Chapter 1 The Luxury Of Surviving #3
His scent infiltrates my nostrils like a trespasser who knows exactly where the security gaps are, bypassing every wall and filter and suppressant in my system to reach the primitive, designation-driven core of my brain that most Omegas learn to manage and I’ve simply learned to ignore.
Most of the time.
The blanket of calm that always accompanies his presence descends over me like something physical—a weight, a pressure, a gravity that pulls the scattered fragments of my consciousness back into alignment.
My breathing deepens without my permission.
The tension in my shoulders—tension I wasn’t even aware I was carrying—releases by a fraction.
It should be studied, really.
The effect this man has on my nervous system.
Published in some academic journal under a title like “Unexplained Autonomic Regulation in Unbonded Alpha-Omega Proximity: A Case Study in Mutual Stubbornness.”
He’s still cursing. The language resolves slightly—something Eastern European, maybe, or a dialect I haven’t encountered.
His hands have moved from my face to my ribs, probing the wound with a clinical precision that contradicts the barely controlled fury in his voice.
I feel the pressure of his fingers assessing damage, gauging depth, calculating the same equation I already ran during the walk home.
Not fatal.
I could have told you that.
If my mouth was currently accepting commands from my brain, which it’s not.
I try to speak again. Manage something that might be his name or might just be a vowel sound paired with a consonant that vaguely resembles the letter H.
My consciousness is already surrendering—the combination of blood loss, pain medication, and the injection creating a pharmacological trinity that my body has no interest in fighting.
He’s here.
That’s enough.
Hawk. Hawthorne Kennedy. The feral-prone, unbonded Alpha who has no business being in my apartment, no business knowing the security code I change every seventy-two hours, no business injecting me with stabilizing compounds that he acquires from sources he refuses to name and I’ve stopped asking about.
He’s probably the reason I’m still here.
The admission rises through the fading layers of my consciousness with the quiet insistence of a truth that’s been waiting for a vulnerable moment to surface.
Not something I’d ever say aloud—I’d rather take another blade to the ribs than give anyone, even Hawk, the ammunition of knowing they matter to me.
That knowledge is a weapon in Savage Knot, and I’ve seen what happens when people learn you have something—someone—you’re afraid to lose.
They take it.
They always take it.
But in the dissolving margins of awareness, where the walls I’ve constructed become translucent enough to admit private truths, I can acknowledge what I’d never say aloud to his face.
He has changed my life. Not with grand gestures or dramatic rescues—though there have been those too, more than I can count on the fingers that are currently going numb from cold and blood loss.
But with the smaller things. The consistent things.
The way he appears at the edges of my worst moments with medicine and fury and hands that shake not from fear but from the effort of restraining an Alpha instinct that wants to destroy whatever caused the damage he’s treating.
I’m grateful for it.
For him.
Even if gratitude is another emotion I’ve filed under “things Victoria Sinclair doesn’t express” alongside joy, vulnerability, and the quiet, desperate wanting that surfaces in the moments between sleep and waking when my defenses are at their lowest.
Without him, I doubt I’d still be on this rollercoaster.
And I’m not sure if that’s a reason to be thankful or terrified.
The darkness comes.
Not the violent, sudden darkness of a blow to the head or the chemically induced darkness of anesthesia.
This is gentler—a gradual dimming, like a stage light being lowered by a careful hand.
The kitchen fades. The pain fades. The cold of the floor and the warmth of Hawk’s scent merge into a single, neutral sensation that feels like floating in water whose temperature exactly matches your own.
I don’t fight it.
Fighting requires energy and purpose and the belief that what waits on the other side of consciousness is worth the effort of remaining present for it. Right now, I’m not convinced of any of those things.
I feel myself being lifted.
Arms beneath my knees, behind my shoulders, cradling me against a chest that radiates the kind of heat my body has been desperate for since I hit the floor.
Pine and smoke and iron envelope me completely, and for a suspended, weightless moment, I am not Victoria Sinclair—not the twin, not the survivor, not the monster, not the Omega hiding in the carcass of a condemned townhome in the forest of the cruelest sector of the cruelest academy in existence.
I am simply held.
Like a princess.
The thought almost makes me smile, but my facial muscles have already surrendered to the darkness alongside everything else.
I can only hope to wake to another misery of life.
This is my earned suffering. The consequence of vengeance.
But is it the end of my wrath?
The darkness swallows the question whole, taking me with it into a silence so complete it feels like mercy—the only kind I’ve ever been given that I didn’t have to bleed for.
Only death can tame that burning flame that yearns to never go out.