Chapter 2 Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
~VICTORIA~
Wet.
That’s the first thing my brain registers before anything else—a damp, cool pressure against my forehead that feels like someone placed a slice of winter directly onto my skin.
It seeps into my pores with quiet persistence, drawing the residual heat of fever and blood loss out of me in a slow, steady exchange that my body recognizes before my mind does.
Cloth.
Wet cloth.
Which means someone put it there.
Which means I’m alive.
Again.
Consciousness returns in reluctant stages, like a guest arriving at a party they didn’t want to attend.
First the sensation—the cloth, the dull throb beneath my ribs, the scratchy warmth of sheets pulled up to my collarbone.
Then sound—the faint hum of the security system in the walls, the distant creak of the townhome’s frame settling against the forest wind, the soft drip of something in the bathroom that I keep meaning to fix and never do.
Because fixing things requires caring about the future.
And the future and I have a complicated relationship.
I open my eyes.
My bedroom materializes in fragments—the ceiling first, its off-white surface interrupted by the hairline crack I’ve been watching migrate from the north corner toward the light fixture for the past eight months.
Then the walls, painted a gray so pale it’s almost lavender in certain light, though there’s nothing lavender about the life that exists within them.
My blackout curtains are drawn, but the thin seam of light bleeding through the center tells me it’s morning.
Maybe afternoon. Time has a habit of becoming theoretical when you’re unconscious.
The room is familiar in the way a cage becomes familiar to something that’s stopped trying to escape.
Not uncomfortable—I’ve made sure of that.
The bed is the one genuine luxury I permitted myself when I claimed this unit: a queen-sized frame with a memory foam mattress that cost more than three months of ration cards because my spine—rebuilt by surgeons after the cliff, held together by titanium rods and sheer biological spite—demands proper support or punishes me with the kind of pain that makes knife wounds feel recreational.
The sheets are dark gray. Clean, because I wash them religiously despite being indifferent to most forms of domestic maintenance.
Something about sleeping in dirty sheets crosses a line even I won’t cross, as if there’s some final standard of civilized behavior I’m clinging to as proof that I haven’t completely devolved into the feral thing Savage Knot seems determined to make me.
Small mercies.
Small, thread-count-specific mercies.
I’m tucked in.
The observation registers with a specificity that makes something shift uncomfortably behind my sternum.
Not just covered—tucked. The sheets are folded neatly across my chest, the duvet layered on top with the kind of deliberate care that speaks of someone taking the time to arrange fabric around a body rather than simply throwing a blanket over it and calling it done.
The wet cloth on my forehead has been folded into a precise rectangle, its edges aligned with a symmetry that borders on obsessive.
Hawk.
The name settles into my recognition like a key into a lock—smooth, certain, accompanied by the faint ghost of wild pine and smoke and iron that lingers in the fibers of my pillowcase.
He carried me here. Changed my clothes, probably, since I’m no longer wearing the blood-soaked jacket and combat pants from last night.
Instead, I’m in an oversized black t-shirt that smells faintly of cedar laundry detergent and—
His shirt.
I’m wearing his shirt.
I file that information away without emotional commentary, the way I file most things that threaten to breach the walls. Observation noted. Response suppressed. Moving on.
Reluctantly—and I mean that in the fullest, most petulant sense of the word—I work on sitting up.
My body protests immediately. The wound in my side announces itself with a sharp, indignant flare that radiates outward from the bandaged area and wraps around my ribcage like a belt made of heated wire.
My abdominal muscles, which normally cooperate with the basic act of vertical repositioning, have apparently filed a formal complaint with my central nervous system and are refusing to engage without significant persuasion.
I push through it.
Teeth gritted, breath held, core engaged through sheer force of will rather than any functional cooperation from the damaged tissue.
The motion pulls the bandages taut against my ribs—white gauze wrapped in clean, tight spirals from just below my breast line to my hip bone, secured with medical tape that has been applied with the precision of someone who has done this many, many times before.
Because he has.
Because this is our routine.
I bleed. He fixes. I survive. Repeat.
I look down at the bandaging and confirm what I already suspected: the wound is professionally dressed, the gauze clean and dry, which means the bleeding stopped while I was unconscious.
The edges of the tape are smooth, without creases or bubbles, and there’s a faint medicinal scent clinging to the fabric that tells me he applied an antiseptic compound beneath the wrapping.
I pout.
Not a dramatic, performative pout—those are for people who expect an audience.
This is the private kind. The kind that happens involuntarily when you wake up to discover you’ve survived yet another night that your body was quietly hoping might be your last. The kind that sits on your lips like a question you’re too tired to ask.
Another day.
Another twenty-four hours of existing in a world that doesn’t particularly want you in it and that you’re not particularly thrilled to remain a part of.
Joy.
A sigh escapes me—long, slow, carrying the weight of five years of mornings exactly like this one. Different wounds, different nights, same outcome. Victoria Sinclair: persistently, inconveniently, stubbornly alive.
How long was I out?
The light through the curtains suggests several hours at minimum.
My mouth is dry, which means significant dehydration.
The pain medication has worn off completely, replaced by a raw, unfiltered awareness of every inch of damaged tissue that makes me feel like my body is sending me an itemized receipt of last night’s decisions.
“Another day looking dreadful because you’re alive.”
The voice comes from the doorway.
My pout deepens—genuinely deepens, the corners of my mouth pulling down with an almost childlike displeasure that I would never, under any circumstances, display in front of anyone other than the man currently leaning against my doorframe like he was architecturally designed to occupy that exact space.
Hawk.
Hawthorne Kennedy, thirty-five years old, six foot three of unbonded, feral-prone Alpha male who has somehow made “standing in a doorway wearing nothing but boxers” look like it belongs in a gallery exhibition titled Things That Are Objectively Unfair.
I take him in.
Not subtly. Not with the careful, peripheral assessment I employ in Savage Knot’s corridors where every glance is a potential vulnerability.
Here, in the safety of my condemned little sanctuary, I let my eyes do exactly what they want—which is travel the full length of him with the unhurried appreciation of someone admiring a piece of art that also happens to be capable of killing you with its bare hands.
His hair is its usual state of beautiful disaster—dark blonde base threaded with those burnt orange and black highlights that catch the thin bedroom light like singed feathers.
It falls across his forehead in uneven layers that would look unkempt on anyone else but on Hawk simply looks like an aesthetic choice the wind made on his behalf.
His jaw is sharp enough to qualify as a secondary weapon, stubbled with a day’s worth of growth that catches gold in the light seeping through the curtains.
His eyes—predatory amber-gold, always assessing, always calculating threat levels and escape routes even in spaces he considers safe—are fixed on me with that particular blend of exasperation and concern that I’ve come to think of as his default Victoria expression.
Equal parts “you’re an idiot” and “I’m glad you’re breathing.”
But it’s his body that holds my attention longest, because Hawk’s body tells his story more honestly than his words ever will.
The scars.
They traverse his torso like a map of violence—a cartography of survival etched into sun-touched skin that stretches over lean, functional muscle built for speed and endurance rather than display.
Across his collarbone: a jagged line from a blade that came too close.
Along his ribs: parallel marks that speak of claws or serrated edges, healed thick and pale.
Down his left side, disappearing beneath the waistband of his boxers: a burn scar, the edges smooth from medical intervention but the center rough with the texture of flesh that was never meant to repair itself.
I know the ones on his back are worse.
The ones he earned when his pack was massacred and the people responsible decided to leave their signature on the only survivor.
Looking at him—at the scars that mirror my own in their origin if not their geography—is like looking into a reflection that shows you the parts of yourself you work hardest to hide.
We are the same, Hawk and I. Two creatures stripped to their essential components by violence, rebuilt not by love or healing but by sheer biological refusal to stop existing.
Two survivors who never learned how to be anything else.
“Sadly,” I reply, the word carrying enough dry resignation to dehumidify the room.
He smirks.