Savage Knot (Forgotten Omegas: Initiation #4)

Prologue The Last Mercy

~VICTORIA~

The wind is the only honest thing left on this cliff.

It doesn't pretend to be gentle. Doesn't soften its edges or whisper sweet lies about forgiveness and healing and all those pretty words people stitch into greeting cards when they don't know what else to say to someone whose world has been rearranged by violence.

The wind just is.

Cold. Relentless. Unapologetic.

Like me.

I stand at the edge of a desolated cliffside that overlooks the kind of ocean poets romanticize and survivors fear—black water crashing against jagged rock formations that jut from the surface like the broken teeth of something ancient and starving.

The spray reaches high enough that I can taste the salt on my lips if I breathe in deep enough, mingling with the iron aftertaste that hasn't left my mouth since the warehouse.

Since I started cutting.

The sky above is bruised. Purples and grays bleed into one another like watercolors left in the rain, heavy with the promise of a storm that hasn't decided whether it wants to weep or rage.

The last threads of daylight cling to the horizon in thin, desperate ribbons of amber that do nothing to warm the air or the hollowed-out cavity behind my sternum where something vital used to live.

Hope, maybe.

Or naivety.

Hard to tell the difference when both leave the same wound.

Behind me, the dirt path we took to get here is already disappearing under the encroaching darkness.

The van is parked a quarter mile back, hidden behind a cluster of dead trees that look like skeletal hands reaching for a god who stopped listening long ago.

Elizabeth and the others left an hour ago—back to their pack, back to their revelations, back to the mess of truths and confessions that Christmas in Russia decided to unravel for them all.

Good for them.

Truly.

Elizabeth Abercrombie earned her ending.

Earned the right to stand in front of Holmes with all her secrets laid bare and not crumble.

She earned those men—earned the love that's been clawing its way through every wall she built since Harvard, since the forest, since I found her half-dead and delirious in the underbrush with her dress torn and her spirit shattered into fragments I wasn't sure could ever be reassembled.

I put her back together.

Piece by agonizing piece.

And now she gets to walk forward while I stay behind to finish what should have ended years ago.

The liquid shot I administered took its full effect within the promised three minutes.

The compound—engineered specifically through connections I'd spent years cultivating within the Forgotten Omegas network—wasn't designed to kill.

That would have been a mercy, and mercy was never part of the itinerary.

No.

The shot was designed to prolong. To preserve just enough biological function to keep the body conscious while it endured the kind of systematic deconstruction that would make even a seasoned surgeon look away.

And I didn't look away.

Not once.

Seventy-two hours.

That's how long it took to reduce Vivian Sinclair from the polished, designer-clad imposter who'd stolen my name, my life, and my intended mate into the thing that now sits before me.

Thing.

Because she stopped being my sister somewhere between the second day and the third, when the screaming finally stopped—not because the pain lessened, but because there was nothing left to scream with.

I adjust my black gloves—the same ones I wore when I stepped into that warehouse light and watched Vivian's world collapse with a single whispered greeting—and turn to face the chair.

She's there.

What remains of her, anyway.

The metal chair is bolted to a concrete slab someone dragged to the cliff's edge long before I arrived.

A previous tenant of vengeance, perhaps.

This place has that energy—soaked in endings, baptized in the kind of finality that seeps into the soil and poisons the roots of anything foolish enough to try growing here.

Vivian is bound to it with industrial-grade restraints, though they're hardly necessary at this point.

Her body is a patchwork of surgical precision and deliberate cruelty—stitched back together in places where I'd opened her up, the black thread pulling taut against swollen, discolored flesh that weeps fluid in thin, continuous streams. Her designer curves—the ones she'd purchased rather than earned, the BBL and the implants and all that carefully constructed artifice—are unrecognizable now.

Everything about her was always a fabrication.

Her body. Her name. Her love.

At least now the outside matches.

Her head hangs forward, chin touching the ruin of her collarbone.

What was once perfectly maintained blonde hair—dyed to differentiate herself from my natural brunette, as if changing the surface could change the substance—now hangs in matted, blood-crusted tangles that obscure most of her face.

Her jaw is slack, and behind her cracked, colorless lips, the hollow cavity of her mouth sits empty and dark.

Her tongue is gone.

I removed it on the second day, after she'd spent sixteen hours alternating between screaming threats and begging for forgiveness. The audacity of it—switching between promising to destroy me and pleading for my mercy in the same ragged breath—was what made the decision so easy.

You used that tongue to steal my life.

To whisper your lies into Holmes's ear.

To introduce yourself as Victoria Sinclair to every room you entered as if the name had always been yours.

As if I'd never existed at all.

Her breathing is the only indication she's still technically alive.

Thin, reedy wheezes that barely displace the air in front of her lips.

Each inhale sounds like paper tearing—slow and fragile, as though her lungs have forgotten their purpose and are simply going through the motions out of biological stubbornness rather than any genuine will to survive.

Her heart beats.

Barely.

A faint, arrhythmic pulse visible in the damaged vein at her throat that I chose not to sever.

Not out of mercy.

Out of spite.

I walk toward her.

My boots are silent against the stone—the same black combat boots I've been wearing for three days straight.

They're scuffed now, stained in ways that won't wash out, and I find I don't care.

Fashion was always Vivian's obsession. The designer dresses, the calculated aesthetics, the way she curated her appearance the way a museum curates an exhibit—everything positioned for maximum impact, nothing left to chance or genuine expression.

I dressed for function.

She dressed for deception.

And in the end, all those pretty clothes couldn't protect her from the consequences.

I stop two feet in front of the chair and stare down at her.

Nothing.

That's what I feel.

I search for it—actively, deliberately probe the spaces inside my chest where emotions are supposed to live—and find only a vast, echoing stillness.

No satisfaction. No grief. No triumph or guilt or the cathartic release that every revenge fantasy promises but never delivers.

Just... absence. The emotional equivalent of walking into a room you've spent years trying to reach only to find it completely, devastatingly empty.

Maybe this is what they don't tell you about vengeance.

That it doesn't fill the void.

It just gives the void a name.

"What a true pity."

My voice doesn't waver. Doesn't crack or soften or carry even a fragment of the sisterly affection that once existed between us—back when we were children, back before the rivalry poisoned everything, back when sharing a face meant sharing a soul rather than waging a war over which version of it deserved to survive.

Those days are so far gone they might as well be someone else's memories.

"You thought you'd won." I tilt my head, studying the wreckage of her with clinical detachment. "That you'd get the pack. Win this hidden, waging war that I actually wanted to protect you from."

A bitter laugh escapes me, sharp and hollow as a cracked bell.

Protect.

What a foolish word to associate with anything that involves a Sinclair.

"You became the villain in a story that was never meant to be your domain to claim." My gloved fingers flex at my sides, the leather creaking softly. "But alas. Your suffering will end, and I'll have to carry that burden onward."

I shake my head, and the motion feels rehearsed even though it isn't. Everything about this moment should feel monumental—the climax of years of planning, the crescendo of every sleepless night spent tracing the scars she left on my body, every morning spent relearning how to walk after what the fall did to my spine, every second of existing as a ghost in a world that had already eulogized me and moved on.

Victoria Sinclair: dead at nineteen. Tragic accident. Fell off a cliff.

Case closed.

Except I didn't die.

I just stopped being alive in every way that mattered.

I lean forward.

Close enough that the remnants of her scent—sour now, corrupted by infection and decay and the chemical compound still metabolizing through what's left of her system—fills my nostrils.

Close enough that I can see the slight, almost imperceptible movement of her pupil beneath the swollen, bruised lid of her left eye.

It shifts.

Finds me.

Locks on.

There you are.

The last bit of Vivian Sinclair—the real her, the conscious, thinking, comprehending fragment that still exists somewhere behind the destroyed exterior—stares up at me from that single functioning eye.

And I watch, with the same detachment I've carried for the last seventy-two hours, as tears begin to pool against the damaged waterline.

Slow.

Thick.

The kind of tears that come not from pain—she's well beyond pain at this point—but from the absolute, crystalline understanding that death is here.

That death has my face.

How poetic.

"I'll never forgive you."

The words come out steady. Low. Final.