Bleeding Oleander

Chapter 1

Something Like Surviving

Felix POV

‘You are not needed here!’

‘Go away!’

‘Why were you not born female? At least then you would be of some use to us! A male Omega is nothing but a defect — a bad luck bringer!’

‘A male Omega wolf? What a disgrace to the pack.’

And underneath all of it, quieter than the rest. The voice that hurt the most.

‘I have no son.’

I woke up with cold sweat running down my forehead and into my cheeks, panting so hard it was difficult to breathe. I could still hear their voices. I always could. Nightmare after nightmare, every single day, as if my own mind had decided that sleeping was just another way to punish me.

Slowly I sat upright, curled my legs to my chest, and buried my face in my knees. The sobs came before I could stop them. They always did, in those first few seconds after waking, before I remembered how to hold myself together again.

The forest breathed around me the way it always did, indifferent and vast and mercifully quiet. No one here to look at me wrong. No one here to look at me at all. Through the small window near my bed, the sky was beginning to lighten, pale grey giving way to the faint gold of dawn. The dark trees of Nemus Dormiens stood as they always did, silent and enormous, keeping their secrets the way they had always kept mine.

“Good morning,” I said out loud.

My voice came out rough and strange. It always did. Some days I went so long without speaking that I said it just to make sure I still could. There was no one to say it to. There never was. But the habit had kept something in me from going completely hollow, so I kept doing it.

It had been seven years since my own pack abandoned me, since my own parents abandoned me, simply because I was born an Omega. The moment I turned eighteen, the moment they finally tested what my secondary gender was, everything I had ever known turned upside down. Everything I had was gone in the blink of an eye.

A male Omega. Bad luck. A defect. A thing to be ashamed of.

They brought me to the edge of Nemus Dormiens, the most dangerous forest in the territory, and they left me there. No food. No supplies. No goodbye. I stood at the treeline and listened to their footsteps walking away, and I waited for one of them to look back.

My father never did.

I nearly died in the first season alone. I walked for days, eating whatever I could find that my nose told me was safe, moving as quietly as I could manage, bleeding and starving and half out of my mind. Then, by something that felt less like luck and more like the forest taking pity on the pathetic creature stumbling through it, I found an abandoned hut deep in the trees.

That hut became my shelter. Then my home. It was the only home that had ever kept me.

My wolf had gone quiet years ago. Not dead, just exhausted, I think. We both were. Surviving takes everything you have. There is nothing left for howling at moons you will never share with anyone, nothing left for the instincts that whisper about packs and warmth and belonging. I had long since learned to stop listening to those.

Seven years. I was still here.

Whatever they had been hoping for when they left me at that forest edge, it had not happened yet. I had made sure of it every single day. Some mornings that were the only reason I got up. Not because I wanted to keep going, but because stopping would mean they had been right about me.

I refused to give them that.

I wiped my face with the back of my hand, slapped both my cheeks once to shake off the lingering sorrow, and forced myself up from the bed.

The small, cracked mirror on the wall caught my reflection as I stood. I had stopped looking at it deliberately a long time ago, but sometimes it ambushed me like this, pale face still blotchy from crying, blonde hair a tangled mess across my forehead from sleep. Seven years of forest living had kept me lean. Too lean, probably. My face had stayed frustratingly soft no matter how hard the years got, high cheekbones, a jaw that never quite managed to look sharp, lips that curved slightly even when I was not smiling. My hair had grown long enough to curl at the ends, always falling forward no matter what I did with it. And my eyes, red-rimmed from crying now but otherwise that same deep forest green, dark as moss, dark as the trees outside my window.

I looked, in short, like exactly what I was.

Small. Delicate. An Omega.

I hated it.

Living alone in Nemus Dormiens was not, truthfully, the worst thing. There was no one to look at me like I was something gone wrong in the world. No pack hierarchy to remind me where I sat at the bottom of it. Just the forest, the cold, the quiet, and me.

I was weaker than most wolves, smaller in both my human and wolf form, my senses a fraction less sharp than a full-blooded Alpha or Beta. But my nose still worked well enough to tell a poisonous plant from an edible one, to track a rabbit through two inches of snow, to know which parts of the forest were safe and which were not. I had learned to hunt small animals; rabbits, fawns, and piglets to preserve their meats. I had learned which roots kept through winter and which berries came back in spring.

I had learned, in short, how to survive. I had gotten very good at it.

Before venturing too deep into the forest, I checked everything I had in stock, counting carefully so nothing was missed. Firewood still plenty enough for three more days. My preserved meats were holding up well too.

I had learned that particular trick not from necessity but from a summer a lifetime ago, a scouts camp my pack had sent the children to every year, before my dynamic presented and changed everything. We spent weeks out in the wilderness learning to smoke and dry meat over open fires, competing over whose strips dried the fastest, laughing about nothing in particular. There had been badges involved. I had been very serious about the badges.

I had been good at it then. Happy, even, in the uncomplicated way children are happy before the world shows them what it is. The kind of happy where you do not know you are happy because you have never known anything else.

Whoever invented the drying rack smoking technique, I owe them my life. Back then I had just thought it was fun.

“Ah. Almost out of clean water,” I muttered, eyeing the large clay pot near the drying rack.

Grabbing the nearest wooden bucket, I headed toward the river. As I walked, a cold gust of wind cut right through me. I should have brought my hand-stitched leather coat, the one I had made from a deer I found already dead at the forest edge, as if Nemus Dormiens itself had decided it wanted me alive.

Sometimes I walked to the edge of the forest just to remember the outside world still existed. I never dared venture further, not into the settlements, not anywhere I might be seen. A lone Omega with no pack name was nobody. I had learned that the one time I tried, half-dead and desperate in my first year, turned away from every door I knocked on.

So instead, I listened from the trees. Merchants passing on the road. Hunters at the forest edge. Pack wolves who wandered close enough to talk without lowering their voices. It was how I kept track of a world that had decided it had no use for me.

I stepped outside into the cold morning air, the forest stretching endlessly in every direction. No footsteps in the mud but mine. No smoke from any fire but my own. Nemus Dormiens breathed its cold breath against my skin and the silence settled around my shoulders like it always did, familiar as anything, heavy as everything.

Seven years of this. Every day for seven years, this was my life. Alone. Surviving. Somehow well enough.

I told myself I was used to it.

Lying to myself was easier. It always had been.

I was not going to die the way they hoped. No.

I was Felix — and I would survive no matter what.