Chapter 1 The Luxury Of Surviving
The Luxury Of Surviving
~VICTORIA~
The door doesn’t open so much as it surrenders.
I shove my shoulder into the reinforced steel—painted to look like rotting wood on the outside, because camouflage is the first language Savage Knot teaches you—and the lock gives with a reluctant click that reverberates through my teeth.
The motion sends a fresh wave of agony ripping through my left side, somewhere between my fourth and fifth rib where the blade caught me during tonight’s particular brand of entertainment.
Entertainment.
That’s what they call it here.
When two people are thrown into a ring with sharpened instruments and told that only one walks out with their ration card intact for the week.
I stumble across the threshold and kick the door shut behind me with my boot, the deadbolt engaging automatically—one of the few modifications I invested in when I first claimed this unit three years ago.
The security system hums to life in the walls: motion sensors, pressure plates, a perimeter alarm connected to the electrified fencing that surrounds the property in a twelve-foot embrace of rusted metal and razor wire.
From the outside, this place looks abandoned.
That’s the point.
A two-bedroom single townhome buried in the throat of the forest that borders Savage Knot’s eastern perimeter.
The exterior walls are deliberately weathered—peeling paint the color of gangrene, windows boarded with plywood that’s actually reinforced composite, a front path so overgrown with dead vegetation that you’d have to know exactly where to step to avoid the pressure-triggered alerts buried beneath the soil.
By Savage Knot standards, I’m living in the gutter.
The elite students occupy penthouse suites in the Academy’s central tower—floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking manicured grounds, personal chefs, silk sheets that cost more than most families earn in a year.
The mid-tier residents have townhomes within the Academy’s walled compound, protected by communal security forces and proximity to the administration buildings.
And then there’s me.
Out here in the forest, a quarter mile from the nearest occupied structure, surrounded by nothing but trees that have learned to grow crooked and a silence so thick it has texture.
I like it.
The admission surprises me sometimes, how fiercely I’ve come to guard this rotting little sanctuary.
But the truth is simple: the forest doesn’t judge.
The trees don’t whisper about the Omega who lives alone.
The silence doesn’t ask questions about why a woman with my particular designation hasn’t been claimed by a pack, hasn’t submitted to the hierarchy, hasn’t done what every Omega in Savage Knot is expected to do—which is kneel, and smile, and be grateful for the privilege of being owned.
Fuck that.
Fuck all of it.
The interior is the opposite of the exterior—a contradiction I’ve always found fitting, given that my entire existence is built on the architecture of deception.
Clean hardwood floors. White walls with minimal decoration—a single framed photograph of a coastline I’ll never visit sits above the kitchen counter, and I genuinely cannot remember if I hung it or if it came with the unit.
Functional furniture in muted grays and blacks.
A kitchen that’s rarely used for cooking but always stocked with medical supplies in the cabinet above the sink.
Priorities.
The only thing that disrupts the sterile cleanliness is me.
I track blood across the hardwood like a wounded animal marking its den—dark droplets falling from the saturated fabric pressed against my ribs, each one landing with a soft, wet sound that I’ve heard so many times it barely registers anymore.
The crimson maps my route from the front door to the kitchen in a constellation of pain that I’ll have to scrub out later with hydrogen peroxide and cold water.
Later.
If there is a later.
I lean against the kitchen counter and the edge of the granite digs into my hip bone hard enough to leave a bruise, but the pressure is grounding.
Something solid. Something real. Something that confirms I’m still here, still occupying physical space in a world that’s tried very creatively to remove me from it on multiple occasions.
My left hand reaches for the medicine cabinet above the sink.
Misses.
My fingers graze the bottom edge of the cabinet door, slipping against the smooth surface because my gloves are slick with blood—mine, mostly, though not entirely—and the angle requires me to lift my arm higher than my damaged ribs want to allow.
The motion pulls at the wound, and a sound escapes my throat that I refuse to classify as a whimper.
It wasn’t a whimper.
It was an involuntary vocalization caused by the sudden displacement of damaged tissue.
Completely different.
I try again, this time bracing my right hand flat against the counter for leverage, and the cabinet door swings open with a squeak that sounds unreasonably loud in the quiet of the apartment.
Inside: a pharmacy’s worth of supplies organized with the kind of meticulous precision that would probably concern a therapist if I had one.
Gauze. Surgical tape. Antiseptic solution.
Three different types of antibiotics that I acquired through channels best left undiscussed.
And the pain medication—prescription-grade, the kind that dulls everything from knife wounds to existential dread with equal efficiency.
I shake two pills into my palm, consider the throbbing inferno in my ribcage, and add a third.
Living dangerously.
As if that’s not already the permanent state of affairs.
I swallow them dry—water requires walking to the fridge, and walking requires energy I stopped producing approximately forty minutes ago when that second-year Alpha drove his blade through my guard and into the meat between my ribs with a grin that suggested he thought he’d just won the lottery.
He didn’t.
I broke his wrist in two places and dislocated his shoulder before the referees pulled me off.
He’ll heal.
Probably.
I turn around and lean my back against the counter, breathing through the pain in shallow, measured intervals that my body has learned through years of repetition.
Inhale for three counts. Hold for two. Exhale for four.
A rhythm as familiar as my own heartbeat—more familiar, actually, since my heartbeat has a tendency to become erratic when the blood loss reaches a certain threshold, and I’m hovering dangerously close to that threshold now.
The apartment settles around me in its usual silence.
No roommate to fuss over the blood on the floor. No pack Alpha to growl and demand to see the wound. No concerned Omega sisters hovering with warm compresses and worried eyes and the kind of gentle scolding that sounds like love if you let yourself hear it that way.
Just me.
The way it’s been for five years.
The way it should be.
Five years.
The number settles into my chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through the carefully maintained emptiness that I’ve spent half a decade constructing.
Five years since I stood on that cliff and watched a chair disappear over the edge with my twin sister bound to it.
Five years since the rain fell on my face and washed away nothing—not the blood under my nails, not the hollow where my heart used to be, not the understanding that revenge tastes exactly like ash and gives you exactly as much nourishment.
Five years since I became a murderer.
The word doesn’t sting anymore. It used to—in the early months, when I’d wake from nightmares drenched in sweat and clawing at the sheets, Vivian’s face burning behind my eyelids with that single, terrified eye locked onto mine.
But the human psyche is a remarkably adaptive organ.
It learns to absorb even the most devastating truths the way scar tissue learns to cover even the deepest wounds—not by erasing them, but by building something harder over the top.
I don’t regret killing her.
I settle into that truth the way I settle into the pain in my ribs—with practiced acceptance, without flinching, without the performative guilt that society would expect from a woman who ended her own sister’s life.
I regret the circumstances that made it necessary.
I regret being born an Omega in a world that treats our designation as an invitation for ownership.
I regret that Vivian looked at me and saw competition instead of a sister, because this world taught her that two Omega twins couldn’t both survive—that one would always have to be sacrificed so the other could thrive.
I regret the jealousy that poisoned us both, the Sinclair name that demanded we destroy each other for the privilege of wearing it.
But the act itself?
The kick. The fall. The sound of her body meeting the rocks.
No.
I’d do it again.
And that’s the part that should terrify me but doesn’t, because you can’t be terrified of something when you’ve already accepted it as fundamental to your composition. Like being afraid of your own bones. Pointless.
My legs give out.
Not dramatically—not the cinematic collapse of a woman overwhelmed by memory and grief.
Just a quiet, mechanical failure of muscles that have been running on adrenaline and spite for too many hours.
My back slides down the cabinet face, the smooth wood catching on the hem of my jacket as I descend, and my tailbone connects with the hardwood floor with a dull thud that sends a fresh jolt through my injured ribs.
I end up sitting with my knees drawn toward my chest, my left shoulder pressed against the cabinet, blood slowly pooling beneath my right hip where the wound continues its stubborn, steady weeping.
A quick nap.
That’s all I need.