Chapter 2 Twenty-Seven #3
He rises from the bed, and the sudden absence of his warmth along my side makes me pout again—an involuntary expression that I catch too late to suppress, my lips curving downward like a child who’s had a toy removed.
The cold rushes in to fill the space he vacated, and I pull the duvet higher around my shoulders with a shiver that has everything to do with my body’s chronic inability to thermoregulate and nothing to do with wanting him to sit back down.
Nothing at all.
Instead of sitting back down, he walks to my closet.
I tilt my head against the headboard, confusion creasing my brow.
My closet is not a destination that typically features in our morning interactions.
It’s a narrow, utilitarian space that houses my limited wardrobe—functional blacks, combat-appropriate layers, the occasional item of gothic elegance that I wear when Savage Knot’s social obligations require me to pretend I care about aesthetics.
Nothing in there that warrants a special trip.
What is he—
He emerges carrying a box.
Not a large box—roughly the size of a hardcover book, wrapped in matte black paper with clean edges and precise folds that suggest either professional wrapping or the kind of meticulous attention to detail that would be endearing if I permitted myself to be endeared by things.
A ribbon sits on top—deep burgundy, tied in a bow that is somehow both masculine in its simplicity and unexpectedly beautiful in its execution.
He crosses the room and holds it out to me.
I stare at it.
Then at him.
Then at the box again.
My left leg begins its unconscious tapping against the mattress—the nerve-damaged limb finding its rhythm on the sheets, a metronome of unacknowledged anxiety that I’ve long since stopped trying to control.
The reduced sensation makes it easy to forget I’m doing it until someone points it out or I catch the motion in my peripheral vision.
“Now who did I kill that you got me a gift?”
The deflection is automatic. Humor as armor. Sarcasm as a shield against the dangerous possibility that someone might be doing something genuinely kind for me without ulterior motive, without expectation, without the invisible ledger that Savage Knot teaches you everyone keeps.
Because in this world, gifts are debts.
Kindness is currency.
And everything—everything—comes with a price.
He chuckles, those amber eyes softening by a fraction that most people wouldn’t notice but I’ve spent three years cataloguing Hawk’s microexpressions the way a linguist catalogues dialects—with obsessive, analytical precision that I pretend is strategic rather than personal.
“Just open it, Vic.”
Vic.
He’s the only person alive who calls me that.
The only person I allow.
I shrug—a gesture designed to communicate indifference that I’m not feeling—and take the box from his hands.
His fingers brush mine during the transfer, calloused tips against my cold knuckles, and the contact sends a flicker of warmth up my wrist that I file away in the same locked compartment where I keep all the other things about Hawk that I refuse to examine.
The ribbon slides free with a whisper of silk against paper.
I lift the lid.
And my entire body goes still.
Not the practiced stillness of combat training or the dissociative stillness of the void. This is something different—something involuntary, something that begins in my chest and radiates outward through every muscle and tendon and nerve until I am completely, devastatingly motionless.
Ballet shoes.
I reach into the tissue paper—my fingers moving with the reverent care I usually reserve for handling bladed weapons—and lift them free.
They’re stunning.
The velvet surface catches the thin bedroom light and transforms it—warm, rich, the particular shade of blush pink that sits at the intersection of elegance and artistry.
I turn them slowly in my hands, my eyes tracing the craftsmanship with the analytical precision of someone who has spent a lifetime in pointe shoes and knows the difference between functional and extraordinary.
These are extraordinary.
The satin ribbons cascade from the shoe’s heel in four perfectly measured lengths, their edges sealed with invisible heat treatment that prevents fraying.
The shank—the rigid spine that supports the arch during pointe work—is exactly the right flexibility for my foot type, which means someone specified the grade when ordering.
The box—the flat, reinforced toe that carries the dancer’s full weight—is shaped for a narrow, high-arched foot.
My foot.
These were made for me.
The brand’s insignia is embossed on the inner sole in gold foil so fine it’s almost invisible—a Parisian atelier whose name I recognize immediately because every serious dancer does.
Their waiting list is eight months long.
Their price point starts at a number that would make most people’s eyes water.
Their shoes are handcrafted in a workshop on the Rue de Rivoli by artisans who have been making ballet footwear for the same families for generations.
You can’t order these online.
You can’t have them shipped.
You have to go to Paris.
“How—”
The word comes out fractured, incomplete, my voice cracking on a single syllable in a way that would humiliate me under normal circumstances.
But nothing about this moment is normal.
My hands are trembling—actually trembling, the fine motor control that keeps me alive in the ring abandoned entirely in favor of some emotion I can’t name because I’ve spent so long avoiding the entire catalog that I’ve lost the vocabulary.
I look up at him, and I know—I know—that something has shifted in my face.
Something that usually stays locked behind the blank, emotionless exterior I present to the world.
Because Hawk’s expression changes when he sees it.
A subtle alteration, the smirk softening into something that isn’t quite a smile but occupies the same emotional territory.
My eyes.
They’re doing the thing.
The thing I can’t control—the involuntary brightening that happens on the rare, catastrophic occasions when an emotion bypasses my defenses and reaches the surface before I can intercept it.
He’s seeing me.
The real me.
And I can’t make it stop.
I try to fathom how he did this. Hawk hasn’t left Savage Knot’s territory in months.
I track his movements the same way he tracks mine—not out of suspicion, but out of the mutual surveillance that passes for trust between two people who’ve seen too much betrayal to accept it in its conventional forms. He hasn’t been to Paris. Hasn’t been anywhere.
Which means he planned this.
Arranged it through contacts, through favors called in, through whatever shadow network he maintains outside these walls.
For me.
He did this for me.
He smirks again—that devastating, infuriating, impossibly warm expression—and rises to his full height.
The motion is fluid, all predatory grace and restless energy, and he looks down at me with those amber eyes that see through every wall I’ve built as if they’re made of glass rather than reinforced steel.
“So you’ll get all up and clean-looking so we can go to school for your dance class, yes?”
My cheeks flush.
Heat blooms across my porcelain-pale skin with the subtlety of a forest fire, and I hate it—hate the involuntary betrayal of it, the way my body announces my internal state to the world without consulting me first. Blushing is for people who still have the capacity for normal emotional responses. I am not one of those people.
And yet.
I look up at him, the shoes cradled against my chest like something fragile and holy, and I don’t have words.
Victoria Sinclair—who has talked her way out of fights, lied her way through identity checks, and delivered a farewell monologue to her dying sister without stuttering—has absolutely no words for the thirty-five-year-old feral Alpha standing in her bedroom in boxers who just gave her Parisian ballet shoes that he has no business knowing she needed and no logical means of acquiring.
He leans down.
Slowly. Deliberately. Giving me every opportunity to pull away, to deflect, to deploy one of the thousand defensive mechanisms I keep loaded and ready for moments exactly like this one.
I don’t pull away.
His lips brush mine—light, impossibly light, a contact so gentle it barely qualifies as a kiss.
More like a whisper that chose skin instead of air as its medium.
Pine and smoke and iron fill my senses completely, and for one suspended heartbeat my void—that vast, echoing emptiness behind my sternum—contracts.
Not fills. Contracts. As if the darkness itself flinches from his proximity.
“Happy birthday, Victoria.”
The words are whispered against my mouth.
We share a look.
It lasts only seconds but carries the weight of years—three years of silent agreements and unspoken truths and the careful, complicated dance of two people who refuse to name what exists between them because naming it would make it real, and real things in Savage Knot are targets.
He pulls back.
The smirk returns—his armor reassembling as efficiently as mine—and he straightens up, crossing his arms over that scarred, magnificent chest with the casual arrogance of a man who knows exactly what he just did to my internal architecture and feels precisely zero remorse about it.
“Now don’t get stabbed again.” His voice shifts to something lighter, the emotional depth of the previous moment folded away and tucked into whatever compartment he keeps his own vulnerabilities in. “Always giving me heart attacks at 3 in the morning, jeez.”
I huff, the sound escaping my nose with the indignation of someone who has been emotionally ambushed and is now scrambling to rebuild their defenses before the invader notices how thoroughly they were breached.
“You could have just let me die.”