Chapter 2 Twenty-Seven #2
It’s an infuriating expression—that particular curl of his lips that manages to communicate amusement, challenge, and something warmer beneath the surface that he’d deny if you were foolish enough to name it out loud.
He pushes off the doorframe with a fluidity that shouldn’t be possible for a man his size, his movements carrying that restless, animal-like awareness that never fully switches off even in safe spaces.
“We going to class, or what?”
I groan.
The sound is more dramatic than strictly necessary, and I let it carry as I collapse backward onto the mattress, the impact sending a fresh ripple of pain through my bandaged ribs that I ignore with the practiced efficiency of someone who treats physical discomfort as background noise.
“Fuck off.”
He chuckles—a low, rough sound that vibrates through the small bedroom and settles somewhere in the pit of my stomach where I refuse to examine it too closely.
It’s one of Hawk’s more dangerous qualities, that laugh.
It makes him sound human. Makes him sound like someone who knows how to enjoy things, which is an ability I’ve always envied in people and never figured out how to replicate in myself.
“Don’t you have a ballet thing today?”
I lift my head from the pillow.
The motion is instinctive—a reflex triggered by the one word in his sentence that still has the power to bypass every defense system I’ve constructed.
Ballet. The single thread connecting me to a version of Victoria Sinclair that existed before the cliff, before the revenge, before the void took up permanent residence where my personality used to live.
The version that could spend hours at a barre and feel something other than emptiness.
The version whose body was an instrument of beauty rather than a catalogue of damage.
That Victoria is dead.
This Victoria dances anyway.
Because the body remembers what the heart has forgotten.
“Just so you know, I lost my ballet shoes,” I say, letting my head drop back onto the pillow with a soft thud. The admission comes out flat, stripped of the disappointment it probably deserves. “And I don’t have the means to go buy new ones, so. It’s all good.”
It’s not all good.
It’s nowhere in the vicinity of good.
But saying that out loud would require acknowledging that something matters to me, and I’ve made a career out of ensuring that nothing does.
I stare at the ceiling. The crack has migrated another centimeter since the last time I lay here cataloguing its progress.
The light fixture—a basic overhead dome that came with the unit—has a dead insect trapped inside the frosted glass cover that’s been there since I moved in. I’ve named it Gerald.
Gerald and I have a lot in common.
Trapped in a glass enclosure, dead but still technically present.
Hawk sighs.
It’s a specific sigh—the one he reserves for moments when my particular brand of passive nihilism collides with his particular brand of stubborn investment in my continued existence.
I hear his weight shift, the soft pad of bare feet on hardwood, and then the mattress dips beside me as he settles onto the edge of the bed.
His proximity rearranges the air. Wild pine and smoke and iron filter through the residual fog of sleep and medication, and my Omega biology responds the way it always does to his presence—a subtle unclenching, a loosening of the invisible fist that keeps my muscles in a state of perpetual readiness.
My left leg, which has been tapping unconsciously against the mattress—a nervous habit I developed after the fall damaged the nerve pathways from my hip to my knee, the reduced sensation making it the designated outlet for anxiety I refuse to acknowledge—stills at the edges of his warmth.
“If you get up and ready,” he says, his voice pitched low enough to be felt as much as heard, “I’ll feed you. And enhance your mood.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
Not the hollow, echoing thing from last night on the kitchen floor. This one is small but genuine—a sound that surprises me as much as it probably surprises him, emerging from whatever locked compartment inside my chest still remembers how to produce it.
“Unless you’re fucking me,” I say, my eyes still fixed on the ceiling, on Gerald, on anything that isn’t Hawk’s face because looking at him when I laugh tends to make me feel things and I’ve used up my emotional quota for the week, “you can fuck off.”
His turn to chuckle.
The sound is lower this time, rougher, carrying an undertone that shifts the temperature in the room by several degrees in a direction my damaged body has no business responding to but responds to anyway because biology doesn’t care about logic or self-preservation or the elaborate emotional fortifications I’ve spent five years constructing.
“Well,” he says, and I can hear the smirk without looking. “We could have time for a quickie.”
I consider this.
Genuinely consider it, the way a strategist considers a battlefield proposition—weighing variables, calculating risk, assessing the potential return on investment against the cost of physical exertion with a freshly bandaged stab wound.
My body, despite its current state of disrepair, votes yes with an enthusiasm that borders on treason against my higher cognitive functions.
I sit up.
The pain sings through my ribs again, but I ignore it with the ease of long practice, propping myself against the headboard and fixing Hawk with a side-eye that I’ve been told—by him, specifically, on multiple occasions—could strip paint off a wall at thirty paces.
He chuckles again, amber eyes glinting with the kind of warmth that would be devastating if I let myself dwell on it, which I won’t, because dwelling leads to attachment and attachment leads to vulnerability and vulnerability in Savage Knot leads to a very specific, very permanent kind of ending.
“Never refuse sex, huh?” he teases, and the easy familiarity in his tone is both comforting and dangerous in equal measure.
I huff—a sharp exhale through my nose that communicates exactly what I think about his observation without wasting actual words on it.
“Omegas have needs, in case you forgot,” I shoot back, adjusting my position against the headboard with a wince I can’t entirely suppress. “Mr. Feral Alpha.”
The title is delivered with the particular blend of affection and accusation that characterizes most of our verbal exchanges. Playful on the surface. Loaded with unspoken truths underneath.
Because Hawk is a feral-prone Alpha.
An unbonded one.
At thirty-five.
The fact that he’s still functional—still capable of coherent speech, still in possession of his rational faculties, still able to smirk at me in doorways wearing boxers rather than rampaging through Savage Knot’s corridors in a dissociative haze of unchecked Alpha aggression—is something that defies every medical text and behavioral study I’ve ever read on the subject.
Feral Alpha syndrome. The clinical term for what happens when an Alpha of sufficient biological intensity goes too long without a pack bond, without an Omega’s stabilizing presence, without the chemical and emotional anchoring that their designation was neurologically wired to require.
The early stages are manageable—heightened aggression, sensory hypersensitivity, periods of emotional volatility.
But the later stages are not. Loss of verbal function.
Dissociative violence. The complete erosion of the civilized overlay that separates a person from an animal.
Hawk should be there by now.
Years past it, actually.
And yet.
He has his episodes. I’ve seen them—the moments when his amber eyes go flat and distant and the man behind them retreats, leaving behind something older and more dangerous that operates on instinct alone.
The first time it happened in my presence, I was genuinely afraid, which is saying something because I pushed my twin sister off a cliff and watched her die without flinching.
But those episodes have become rare.
Remarkably, conspicuously rare.
Ever since we started this.
Whatever this is.
Our arrangement—and I use the word with deliberate clinical distance because calling it anything warmer would imply things I’m not prepared to imply—is mutually beneficial in the way that only two broken people can engineer.
I help him with the feral edge. My Omega presence, my scent, the physical intimacy we share when the need becomes too sharp for either of us to ignore—it grounds him.
Anchors the rational mind to the surface, prevents the primitive Alpha from drowning the civilized one.
And he helps me with the Heats.
The suppressants I take manage the worst of it—mask the scent, dampen the pheromone output, reduce the biological urgency to a level that doesn’t compromise my ability to function.
But they don’t eliminate it entirely. Every few weeks, the hormonal tide surges past the pharmaceutical barriers, and my body becomes a traitor—demanding things I’d rather not need, from a world I’d rather not depend on, with an urgency that makes rational thought feel like trying to swim upstream in a flooded river.
Hawk handles it.
Efficiently.
Thoroughly.
Without asking for anything afterward that I’m not prepared to give.
Which is everything.
It works. For both of us. A transactional intimacy built on survival rather than sentiment, need rather than desire—
Mostly.
If you ignore the parts that feel like more.
Which I do.
Aggressively.