Chapter 3 Birds Of Prey #2
Not that I’d ever tell her that.
She reaches me and stops, close enough that the warmth radiating from the stove behind me meets the persistent coolness of her skin—that chronic inability to thermoregulate that makes her run cold in every room, every season, every circumstance.
I can see the faint goosebumps on her bare arms, the fine hair rising in response to a temperature her body perpetually finds insufficient.
She’ll never ask for a jacket.
She’d rather freeze.
Which is why I always leave one within reach.
Her hair is in her face.
Those dark blue strands with their threads of pale blue and soft blonde have fallen across her forehead and curtained one eye, and she hasn’t bothered to push them back because Victoria, when she’s like this—freshly woken, still medicated, existing in the liminal space between the void and the present—doesn’t process herself the way she processes the world.
The world gets her sharp, analytical attention. Her own needs barely register.
I reach out and fix it.
My fingers are gentle—gentler than my hands were built for, gentler than anything about me has a right to be.
I tuck the strands behind her ear, letting my fingertips graze the cool shell of cartilage and the softer skin beneath it.
The contact is brief, but I feel the way her body responds—a micro-relaxation, a loosening of some invisible thread that keeps her wound tight enough to snap.
“You’re literally half asleep, aren’t you?”
She sighs.
Long. Slow. The kind of exhale that carries the weight of every morning she’s woken up alive and found the experience disappointing.
“I’m supposed to be recovering,” she mutters, her voice still carrying the husky remnants of sleep and medication. “Not going to dance recitals as if they give a damn about my existence.”
I nod, accepting the truth of it because lying to Victoria is both pointless and insulting.
“True and valid.” I let the agreement hang for a beat before adding, “But you enjoy watching those young Omegas infatuate about you.”
The first-year dancers at the Academy’s recreational studio—the only venue in Savage Knot that permits artistic expression, and only because someone powerful enough to protect it decided it served a purpose.
Victoria teaches there. Unofficially, of course.
Nothing about her existence in Savage Knot is official.
But the young Omegas who attend the classes watch her the way astronomy students watch comets—with breathless, reverent awe at something beautiful that might not come back.
They see what the others don’t.
The grace beneath the emptiness.
The art beneath the survival.
She huffs again—a different huff this time, shorter, the one that means I’ve landed a point she’d prefer I hadn’t.
“Whatever.”
She turns to leave.
My arm catches her.
Not rough—never rough with her, not in the ways that matter—but firm.
My forearm hooks around her waist, the muscle pressing against the curve of her hip just above where the leather gives way to bare skin, and I pull her back into me.
The motion is fluid, practiced, the kind of maneuver that happens between two bodies that have learned each other’s geometry through repetition and urgency and the particular intimacy of keeping someone alive long enough to argue with them in the morning.
Her back meets my chest.
And the contact—the sudden, full-body collision of her coolness against my heat—sends a current through me that starts at the point of contact and radiates outward with the focused intensity of a controlled detonation.
My Alpha biology, already primed by the visual assault of her legs and the leather and the half-asleep vulnerability she wears like a second skin, registers her proximity with a surge of possessive awareness that I feel in my teeth.
Mine.
The word appears unbidden, primitive, from a part of my brain that predates language.
I don’t push it away.
I’ve stopped pretending I don’t mean it.
She pouts.
There it is. That expression. The one that dismantles every defense I’ve built with the efficiency of a precision weapon designed specifically for the structural weak points in my composure.
Her bottom lip pushes forward, the motion so slight it’s barely visible, and her storm-gray eyes lift to meet mine from beneath those dark blue lashes with a look that is equal parts defiance and surrender and something softer that she’d deny to her last breath.
Cute.
Victoria Sinclair—the woman who tortured her twin sister for seventy-two hours and kicked her off a cliff without shedding a tear—is cute.
And I would sooner eat my own fist than say that word out loud in her presence.
My thumb rises to her mouth.
The pad of it—callused, scarred across the knuckle from an old break that never healed correctly—traces the curve of her bottom lip with a slowness that is entirely deliberate.
I feel the softness of her skin against the roughness of mine, the contrast sharp and somehow perfect, and I watch her eyes as I do it—watch the way those storm-gray irises darken at the edges, the cobalt rings contracting as her pupils dilate by the fraction that tells me everything her expression refuses to.
She’s looking up at me.
And behind the practiced blankness, behind the walls and the void and the elaborate emotional architecture of a woman who has turned not-feeling into a survival strategy—I can see her. The real her. Thinking. Processing. Wanting things she’s trained herself to believe she doesn’t deserve.
“Never like to listen to me.” My voice drops lower, rougher, the Alpha register that I don’t always control and don’t always try to. My thumb presses lightly into the plush of her lower lip, feeling the warmth of her breath against my skin. “But love when I feed this mouth of yours, hmm?”
She says nothing.
Stares back up at me with those eyes that try to hide everything she’s thinking and succeed with everyone except me.
The silence stretches between us—not uncomfortable, not awkward, but charged.
Loaded with the specific electromagnetic tension that exists between two people who have been doing this long enough to have developed their own language of unspoken cues and implicit permissions.
I know what she wants.
She knows I know.
And she’s staying here, being that silent, submissive thing she becomes in these moments—not because she lacks the ability to speak, but because her silence is its own form of asking.
Victoria Sinclair doesn’t beg.
She just… stays.
And her staying says more than anyone else’s words ever could.
I want to make her struggle for it.
It’s my default—the impulse to draw things out, to test the edges of her composure, to make the Emotionless Queen show me something behind those fortress walls before I give her what she’s asking for without asking.
The game we play. The push and pull that keeps us both sharp, both engaged, both reminded that the other person is real and present and not another ghost in a world full of them.
But she could have died last night.
The thought sobers me with the efficiency of a bucket of ice water.
That stab wound. The blood on the kitchen floor.
The way I found her slumped against the cabinet at 3 a.m., her skin the color of the walls, her pulse so faint I had to press my ear to her chest to confirm it was still there—and the four seconds of silence before I heard it were the longest four seconds of my life, longer than the silence after my pack was killed, longer than the years of feral isolation that followed.
She could have died.
And I wouldn’t have been there to stop it.
Because she doesn’t listen.
Because she never fucking listens.
I decide to be easy on her.
Today. Just today. Because it’s her birthday and she almost bled out on the floor and those ballet shoes made her eyes do the thing—the involuntary brightening that she can’t control and can’t hide and that I live for in a way that probably says something alarming about the state of my psychology.
I lower my mouth to hers.
Slow. Controlled. Giving her the fraction of a second she always needs to make the choice—to close the remaining distance or pull away, to permit or deny, to stay in the moment or retreat into the safety of the void.
This is non-negotiable for me. No matter the heat between us, no matter the biological imperative screaming through my bloodstream like a Category 5 hurricane through a trailer park—she chooses. Every time. Always.
She doesn’t pull away.
She melts.
The tension that lives in her body like a permanent resident—the coiled, spring-loaded readiness that keeps her muscles engaged and her reflexes primed and her nervous system operating at combat frequency even in the safety of her own home—dissolves.
I feel it happen against my chest, feel her weight shift as the rigid architecture of her posture surrenders to the pressure of my mouth against hers, her spine softening, her shoulders dropping, her center of gravity migrating from self-contained to shared.
She kisses me back.
Not tentatively. Not the careful, analytical kissing of someone managing a transaction.
This is the other Victoria—the one that exists beneath the ice, beneath the void, beneath the five years of practiced numbness.
This Victoria kisses like she’s trying to pull warmth from me through the point of contact, like my mouth is the only source of heat in a world that keeps her perpetually cold.
Her lips. Soft. Insistent. Tasting of the menthol toothpaste she uses and something underneath it that’s entirely her—cold iris and night rain and the faintest trace of sweetness that her suppressants can’t entirely erase.
Omega.
My Omega.
I’ve never been a romantic type.