Chapter 5 #2
The clock is ticking. I know this with the same certainty I know the auditorium’s acoustic profile and the precise angle of light through the eastern windows at 2 p.m. The administration will reach a threshold—some arbitrary bureaucratic trigger tied to budget cycles or enrollment quotas or the particular mood of whoever reviews the roster each semester—and I’ll be expelled.
Dismissed. Pushed out of the only protected environment available to an unclaimed Omega and into the world outside these walls, where mateless women of my designation are commodities to be traded, placed, or disposed of according to the preferences of people who view us as assets rather than humans.
Alternative placement.
Laboratory services.
The nighttime auctions.
Pretty words for ugly fates.
Or maybe they’ll just get tired of me.
Tired of the Omega who refuses to play the game the way it’s meant to be played, who won’t kneel for the matchmaking advisors or perform gratitude for the privilege of being included in the selection pool.
Tired of the woman who has somehow avoided fulfilling the hidden mandate woven into Knot Academy’s foundation—that matchmaking service for the most cunning, unhinged Omegas and the most dangerous, devoted Alphas that masquerades as an educational institution.
A smirk pulls at the corner of my mouth—a tiny, private expression that the girls across the stage can’t see from their vantage point.
Matchmaking service.
What a polite way to describe a system that pairs psychopaths with their soulmates and calls it curriculum.
I transition out of the split with controlled precision, my core engaging to lift my torso from the floor while my legs maintain their extended position.
The motion requires coordination between muscle groups that are currently operating at maybe seventy percent capacity—the stab wound siphoning energy from movements that should be effortless—but I execute it cleanly, without visible strain, because visible strain is weakness and weakness in Savage Knot is an invitation.
I look around the auditorium.
Not with obvious surveillance—with the casual, half-lidded assessment that I’ve perfected over five years of existing in spaces where every glance carries potential consequences.
My chin tilts slightly, my storm-gray eyes scanning the tiered seating, the rigging overhead, the entrances and exits, cataloguing changes since my last visit three days ago.
Stage door: closed, unguarded.
Emergency exits: two, both on the western wall, push-bar mechanisms.
Windows: eastern wall, high, non-operational, sealed for climate control.
Seating: empty.
Almost.
My eyes catch him in the top corner of the auditorium.
Mezzanine level, last row, far left—the seat with the worst sightline to the stage but the best sightline to every entrance in the building.
He’s sitting with one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, his posture deceptively relaxed, a worn paperback held open in one hand with the casual grip of someone who appears to be reading but is actually monitoring every movement within a two-hundred-foot radius through peripheral vision alone.
Hawk.
Sitting there like he has absolutely nothing else to do with his afternoon but occupy a seat in a dance auditorium and pretend to read.
Supporting me.
Without being asked.
Without making a production of it.
Just… present.
The book in his hand is another romance novel.
I know this because Hawk’s reading habits follow a pattern so consistent it’s practically a personality trait—he devours them the way some people devour true crime or political thrillers, consuming stories about enemies who fall in love and lovers who become enemies with the same analytical intensity he applies to tracking threats and memorizing escape routes.
Stupid romantic novels.
With their enemies-to-lovers bickering that’s better written than anything our lives could ever produce.
Though ours comes with actual knives and actual near-death experiences, so there’s that.
The funny thing is that no one notices him.
Not the young Omegas who chatter and giggle and cluster in their social formations like schools of fish finding safety in numbers.
Not the staff who pass through the auditorium on their rounds.
He just… blends. Disappears into the environment the way predators are designed to—not through absence but through stillness, through becoming so fundamentally part of the background that the eye slides over him without registering a presence.
A storm that wandered into a palace and learned to look like wallpaper.
Impressive, really.
If also slightly unnerving when you remember what lives beneath the stillness.
I begin stretching my arms—extending them overhead, fingers interlaced, pulling the long muscles of my sides and shoulders into elongation.
The motion lifts the hem of my bodysuit slightly, and I feel the cool auditorium air against the thin strip of skin exposed above the waistband of my dark sparkling stockings.
Cold.
Always cold.
At least Hawk’s jacket is draped over my bag by the barre.
The man is a walking thermostat for my defective biology.
The auditorium door opens.
Miss Renard enters with the brisk efficiency of a woman who has been teaching dance in Savage Knot long enough to have developed a permanent furrow between her brows and the kind of posture that suggests her spine is held together by discipline rather than calcium.
She’s small—five foot four in her character shoes—with close-cropped silver hair and eyes that could strip lacquer from a stage floor.
A former dancer herself, though the years and the particular demands of existing within Knot Academy’s ecosystem have traded her performance career for a teaching one.
“Ladies.” Her voice carries the particular authority of someone who has been ignored too many times to waste energy on pleasantries. “You should perform your best today because we have a visitor.”
The chatter among the younger Omegas shifts frequency—curiosity replacing mockery, self-interest replacing cruelty with the speed that only the truly young can manage.
“You should know Violet Martinez, yes?”
The auditorium erupts.
Squeals. Actual, high-pitched squeals that bounce off the wooden panels and the tiered seating and the cracked warmup mirror with the acoustic fidelity of a room designed to amplify sound.
The younger Omegas cluster together in a formation that resembles a beehive experiencing an electrical surge—bodies pressing close, hands gripping arms, eyes widening with the particular luminosity of genuine excitement.
“Violet Martinez!”
“The Violet Martinez?”
“Chairman of the International Alliance of Contemporary Dance Excellence?”
The titles spill from their lips with the reverent cadence of a litany—each one spoken as though the syllables themselves carry weight and significance beyond their phonetic value.
They list her achievements with the breathless enthusiasm of fans reciting the stats of their favorite athlete, tripping over each other’s words in their eagerness to demonstrate knowledge that, in Knot Academy’s economy, translates directly to social currency.
Violet Martinez.
I correct my posture—a micro-adjustment of my spine, squaring my shoulders, re-engaging the core muscles that had begun to relax during the stretch—and listen without participating.
My expression remains neutral. The void holds steady behind my eyes while, beneath it, in the spaces I don’t advertise, something that might be recognition stirs.
Violet.
Chairman of the International Alliance of Contemporary Dance Excellence.
A title for glamor.
CEO of the Forgotten Omegas initiative.
The title that actually matters.
The girls don’t know that part. They know the public version—the trailblazing dancer who made history, the connected powerhouse who has placed more Omegas in elite programs like Juilliard than any other single figure in the Academy’s history.
They don’t know about the sisterhood that operates beneath the surface.
The network of Forgotten Omegas who found their vengeance through Violet’s organization and emerged from the other side with packs that were equally forged in darkness.
“Oh my god, remember Elizabeth Abercrombie from Hard Knot?”
The name sends a ripple through me that the void absorbs before it reaches the surface.
“Yes! And Jessica from Dead Knot!”
“Seraphine from Ruthless Knot too!”
“They all got their happy ever afters. Like, actual happy endings. Packs and everything.”
The girls’ voices overlap in a cascade of admiration and aspiration, each name spoken like a talisman against the fear that lives in every unclaimed Omega’s chest—the fear that they won’t be chosen, won’t be wanted, won’t escape the system before it consumes them.
Happy ever afters.
What a convenient summary of the blood-soaked, trauma-woven, knife-edged journeys those women actually walked.
Elizabeth, who was raped and nearly killed and spent five years pretending to be nobody while building an empire of revenge beneath the surface of a dance scholarship.
Jessica, who was left for dead by six Alphas and reconstructed herself into something lethal enough to make them regret leaving a witness.
Seraphine, with her counting and her precision and the quiet, devastating strength that most people mistook for fragility until they learned the hard way that it wasn’t.
Happy ever afters.
Sure.
If you skip the parts where they almost died getting there.
“If we impress her, surely she can do the same for us!”
The optimism in the statement is so pure, so uncontaminated by experience, that it lands in my chest like a physical object—something small and hard and achingly familiar, a reminder of a version of myself that believed effort and talent were sufficient currency for survival.
They’re not.