Chapter 5
Centre Stage
~VICTORIA~
The auditorium smells like rosin and ambition and the faint, chemical sweetness of industrial floor polish that never quite manages to disguise the older, more permanent scent of sweat embedded in the wood.
It’s a particular smell—the kind that settles into the architecture of a space the way memories settle into the architecture of a person, becoming so integrated that removing it would require dismantling the structure entirely.
The main stage stretches thirty feet across, the marley floor a matte black expanse that absorbs light rather than reflecting it, designed to make dancers appear suspended against darkness rather than standing on a surface.
Overhead, the rigging system holds rows of theatrical lights that are currently off, their metal housings cold and dormant, waiting for someone to decide this space deserves illumination.
It rarely does.
Savage Knot doesn’t invest in beauty.
It invests in control.
The auditorium exists because someone powerful enough to protect it decided that artistic expression served a strategic purpose within the Academy’s ecosystem—a pressure valve, perhaps, or a showcase for Omega talent that could be leveraged in negotiations and matchmaking ceremonies.
Whatever the reasoning, the result is this: a single rectangular room with tiered seating for two hundred, a proper sprung stage, and acoustics that someone with actual knowledge designed before the original purpose was buried under layers of bureaucratic indifference.
The seating rises in graduated rows from the orchestra pit to the mezzanine level, upholstered in a dark burgundy velvet that was probably luxurious a decade ago but now bears the wear patterns of bodies that sat in them with varying degrees of interest. The walls are paneled in dark wood—oak, if I had to guess, though the original finish has been dulled by years of neglect into something closer to slate.
High windows along the eastern wall admit columns of natural light that cut through the space at sharp angles, catching dust motes in their beams and making them look like slow-motion snow.
The warmup area is stage left, a section of floor marked by portable barres and a wall-mounted mirror that has a crack running diagonally from the upper right corner to approximately center mass—a flaw I’ve been using as a reference point for my alignment for the past three years.
The crack and I have an understanding.
It stays in its lane. I stay in mine.
I’m in a split.
Full center, my legs extended in a straight line that stretches from the point of my left toe to the point of my right, my hips square to the mirror, my pelvis flush against the cool marley floor.
The position requires a flexibility that took years to develop and daily maintenance to preserve—the muscles of my inner thighs, hip flexors, and hamstrings elongated to their maximum range, the connective tissue warm and pliable from the twenty minutes of progressive stretching I’ve already completed.
My chin rests on the floor.
Both hands grip my left ankle, the fingers wrapped around the joint with the kind of controlled pressure that deepens the stretch incrementally without risking injury.
My breathing is even, measured—four counts in, four counts out—and my core is engaged to protect the spine that was rebuilt with titanium rods and that reminds me of this fact every time I push it beyond what the surgeons said it could do.
The surgeons said a lot of things about what I couldn’t do.
I did all of them.
Spite is an excellent physiotherapist.
The stab wound is a presence beneath the black leather of my bodysuit—a dull, heated awareness on my right side where the bandages press against the damaged tissue with each expansion of my ribcage.
It should probably keep me from doing this.
Any reasonable person with a twenty-four-hour-old knife wound between their fourth and fifth rib would be in bed, or at the very least sitting in a chair doing something less mechanically demanding than a full center split with their chin on the floor.
Reasonable.
A word that has never once appeared in the same sentence as my name without negation.
The pain medication helps. Two pills swallowed dry in the bathroom before Hawk drove me here—his leather jacket draped over my shoulders without being asked because the man has apparently developed a sixth sense for the precise moment my body temperature begins its predictable decline into hypothermic territory.
The numbing herbs he applied to the wound during last night’s patchwork surgery have left a pleasant tingling beneath the gauze that blunts the sharper edges of the pain, reducing it from a scream to a murmur.
Bless his sinful heart.
The soreness from that is another matter entirely.
Not the wound. The other thing. The kitchen table thing.
The thing that happened after the birthday kiss and the bird teasing and the moment he scooped me up and set me on the edge of the table like a meal he’d been starving for.
The sexual tension between Hawk and me never truly ends—it doesn’t resolve or dissipate or reach a satisfying conclusion the way normal tension does.
It simply oscillates. Builds to a peak, releases in a physical collision of considerable intensity, and then immediately begins rebuilding, fed by proximity and near-death experiences and the particular chemistry of an Omega whose suppressants can’t fully mask her scent around the one Alpha who’s learned to read what’s beneath them.
Near-death experiences, specifically, spike it to dangerous levels.
Something about the biological imperative to reproduce when faced with mortality.
Or maybe we’re just fucked up.
Probably the latter.
“Oh my god, she looks like she got hit by a truck.”
The voice comes from stage right, accompanied by the particular pitch of laughter that young women produce when they’ve found something they consider worthy of collective mockery.
High, sharp, travelling in a frequency designed to carry—not whispered, not concealed, delivered with the full-volume confidence of people who have never been given a reason to fear the consequences of cruelty.
The younglings.
I don’t look up.
My chin stays on the floor, my hands stay on my ankle, and my eyes—currently fixed on a point approximately six inches in front of my nose where the marley surface shows a faint scuff mark from someone’s heel—don’t shift.
Not because I’m disciplined, though I am.
Not because I don’t care, which I’d like to claim but can’t entirely prove.
But because reacting to them requires energy, and I’ve allocated today’s limited supply to things that matter.
They don’t matter.
Repeat as needed until the void believes it.
“Did you survive another night of hell?”
More laughter. A different voice this time—lighter, with the practiced sweetness that young Omegas learn to deploy when they want their mockery to appear harmless.
I catalog it without acknowledgment, filing the tone and cadence into the mental database I maintain of every person in this auditorium’s vocal patterns, threat levels, and potential utility.
Old habits.
Survival habits.
“She’s gonna wind up dead. Clearly.”
A third voice, followed by a chorus of giggles that ripples through the warmup area like stones dropped into still water.
I count the voices—six distinct sources, which means the entire cohort of young Omegas currently enrolled in the dance program is present and participating in today’s edition of Let’s Mock the Old One.
Charming.
Original, too.
They’re young. That’s the thing I remind myself of when the comments land with more precision than I’d prefer—not on my pride, which was dismantled years ago and rebuilt into something more utilitarian, but on the quieter, less defended spaces inside me that still remember what it felt like to believe the world was fair.
The youngest is eighteen. A first-year with wide eyes and the particular kind of optimism that Savage Knot hasn’t had time to crush yet.
The oldest among them is twenty-two—still young enough to believe that finding a pack is a matter of effort and merit rather than the complex, often arbitrary calculus of timing, chemistry, and institutional politics that actually governs Knot Academy’s matchmaking apparatus.
By twenty-five, most Omegas have secured their packs.
By twenty-five, the desperation begins to show—the carefully hidden panic in the eyes of women who are approaching the invisible deadline that separates “selectable” from “dismissable.” The administration doesn’t publicize the cutoff.
They don’t need to. Everyone knows. It’s embedded in the culture the way rot is embedded in the walls of my townhome—invisible to newcomers, obvious to anyone who’s been here long enough to learn where to look.
I’m twenty-seven.
As of this morning.
Happy birthday to me, indeed.
My presence in this auditorium at twenty-seven is a mockery of the system’s intended timeline.
A glitch in the matrix. The institutional equivalent of a software error that nobody has bothered to debug because the cost of addressing it exceeds the inconvenience of ignoring it.
I’m the oldest Omega in Savage Knot’s dance program by a margin of five years, which in Knot Academy terms might as well be five decades.
Another form of punishment, I suppose.
Added to the collection.
Right next to “surviving” and “existing” and “waking up on birthdays to discover you’re still inconveniently alive.”