Ruthless Knot (Forgotten Omegas: Initiation #2)

Prologue Curtain Call For The Damned

~SERAPHINE~

The stage is mine.

It's always been mine, even when they tried to rip it from my bleeding fingers.

Even when they murdered my parents on a stage just like this one—execution-style, spotlight bright, their blood mixing with the rosin dust while I watched from the wings, powerless and small.

But I'm not small anymore.

The music starts—that slowed reverb track I've had on repeat for weeks, the one that crawls under my skin and makes a home in the hollow spaces where my heart used to live.

Summer Walker's voice filters through the speakers I rigged hours ago, each word stretched and distorted until it sounds like a ghost singing through water.

Oh, it's over...

My mismatched ballet shoes—one carnelian red like arterial spray, one dusty rose pink like the blush I used to wear when I still cared about being pretty—press against the scuffed wooden stage.

The red one first.

Always the red one first, because beginnings should be written in blood.

I rise onto pointe.

Pain lances through my toes, sharp and grounding and perfect.

The kind of pain that reminds me I'm still capable of feeling something beyond the rage that's become my baseline existence.

My arms lift slowly, fingers extending into that perfect alignment Madame Chernova used to demand before I watched her die alongside my parents.

All the mess, over. All the stress, over...

The reverb stretches the words into a lament, and I move with them. A slow, controlled pirouette that would make my dead instructor weep if she could see me now—if she could see what her star pupil has become.

I spin faster.

The theater around me blurs into streaks of shadow and dying gold—peeling paint, moth-eaten curtains, empty seats stretching back into darkness. And the cages. God, the cages. Golden bird cages suspended from the ceiling on chains that creak with the weight of the bodies inside.

My gallery. My art. My fuck-you to everyone who thought they could break me.

Oh, no more crying in public...

The song's beat drops lower, that bass reverberating through the floorboards, and I drop with it. Grand plié, sinking toward the earth before exploding upward in a grand jeté that sends me soaring. For one crystalline moment, I'm flying—untouchable, free, alive.

Then I land.

One foot. Two. A chassé into a series of fouettés that blur the world into nothing but motion and rage and the ghost of who I used to be.

Thirty-two rotations.

The same number of times my father begged for mercy before they shot him in the head.

The same number of days I spent in the isolation chamber when I first arrived at this nightmare academy, carving tallies into my thigh just to remember I was still here.

The same number of reasons I have to make them all fucking pay.

Our love bipolar, finally over...

Bipolar. That's what the academy shrinks call me. Bipolar, PTSD, attachment disorder, psychotic breaks—they have so many pretty labels for what happens when you watch your entire world get slaughtered and somehow survive it. When you become something new. Something feral.

My costume is a desecration of everything I used to worship.

Black leotard slashed across the ribs, revealing strips of pale skin decorated with bruises in various stages of healing—purple, green, yellow, a watercolor painting of violence. The tutu is tattered tulle in shades of crimson and midnight, each layer deliberately shredded to look like wings.

Or wounds.

Depending on how you look at it, I suppose both are the same thing.

My hair hangs loose, wild and dark, whipping around my face with each turn. No pins. No bun. No pristine ballerina perfection. That girl died three years ago when her parents' blood splattered across her face and the heir to the cartel empire smiled at her from the shadows.

Kai James Lawson.

Even thinking his name makes something violent coil in my chest.

Oh, for you I pray...

The reverb makes the prayer sound desperate, hollow, like screaming into a void that doesn't give a fuck about your suffering.

I transition into an arabesque, my working leg extending behind me at an angle that makes my muscles scream.

My back arches, spine curving into a bow, and I hold the position as the song bleeds into the next verse.

Sure you wanna share your last name with me? Baby, I'm sure I do...

The words hit different when you understand what they're really saying. When you know what it means to be promised forever—promised safety, protection, a pack that would die before letting harm touch you—only to have it all revealed as a lie written in your parents' blood.

I was supposed to be special.

An Omega destined for greatness, for Juilliard, for a pack that would cherish me like the rare thing I was supposed to be.

What a cosmic fucking joke.

I spin again, this time letting my head fall back, exposing the long line of my throat—a submissive gesture that's anything but. When I right myself, I'm grinning, that manic edge pulling at my lips that makes people either run or get stupid ideas about taming me.

Spoiler: no one tames a rabid animal. You just put it down.

With you, love doesn't hurt. Love is for better or worse, so I do...

Love doesn't hurt. What a beautiful lie that is. What a perfect piece of propaganda they feed to unmated Omegas, making us believe that true love will heal all wounds, that the right pack will make everything okay.

Love destroys.

It took my parents, my future, my entire identity and ground it into dust beneath boots that cost more than most people make in a year.

The song swells, that reverb effect making Summer Walker's voice echo like she's singing from the afterlife, and I move into the final sequence. Piqué turns carrying me in a diagonal line across the stage, each rotation timed perfectly with the stretched-out beats.

My spotted vision catches flashes of my art installation—those golden cages swaying gently, the bodies inside positioned like twisted marionettes. Students who thought they could claim me. Alphas who believed my Omega status made me weak. Betas who looked away when the monsters came calling.

Now they're all part of the performance.

Don't know what you see, but you take me and all I carry, so I do...

The scent of death mingles with my distress—sharp lavender with undertones of something acrid and wrong. Unmated Omega scent. Broken Omega scent. The kind that makes Alphas either run or get greedy, thinking they can be the hero in my tragic story.

They're always wrong.

I transition into a penultimate arabesque, holding the position as the music begins its descent into that final, haunting repetition. My chest heaves with exertion, sweat dripping down my temples, disappearing into the torn fabric of my costume.

No one else can take it. Say I'm overcomplicated...

Overcomplicated. That's what the Lawson heir called me once, back when I was still stupid enough to believe in allies. Back when I thought maybe—maybe—there was a version of this story where I wasn't the villain.

But here's what I've learned in three years of surviving this nightmare: sometimes the villain is just the hero who got tired of bleeding.

I got too many issues I never solved...

The song stretches the confession into something almost beautiful, almost forgiving. But I don't want forgiveness. I want vengeance. I want to watch them choke on their lies and beg for mercy I'll never grant.

I move into the final position.

One-legged pointe on the red shoe—because endings should always be written in blood—my other leg bent and lifted, foot pointed and pressed against my supporting knee. My arms extend overhead, wrists crossed, fingers reaching toward the ceiling as if in prayer.

But I stopped praying the night I watched my father's brains paint abstract patterns on the wall behind him.

I've been jaded, I have questions. All the good ones taken...

All the good ones taken. That's the story they tell broken Omegas, isn't it? That we're too damaged for the decent packs, too fucked up for healthy love, too complicated for anyone except the monsters who made us this way.

Maybe that's true.

Maybe the only pack worthy of a monster is one made of devils.

So for me, you must've been waiting...

The reverb makes the words sound prophetic, like fate speaking through Summer Walker's voice. Like the universe itself acknowledging that some meetings are written in blood and fire, that some connections are forged in violence rather than love.

The music ends.

Complete. Absolute. Deafening silence crashes over the theater like a tidal wave.

I hold the position.

One second. Two. Three.

My muscles tremble, that red shoe supporting my entire weight on a platform barely wider than a quarter. Pain radiates up my leg, but I embrace it. Let it ground me in this moment, in this rage, in this purpose that's kept me alive when I should have died alongside my parents.

The silence stretches. In it, I can hear everything—the creak of the building settling, the whisper of wind through cracked walls, the distant sound of violence from other parts of the academy.

Just another night at Hard Knot Academy, where nightmares breed and broken souls learn to become predators.

My heart hammers against my ribs.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

A countdown to something. To what, I'm not—

Clap.

The sound cracks through the silence like a gunshot, and my eyes snap open.

The madness surges forward—that beautiful, terrible thing that whispers promises of blood and chaos in the darkest hours. I feel it in the way my lips curve, the way my pupils dilate, the way my scent shifts from distress to something dangerous.

I don't move from my position. Not yet.

But I track the sound.

Center aisle. Twenty rows back.

And there he is.

Kai James Lawson.