Chapter 2 Twenty-Seven #4
The words come out lighter than I mean them to.
Or maybe exactly as light as I mean them to.
The line between joke and confession has been blurry for years.
He laughs—a real laugh, the kind that reaches his amber eyes and transforms his entire face from something predatory into something almost boyish, a ghost of whoever Hawthorne Kennedy was before the world sharpened him into the weapon he is now.
“Where’s the fun in that, Precious?”
Precious.
The nickname he gave me that I’ve never asked him to stop using.
The one I pretend I hate.
The one I would miss with every atom of my being if he stopped.
He leaves.
The doorway is empty. His footsteps pad down the short hallway toward the kitchen, and I hear the click of the stove igniting, the rattle of a pan being placed on a burner, the quiet, domestic sounds of a feral Alpha making breakfast in the kitchen of a condemned townhome in the forest of the cruelest sector of Knot Academy.
Surreal doesn’t begin to cover it.
I look down at the ballet shoes in my hands.
The velvet surface is warm from my touch now, the blush pink deepening slightly where my fingers grip the fabric.
The ribbons spill over my knuckles in elegant cascades, catching light, shimmering with the subtle iridescence of material that was made to be seen on a stage under spotlights by an audience that gasps at beautiful things.
My birthday.
I’m twenty-seven today.
The number settles over me like a second skin—unfamiliar, slightly too tight, not entirely welcome.
Twenty-seven. An age that Vivian never reached and never will, because I made sure of that on a cliff five years ago with a kick and a prayer and a cigarette smoked in the rain while the ocean digested the evidence.
Twenty-seven.
Vivian died at twenty-two.
I’ve now lived five years longer than my twin.
Five years of extra time that I didn’t ask for and don’t know what to do with.
A smile touches my lips.
Small. Uncertain. The expression of someone who has forgotten the muscle memory of genuine happiness and is rediscovering it the way you rediscover a language you haven’t spoken since childhood—haltingly, imperfectly, with long pauses where fluency used to live.
I want to cry.
Not from sadness—from the confusing, overwhelming collision of emotions that the shoes and the kiss and the whispered birthday greeting have triggered in a system that was not designed to process this volume of feeling after years of deliberate emotional starvation.
My throat tightens. My eyes burn. The machinery of tears engages somewhere behind my sinuses.
But nothing comes.
The tears refuse to form. Five years of training them to stay behind the walls has made them too obedient—they sit in their reservoir, present but inaccessible, like water trapped beneath ice too thick to break.
I can feel them there, pressing against the inside of my skull, wanting to fall, and it’s almost worse than actually crying because at least crying provides release.
This is just pressure with no outlet.
The emotional equivalent of a scream with no sound.
I hug the shoes against my chest, the velvet pressing into the oversized t-shirt that smells like Hawk, my bandaged ribs protesting the compression, the cool morning air raising gooseflesh on my bare arms because my body is incapable of staying warm without external assistance and the duvet has slipped to my waist during all of this sitting up and lying down and receiving of devastating gifts from devastating men.
Hawk.
He’s really all I have.
The thought arrives with the quiet certainty of something I’ve always known but rarely allowed myself to articulate.
Elizabeth has her pack—Holmes, Carter, Felix, James, men who would burn empires for her without hesitation.
Jessica has Marcus and his boys. Seraphine has her Alphas who learned to love her the way she needed to be loved.
They walked through the fire of Knot Academy and came out the other side holding hands with people who chose them.
I have Hawk.
One unbonded, feral-prone Alpha who breaks into my apartment at 3 a.m. to inject me with stabilizing compounds and curse in languages I can’t identify and carry me to bed like a princess and leave birthday presents in my closet.
That’s it.
That’s everything.
And somewhere in the deepest, most honest cavity of my chest—below the void, below the emptiness, below the scar tissue and the walls and the practiced indifference—I know with a certainty that borders on prophecy that when one of us goes, the other will follow.
Not from romance. Not from devotion in the way poets describe it.
From something more fundamental. More structural.
Like two pillars holding up the same crumbling roof—remove one, and the other has no purpose.
No weight to bear. No reason to remain standing.
We exist because the other does.
And that is the truest, most terrifying form of solitude I’ve ever known.
Not being alone.
But knowing that your wholeness depends on a single, fragile, breakable person in a world designed to break people.
I look down at the shoes one more time.
Blush pink velvet. Parisian craftsmanship. Ribbons that shimmer like captured light.
A gift from a man who has no business giving gifts.
For a woman who has no business receiving them.
On a birthday that almost didn’t happen.
I don’t know how to feel.
Proud, maybe, that I’ve made it to twenty-seven despite Vivian’s desire to end me at nineteen. Despite the cliff, the fall, the broken spine, the surgeries, the recovery, the years of hiding, the fights, the wounds, the blood on kitchen floors at 3 a.m.
Or maybe tired.
Tired of this life that insists on continuing when I’ve given it every reason to stop.
Proud or tired.
Grateful or exhausted.
Maybe they’re the same thing.
Maybe, at twenty-seven, surviving long enough to feel both is the only birthday gift that matters.
From the kitchen, the sound of sizzling oil and the faint aroma of something cooking drifts down the hallway.
Hawk is humming—low, tuneless, the kind of absent sound a person makes when they think no one is listening.
The domesticity of it is so absurdly at odds with everything else about our existence that it almost makes me laugh again.
Almost.
I press the shoes against my chest one final time, feeling the velvet against my chin, the ribbons threading through my fingers like something alive and gentle, and I close my eyes.
“Happy birthday to me.”