Chapter 11 Two Peas In A Pod #3
Not just for the freedom. Not just for the clemency and the financial support and the promise of a life beyond these Academy walls that doesn’t end with a bullet or a blade or the particular variety of anonymous death that occurs in the dead forest when someone with a bounty ventures too close to someone with ambition.
No.
The masquerade is where we find him.
Because in the midst of masked individuals, the one who betrayed us will have no choice but to return.
The whispers about the masquerade—the ones that circulate through Savage Knot’s underground channels like smoke through ventilation, fragmented and partially reliable but persistent enough to constitute intelligence—suggest that the ball is more than a ball.
It’s a gathering. A convergence. A night when those who have sold loved ones like stock and enjoyed the clean slate that sale purchased are drawn back into proximity with those they sold—either by obligation, by ego, or by the particular gravity that guilt exerts on people who thought they’d escaped it.
Damien will be there.
Masked. Hidden. Blending among those who’ve done what he’s done and justified it the way he justified it.
But masks don’t change scents.
And we know his scent the way we know our own.
Because at one point, before the betrayal, it was as familiar as breathing.
This was truly a privilege. The chance to attend, the connection to Violet’s network, the invitation itself—each element a door that opened onto a corridor that leads to the room where Damien’s immunity expires.
But the mechanism that grants us entry—the Omega, the bond, the Cinderella-with-a-dose-of-the-unknown arrangement that Violet constructed with the architectural precision of a woman who builds impossible things from improbable materials—
The Omega.
Victoria.
She’s intriguing enough to tickle my interest.
I replay the meeting in my mind—frame by frame, the way I replay every significant encounter, searching for the details that the initial viewing missed and the nuances that only emerge upon review.
Her entrance. The hand-holding. The blank expression that wasn’t blank at all but full of a specific, cultivated nothing that took more effort to maintain than any display of emotion would have.
The brass knuckles on her fingers. The leather jacket that didn’t belong to her but that she wore with the particular ownership of someone who has claimed another person’s possessions as extensions of herself.
She sat next to me.
By choice.
When the safer option was clearly Cassian—my mirror, my complement, the version of me that doesn’t smile with teeth and doesn’t probe with endearments and doesn’t test people’s defenses for the sport of watching them hold.
She chose the dangerous twin.
And when I asked if she was afraid I bite—
Those storm-gray eyes found mine.
Measured me.
And told me she could bite back.
—
I blink.
The cigarette is near my lips.
Cassian’s cigarette. Held between his fingers, extended toward my mouth with the casual precision of a twin who has crossed the room without my noticing because I was deep enough in my own thoughts that my environmental awareness—normally calibrated to detect movement at the periphery with the sensitivity of a system designed for survival—failed to register his approach.
He’s next to me.
Standing close enough that our shoulders nearly touch, his gray-blue eyes studying my face with the particular intensity that he deploys when my silence has lasted long enough to concern him.
We process silence differently: mine is rare and therefore alarming; his is default and therefore expected.
When I go quiet, Cassian investigates. When he goes quiet, I give him space.
He arches an eyebrow.
“When you think too deeply,” he says, his voice carrying the measured cadence of someone delivering an observation that doubles as a diagnostic, “I have to determine if you’re plotting one’s murder or prevail.”
I smirk.
My eyes soften—an involuntary response that I permit only in his presence, the relaxation of the performative sharpness that I maintain in every other social context because sharpness is armor and armor is essential and vulnerability is a luxury that Lucien Marchetti extends to exactly one person on the planet.
My younger copy.
By four minutes.
But four minutes is four minutes, and primacy is primacy, and I will die on this hill.
I put my lips around the cigarette. The paper is warm from his mouth—a sensation so familiar that it doesn’t register as someone else’s warmth but as shared warmth, the thermic equivalent of a language only we speak.
I take a deep inhale, letting the smoke fill my lungs with the practiced patience of someone who doesn’t need the nicotine but appreciates the ritual, and release it in a slow, directed stream aimed away from the fabric samples spread across the worktable.
As if it really matters.
We’ll probably be wearing these samples in rooms that smell considerably worse than secondhand smoke before the week is out.
Cassian takes the cigarette back and returns to his position on the window ledge.
He sits with one leg drawn up, his back against the window frame, crossing his arms over his chest in the particular posture that signals he’s shifted from casual presence to active analysis.
His gray-blue eyes are fixed on the cigarette in his grasp rather than the forest beyond the window—a redirection of focus that tells me he’s processing internally rather than scanning externally.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
The question is open-ended in a way that Cassian’s questions rarely are—usually he asks specific things that require specific answers, because precision is his native tongue and ambiguity is my dialect.
But this question is an invitation. A door left open for me to walk through in whatever direction the thoughts are taking me.
“Aside from our wardrobes and disguises,” I begin, and my voice finds the register that sits between my public performance and my private truth—the frequency that only Cassian gets, the one that carries genuine thought rather than curated amusement, “I’m wondering what’s special about the Omega.”
I turn the name over in my mind like a coin between fingers.
“Victoria Sinclair.”
The syllables are unremarkable on their surface—a first name that carries the weight of monarchy and a surname that suggests lineage without announcing it.
Nothing in the name itself explains the woman who wore it into Violet’s office and stared down a Prime Alpha without blinking and sat next to the dangerous twin and told him she could bite back.
“Simple, common name,” I observe. “You agree?”
Cassian is sitting back on the window ledge, the afternoon light catching the sharp planes of his face and casting shadows that make his features look carved rather than grown.
He stares at the cigarette in his grasp—the ember glowing low now, the paper burning slowly toward his fingers, the smoke thinning as the available material decreases.
I study him.
The act of looking at Cassian has never produced the uncanny-valley discomfort that identical twins reportedly generate in other people.
For me, looking at my brother is like looking at a version of myself that was developed under slightly different atmospheric conditions—the same raw material, processed differently by the minute variations in experience that distinguish one twin from the other.
We share the jawline—sharp, angular, the genetic inheritance of a family whose bone structure has been documented in portrait oil paintings for six generations.
We share the gray-blue eyes, though his carry a steadiness that mine deflect with amusement.
We share the lean, angular frame that makes tailoring a precision exercise and that makes combat a matter of speed rather than force.
Even our styles are similar—similar enough that strangers can’t distinguish between us and acquaintances can only distinguish between us when we want them to.
We both favor the old-money aesthetic that our upbringing installed and our years of deprivation paradoxically reinforced—the particular sartorial language of men who dress as if wealth is an inherited characteristic rather than an acquired condition, which in our case it was, then wasn’t, then was again.
The tailored silhouettes. The conservative palettes.
The fabrics that communicate lineage through thread count.
It makes us look older than our thirties, and we permit this because wealth is justifiable through fashion sense, and quiet money gains silence, and silence gains obedience.
The only visible difference sits on my wrist.
My tattoo—a piece I acquired during the homeless years, inked by a man whose studio was a folding table in a basement that smelled like disinfectant and regret.
It’s small, precise, positioned on the inner surface of my wrist where the veins are visible through pale skin.
An intentional placement. A permanent reminder that the vulnerability it sits atop is both the thing that keeps me alive and the thing that makes me killable.
Cassian, by contrast, is unmarked. Clean.
His skin carries scars from the same history that scarred mine, but no intentional markings—no ink, no adornment, no permanent alterations to the surface that he maintains with the particular care of someone who considers his body a precision instrument and precision instruments don’t come with decorations.
Clean like a virgin when it comes to his delicate flesh.
A fact I’ve teased him about and will continue to tease him about until one of us dies.
“A royal name, to me,” Cassian says.
His voice is quiet—the particular register that he uses when he’s been thinking about something for longer than the conversation suggests and has arrived at an assessment that he trusts enough to share.
His gray-blue eyes lift from the cigarette and meet mine, and the look that passes between us carries the particular information density that only twins can transmit—a full paragraph of analysis compressed into a single, microsecond exchange of gaze.
“Defiant.”
One word. Delivered with the certainty of a verdict.
I smile.
Fully. Teeth showing. The expression that I reserve for moments of genuine delight—not the smirk, not the curated amusement, not the social lubrication that passes for happiness in professional settings.
The real thing. Broad enough to engage the muscles around my eyes, sharp enough to reveal the canines that my Alpha genetics produced with slightly more prominence than average, warm enough to make Cassian’s eyebrow rise by a fraction because he knows this smile and he knows what it means.
It means I’m interested.
Genuinely, dangerously, perhaps stupidly interested.
I chuckle—the sound rich, deliberate, carrying the particular resonance of a man who has just been given information that confirms a hypothesis he’s been developing since a woman with storm-gray eyes sat next to him instead of away from him and told him she could bite back.
“A gilded bird who no longer wants to stay in her cage,” I hum.
The metaphor feels right. Not because she’s fragile—nothing about Victoria Sinclair suggests fragility, from the brass knuckles to the void behind her eyes to the casual mention by Violet Martinez that she’d be the last one standing if a kill squad dropped from the ceiling.
But gilded birds are not fragile. They’re trapped.
The cage is beautiful and the bird is beautiful and the combination of beauty and captivity creates something that is neither free nor broken but suspended between the two states in a tension that can only resolve in one direction.
Out.
Or dead.
No third option.
I let the hum fade into the cedar-scented air, my eyes drifting back to the fabric samples that represent my response to existential crisis—tactical preparation disguised as vanity, the particular Lucien Marchetti method of processing impossible situations by focusing on the elements I can control while the elements I can’t control arrange themselves into patterns I’ll decode when they’re ready.
“The real question,” I say, and my voice finds the register that sits precisely at the intersection of amusement and assessment, the frequency that makes people uncertain whether I’m joking or calculating, which is exactly where I prefer people to be when I’m speaking, “is whether or not that pretty neck will be broken due to collateral, or if she has a surviving chance.”