Chapter 1 The Luxury Of Surviving #2
Twenty minutes on this floor and the pills will kick in and the bleeding will slow and I’ll have enough energy to crawl to the bathroom and stitch myself up the way I’ve done dozens of times before.
The cold of the hardwood seeps through my clothing almost immediately—an unwelcome but predictable companion.
My body has never been good at retaining heat.
Something about my particular Omega biology, the suppressants I take to mask my scent, and the general state of malnutrition that comes from living on the margins of Savage Knot’s economy means that cold finds me faster than it finds most people and holds on with more determination.
Elizabeth would scold me for sitting on a cold floor with an open wound.
The thought arrives uninvited, and I let it settle because fighting it requires energy I don’t have.
Elizabeth.
I wonder how she’s doing. How all of them are doing—the women who shared this particular brand of beautiful madness with me, the Omegas who understood what it meant to be forgotten by a system designed to consume them and chose to fight back instead of submitting gracefully.
Elizabeth Abercrombie, with her Shakespeare quotations and her stubborn refusal to let the world dim her light, even when it tried its absolute hardest. She has her pack now—Holmes and his boys, those ridiculous, dangerous, devoted men who look at her like she hung the moon and would burn the world to keep it lit.
She earned that.
Jessica Vesper Calavera, with her sharp tongue and her sharper aim and the kind of fury that runs so deep it becomes indistinguishable from grace. She found Marcus and his crew—men equally forged in darkness, equally unafraid of the shadows she carries.
She earned that too.
Seraphine, with her counting and her precision and the quiet, devastating strength she hides behind rituals that most people mistake for weakness. She has her pack—Alphas who learned to count with her instead of trying to fix what was never broken.
Earned. Deserved. Claimed.
All of them, walking forward into something that looks like happiness, or at least the violent, complicated, blood-stained version of happiness that Knot Academy produces.
And here I am.
On a kitchen floor.
Bleeding.
Again.
The pattern is so familiar it’s almost comforting in its predictability. Go to the ring. Fight someone who outweighs me by fifty pounds. Win—barely. Drag myself home. Bleed on the floor. Take pills. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.
The glamorous life of Knot Academy’s most persistent survivor.
A laugh escapes me—weak, breathless, barely qualifying as a sound.
It echoes off the clean white walls and comes back to me sounding hollow.
Everything sounds hollow these days. Laughter.
Conversation. The rare compliment from a fellow fighter who respects my skill.
The even rarer moment of genuine human connection that slips through the cracks of the fortress I’ve built around my emotional center.
Hollow.
Like the space behind my sternum where other people keep things like hope and attachment and the belief that tomorrow might be different from today.
I know the pain will dull. It always does.
The pills will metabolize, the wound will close—it’s not deep enough to be fatal, I assessed that much during the walk home—and by morning I’ll be functional enough to move through Savage Knot’s corridors without anyone noticing the slight hitch in my stride or the way I favor my left side.
This is the life of Knot Academy.
The survival of the fittest.
Or the richest.
I’m neither, and I’m still here.
Make of that what you will.
I can’t stay outside these walls. That’s the bitter mathematics that keeps me anchored to this place despite everything.
A mateless Omega in the outside world is a commodity—unprotected, unclaimed, legally vulnerable to any Alpha with enough resources and enough cruelty to take what they want.
The government’s “alternative placement” programs. The laboratories.
The nighttime auctions that everyone knows about and no one discusses in polite company.
At least inside Knot Academy, I have the right to fight back.
At least here, survival is a recognized currency.
The only reason I stay is—
My thoughts trail off.
Not intentionally. Not the way a person pauses mid-sentence to gather their words or reconsider their phrasing.
This is something else entirely—a disconnection, a severance of the thread between conscious thought and conscious presence that happens more and more frequently these days.
One moment I’m in the middle of a sentence—even if only inside my own head—and the next I’m just.. . elsewhere. Nowhere.
Staring.
My eyes are open but they’re not seeing the kitchen.
Not seeing the blood on the floor or the cabinet above me or the single framed coastline photograph on the wall.
They’re fixed on a point in the middle distance that doesn’t exist—a void that my gaze has learned to seek out the way a compass needle seeks north.
Automatic. Effortless. Terrifying in its frequency if I ever bothered to track it, which I don’t, because tracking it would mean acknowledging that something inside me is fundamentally fractured in a way that pills and stitches can’t reach.
The void.
My therapist would have a name for it.
If I had a therapist.
If therapists existed in Savage Knot for anything other than prescribing stronger suppressants.
I don’t know how long I sit there.
Minutes. Maybe more. The blood continues its slow pilgrimage from the wound in my side, and the cold continues its patient conquest of my extremities, and the pills begin their chemical negotiation with my nervous system.
My breathing slows. My eyelids grow heavy.
The pain recedes to a distant hum rather than an active scream, which is as close to comfort as I generally get.
Maybe this one will do it.
The thought surfaces without warning or permission—a quiet, clinical observation from a part of my brain that has been running this particular calculation with increasing regularity.
Not suicidal, exactly. Nothing so dramatic or deliberate.
More like… a passive curiosity. A detached assessment of probability.
Maybe this wound, this night, this slow bleed on this cold floor will be the one that finally tips the equation.
Maybe I won’t wake up.
That would be…
I don’t finish the thought.
Not because I’m afraid of the answer, but because something presses against my cheek and the shock of it snaps through the fog like a flare through smoke.
Cold.
Cold as fuck, actually, which is saying something given that I’m already half-frozen from the floor.
Fingers. Large, callused, pressing against the side of my face with an urgency that contradicts their temperature.
They’re rough—not the manicured hands of Savage Knot’s elite Alphas, not the pampered digits that have never known manual labor or combat or the particular abrasion that comes from climbing surfaces not designed for human hands.
These are survivor’s hands.
I blink.
Once. Twice. The kitchen swims back into focus in slow, reluctant increments—edges first, then shapes, then colors that arrange themselves into the familiar geometry of my apartment.
The blood on the floor. The cabinet above me.
The overhead light that I don’t remember turning on, which means someone else turned it on, which means—
Cursing.
Someone is cursing in a language I can’t immediately place. Not English. Not any of the Romance languages I picked up during my years of recovery. Something harsher, more guttural, with consonant clusters that crash into each other like waves against the cliff where I—
Don’t.
The hands are shaking me now. Not violently—with controlled, purposeful force, the kind that says wake up, you stubborn idiot without needing a common language to translate.
My head rocks gently against the cabinet, and the motion sends fresh sparks of pain through my ribs that actually help pull me further from the void.
Pain.
The most reliable alarm clock in existence.
I try to speak. What comes out is a slurred approximation of words—my tongue thick, my lips uncooperative, the consonants sliding into each other like drunken dancers on a tilted stage.
"M’fine…"
Convincing.
Really sold that one, Victoria.
Something sharp jabs into my neck.
The needle.
I should be used to it by now—the sudden puncture, the brief sting of metal piercing skin, the hiss of compressed liquid entering my bloodstream through a delivery system that was definitely not acquired through any official medical channel.
But the cold of the solution as it disperses through my veins is always the part that makes me wince.
Not the pain. The pain is nothing. It’s the sensation of something foreign and frigid spreading through the interior of my body, displacing the warm heaviness of blood loss with a chemical alertness that feels more like an invasion than a rescue.
Annoying.
Every single time.
But the effect is immediate. My heart rate stabilizes—I can feel it recalibrating, the arrhythmic flutter smoothing into something more reliable, more insistent.
The edges of my vision sharpen. The fog retreats, not entirely but enough that the cursing above me resolves into individual words I still can’t understand but can now at least register as separate units of increasingly agitated speech.
And then the scent hits.
Wild pine.
Smoke.
Iron.
Hawk.
The recognition floods through me with a warmth that has nothing to do with the injection and everything to do with the way my Omega biology responds to this particular Alpha’s proximity—a response I’ve spent three years trying to analyze, suppress, and ultimately accept as one of the few genuinely inexplicable phenomena in my otherwise ruthlessly logical existence.