chapter Text
Katsuki had been raised to believe that harming an omega was a sin worse than striking royalty.
It was the first lesson drilled into him by his mother before he could even hold a wooden training sword. Mitsuki, the most terrifying woman in three kingdoms, would crouch down to his level with her hands on both his shoulders and look him dead in the eyes. Omegas are the heartbeat of this kingdom. You remember that.
And Katsuki, small and red-eyed and already far too proud, remembered. He always remembered. Happy omega, happy alpha, she used to say, and then she would stand and walk back to wherever his father was, and Masaru would look up from whatever he was doing with that stupid, soft, expression on his face— the one that said he would burn the palace to the ground if Mitsuki so much as frowned— and Katsuki would gag so hard he nearly choked.
His father would nuzzle into his mother’s neck without shame, even in front of servants, and his mother would purr softly beneath the attention while every beta servant in the room politely pretended not to notice the king acting like a beast ruled by devotion.
He had grown up surrounded by that. He had grown up watching Masaru lean into Mitsuki's scent like a man starved and somehow was never embarrassed about it. And everyone— the tutors, the advisors, the aunts and uncles, the servants who had been in the palace since before Katsuki was born— everyone had that look that told him ‘you'll understand when it's your turn’.
As though he was simply waiting for a package to arrive. As though his future mate existed somewhere beyond the palace walls, and it was only a matter of time before the proper ceremonies and the proper documents were signed, and the scent bloomed between them like it had between his parents and every pair before them.
One day, he would come back from meetings, wars, and diplomacy only to be greeted by a nest built carefully by loving hands. One day, a scent would become so engraved into his instincts that just breathing it in would calm every violent part of him. One day he too would become just as embarrassingly attached as his father was.
Except that day never came.
At first, nobody worried about it. Omegas were rare, yes, but there had always been enough. Royal bloodlines had never struggled before. The kingdom practically revolved around alphas and omegas, around sacred pairings blessed by old traditions.
Katsuki grew older, expecting everything to eventually fall into place naturally. Suitors would arrive. Arrangements would be made. There would be ceremonies and festivals and political negotiations surrounding his future mate.
But the years passed, and instead of excited discussions filling the palace halls, tension slowly began to choke them.
Because omegas had stopped being born.
Not all at once— it was not so dramatic as that, not a single year that history could point to and say, here, this is where it ended. It was slower. Birth tallies that came back lower each season. Registry lists combed through again and again, first with confusion, then with urgency, then with something very close to panic.
At first, they thought maybe families were hiding omega children away. But that theory died quickly. There could not possibly be unknown omegas hidden among peasants because omegas were far too valuable. Any family presenting an omega child to the crown would immediately be rewarded with enough wealth to elevate their bloodline for generations. Entire villages would celebrate the birth of an omega. Temples would ring bells for days. There had never been a reason to hide one.
Yet reports came back empty every single time. The few omegas alive were already mated or far too young for royal consideration, nowhere near Katsuki’s age. And because alphas and omegas mated for life, there were no second chances, no rearrangements, no convenient solutions.
Which meant Katsuki became the first alpha heir in the kingdom’s recorded history to stand without a mate.
And the kingdom lost its fucking mind over it!
The clerks, the royal guards, those who had built entire careers around the matching of noble bloodlines— all of them turning their documents over in their hands like if they looked hard enough, the numbers would change. Where are the omegas? They asked each other in low voices in hallways they thought were empty. Where have they gone?
Katsuki had thought, privately, that perhaps they were asking the wrong question. Why omegas weren't being born seemed, to him, considerably more worth investigating than where the ones who already existed had gotten to.
But no one asked what a prince thought about the sacred order, and Katsuki had learned early to keep that particular brand of opinion behind his teeth.
Historians filled entire libraries searching for even one example in foreign kingdoms that mirrored their own situation, only to return empty-handed every single time. Merchants worried about trade alliances because royal marriages had always strengthened political ties. Rural towns began leaving offerings outside temples, praying desperately for omega births. Some citizens genuinely believed the end of the kingdom was approaching because so many customs, ceremonies, and sacred rites revolved around the union between alphas and omegas.
Festivals could not be properly held. Religious holidays lacked their symbolic figures. Even coronation traditions had to be rewritten because there had never existed a king who stood alone beneath the crown.
People treated it like a catastrophe.
Katsuki thought they were all being dramatic idiots.
Sure, he understood the political implications. He was not stupid. But everyone acted like his entire existence had become some horrible tragedy simply because he did not have an omega attached to his arm. Frankly, the moment he realized marriage negotiations had stalled indefinitely, his first thought had been good fucking riddance.
Why should he be forced into a lifelong bond with somebody he had never met simply because tradition demanded it? Why should he have to build his life around a stranger because old, dead royals decided that was how things should work?
Everybody around him mourned the loss of a future he himself had never particularly wanted. He ruled alone because he was strong enough to rule alone. After all, the kingdom needed a king who could think clearly and act decisively, and not spend half his attention on whether someone else was comfortable.
So what if he ruled alone? He was fully capable of handling himself.
And he did.
For years, Katsuki ruled without a mate at his side. He buried himself in responsibility so much that eventually the whispers surrounding his unmated status faded into background noise.
He signed treaties with neighboring kingdoms until his hand cramped from writing. He expanded trade routes through ports his predecessors had ignored for decades. He strengthened border defenses, negotiated military alliances, funded infrastructure projects, and oversaw the rebuilding of entire districts after violent storms destroyed coastal towns.
Still, some thoughts lingered no matter how much he tried to suffocate them.
Sometimes, during exhausting meetings, he would catch the faint lingering scent of an omega passing through the halls and feel something deep inside his alpha instinctively react before he crushed it back down again. Sometimes he would overhear his parents laughing together somewhere within the palace and remember the way his father always seemed calmer with his mother near him, like her existence alone soothed him.
Sometimes during ruts, when his body burned hot and restless and impossible to ignore, Katsuki would lock himself away, furious at the weakness clawing through him because there was nobody there to steady him through it. Nobody to press soft purrs into his ear. Nobody to scent his sheets and calm the violent instincts buried beneath his skin. Nobody was waiting for him after long days spent carrying the weight of an entire kingdom on his shoulders.
But he ignored all of it.
He ignored it while negotiating shipping agreements with foreign ambassadors. Ignored it while standing beneath golden chandeliers at royal banquets surrounded by nobles desperate for his approval.
Ignored it while he shook hands with a prince he was currently doing deals with.
This meeting had dragged on for the better part of the afternoon, and Katsuki was beginning to feel the drag in a place that had offered him nothing interesting to look at.
The late king and queen of this territory had died within the same season— fever, supposedly, though the letters sent to his court had been vague— and the kingdom had passed to their son.
Prince Yago was young, and there was none of the confidence that Katsuki associated with rulers who had actually earned anything. Just a kind of blankness that sat over the man's features like a mask.
His father, from what Katsuki's advisors had gathered, had been the same— a king who kept to himself, who refused alliances and turned away trade delegations, and governed his territory like someone who had something to hide. The court of this kingdom had a reputation for being impossible to read and even harder to work with, and it had taken three formal invitations and a significant amount of political maneuvering from Katsuki's own ministers before this visit had finally been agreed upon.
They walked the palace's outer corridor toward the gardens, and Yago was talking about routes and the positioning of ports. Katsuki was half-listening, catching the key words, filing the numbers, letting the rest slide past while he watched the world around him
That was when he noticed the guards.
They were stationed at the intervals he would have expected. But there was something…/wrong/ with them. His eyes moved from one to the next without being entirely sure what had snagged his attention, and then it became obvious all at once.
Bandages. More than one guard with wrapped hands, with cloth wound around forearms and the sides of necks. One stood with his chin slightly tilted in the way of someone managing pain.
Another— posted nearest the garden entrance, trying very hard not to look directly at Katsuki— had a scar that ran from his left temple all the way down past his jaw, the skin there pulled slightly wrong. His left eye was clouded, milky at the center.
Katsuki had seen enough combat injuries in his life to recognize what bladed damage looked like on the body, and what this man wore on his face was not a blade. The marks were too irregular. Too curved. They had that dragging quality to them that only came from something that tore rather than cut.
Claw marks.
He said nothing.
The servants they passed in the corridor crossing from one wing to another moved with their heads down before they'd even cleared the doorway, doing anxious gestures like people asking forgiveness from whatever god they thought was listening.
Not devotion. Habit. The kind of habit that came from fear worn into the body over time until it became involuntary. Katsuki tucked every observation behind his teeth.
Then— the smell hit him.
It came from his left, drifting through an open archway that looked out onto the garden grounds, and it stopped him mid-stride as if he'd walked into a wall. His head turned before he'd given it permission to. His entire alpha brain— that wordless, embarrassingly instinctive part of him that he had spent the better part of his adult life keeping firmly in its place— locked onto the scent to the point that it was almost violent.
Sweet. It was sweet. The kind of sweet that landed in the back of the throat and in the chest and in the specific animal part of the brain that sat below language and reason.
He had never smelled anything like it. He had grown up around bonded pairs, had been in rooms his whole life where omega and alpha scents had mingled into the word— belonging, his father had called it once, you'll know it when it's meant for you.
Katsuki had filed that away as sentimental nonsense.
He was filing it differently now.
Because this was not the settled scent of a bonded omega. That he would have recognized; that was gentle in a way that his alpha would have registered and respectfully stepped back from.
This was something else entirely. This was overwhelming in a way that made his gums ache, his canines pressing against the insides of his lips like they'd forgotten they belonged to a king and not a wolf. His skin prickled. The back of his neck went hot. His instincts were currently yanking at the leash with both hands.
And underneath the sweetness was... blood.
TBC