Chapter 14 The Longest Omega
The Longest Omega
~VICTORIA~
The shower was hot enough to leave my skin flushed.
Not warm. Not the moderate, responsible temperature that people with functioning thermoregulatory systems select when they step under running water and allow the heat to do its ordinary work of cleaning and relaxation.
Hot. The kind of hot that turns the bathroom into a steam chamber and leaves the mirror fogged from edge to edge and makes the tile beneath my bare feet feel like sun-warmed stone.
I crank it to the upper limit every time because my body runs cold the way other people’s run warm—chronically, constitutionally, a baseline temperature that sits several degrees below normal and converts every ambient environment into something my skin interprets as an ice bath.
Hawk says I’m part reptile.
I told him reptiles are more dangerous than people give them credit for.
He said that was his point.
I step out of the steam and into the bedroom’s cooler air, and the temperature differential hits my damp skin with the immediate, punishing efficiency of a world that does not accommodate my particular biology.
Goosebumps. The involuntary response cascading across my arms and shoulders and the exposed planes of my stomach before I can close the bathroom door and trap whatever residual heat the shower left behind.
I dress quickly.
Black tights—high-waisted, fitted, the thick-knit variety that provides a marginal thermal layer while allowing full range of motion through the hips and legs.
A tank top—also black, ribbed cotton, simple.
The clothing is functional rather than decorative, selected for the same criteria that govern every material choice in my life: can I move in it, can I fight in it, does it make me invisible. The answers are yes, yes, and mostly.
I leave my hair down.
It falls past my shoulders in damp strands—the dark blue and its pale highlights darkened further by water, the weight of it heavy against my neck and the tops of my shoulder blades.
The sensation is one of the few physical experiences I register without effort—the cool, wet press of hair against skin, the particular way it makes the cold worse while simultaneously providing a curtain of privacy that I value more than the warmth I’m sacrificing.
Hawk would tell me to dry it. I rarely do.
Something about the weight of damp hair feels grounding in a way I’ve never tried to articulate because articulating it would require examining why I need grounding, and that examination leads to places I’ve already visited and chosen not to revisit.
The townhome is quiet.
The particular quiet of a space occupied by one person who doesn’t generate ambient noise—no music, no television, no humming or muttering or the involuntary sounds that most humans produce to fill the silence that their psychology finds uncomfortable.
I don’t find silence uncomfortable. Silence is the void’s native language, and the void and I have been cohabitating long enough that its preferences have become mine, or mine have become its, and the distinction stopped mattering years ago.
The space itself is small. Efficient. A Savage Knot standard-issue residential unit allocated to long-term occupants who have earned—through survival, through utility, through the particular brand of institutional value that Victoria Sinclair provides to an Academy that officially doesn’t acknowledge her existence—the privilege of private quarters rather than communal housing.
Two floors. Narrow. The first floor holds a kitchen area and a sitting room with the vinyl player and the shelf of records and the window that Hawk opens when we smoke and closes when we don’t.
The second floor holds the bedroom, the bathroom, and the closet that contains considerably more tactical equipment than clothing.
The walls are bare. Not intentionally bare—not the curated minimalism of someone who has made an aesthetic decision about negative space.
Bare because decorating requires the assumption that you’ll be here long enough to enjoy the decoration, and that assumption requires a category of optimism that I lost access to somewhere around year three of my residency.
Year three was Vivian.
Year three was the knife and the blood and the particular sound a body makes when it stops being a person and becomes a problem.
I don’t regret it.
I’ve searched for the regret. Looked for it in the places where guilt is supposed to live—the 3 a.m. spaces, the silent moments, the gaps between waking and sleeping where the subconscious supposedly delivers the emotional invoices that the conscious mind refuses to open during business hours.
Nothing.
She tried to destroy me because I was Omega and she was not and the biological lottery that assigned our designations was, in her estimation, a personal insult that required a personal response.
I regret the circumstances.
The designation that made me a target.
The jealousy it produced in a sister who should have been an ally.
The downfall that was built from nothing more than biology and the particular cruelty of a world that converts biological difference into hierarchical ammunition.
I regret all of that.
But the killing itself?
No.
The killing was the only honest thing that happened between us.
I walk downstairs to the kitchen.
The staircase is narrow—steep, wooden, producing a familiar sequence of creaks under my weight that I’ve memorized so thoroughly that I could navigate it blindfolded and identify my position by sound alone.
Third step from the bottom: higher pitch, slight lateral give.
Fifth step: silence, the wood compressed by years of use into a density that absorbs rather than broadcasts.
I catalog these things the way other people catalog furniture arrangements.
The acoustic signature of my environment is a security system that doesn’t require electricity.
The kitchen is small—a galley layout with wooden counters and open shelving and the kind of appliances that function reliably without inspiring affection. I open the refrigerator and take out the wine.
White is my default. Has been since Hawk introduced me to wine at all—a process that involved him arriving at my door with two bottles, one white and one red, and the declaration that “no Omega of mine is going to face the void without at least developing a palate.” The white was crisp, clean, cold—a Sauvignon Blanc that tasted like green apples and the particular mineral sharpness of something grown in soil that doesn’t forgive.
I liked it immediately. It matched the cold I carry. Compatible temperatures.
But Hawk’s been introducing me to red.
Slowly, strategically, with the patient methodology of a man who understands that my palate—like the rest of me—doesn’t accept new things without a period of evaluation and the specific kind of trust that develops when something proves, over time, that it won’t hurt you.
The variations have helped. A Pinot Noir first—light, approachable, the gateway red.
Then a Merlot—softer, rounder, with a depth that my tongue recognized as complexity rather than assault.
Now a Malbec sits on the counter—dark, almost black in the glass, carrying the heavy, ripe fruit and the tannic structure that requires your mouth to work for the pleasure.
I pour a glass. The wine moves like liquid garnet in the low light of the kitchen—thick, viscous, catching the amber glow from the single pendant lamp that serves as the room’s primary illumination.
I take a sip. The tannins grip my tongue with a firmness that I’ve learned to appreciate rather than resist.
Meow!
I pout.
The expression is involuntary—one of the few that the void permits without authorization, a muscular response so deeply embedded in my facial circuitry that it bypasses the emotional embargo entirely and arrives on my lips before the conscious mind can intercept it.
My lower lip extends. My brow softens by a fraction that would be imperceptible to anyone who isn’t Hawk and is, to him, apparently the most endearing thing my face produces.
I turn slowly toward the windowsill.
She’s there.
Ruby.
Sitting on the narrow ledge of the kitchen window with the particular composure of a creature who has navigated the exterior wall of a Savage Knot residential unit—two stories of aged stone and questionable mortar—and considers the achievement unremarkable.
She’s small. A kitten still, technically, though the word kitten suggests a fragility that Ruby has never possessed.
Her fur is pure black—a comprehensive, light-absorbing darkness that makes her nearly invisible against any surface that isn’t white, which in Savage Knot is almost every surface.
The black is complete, uninterrupted, covering every inch of her small frame except for one location.
The scar.
It runs along her left eye—a thin, raised line where the fur refuses to grow back, leaving a strip of exposed skin that has healed to a vivid red against the surrounding black.
It gives her face an asymmetry that most people would call a flaw and that I call a credential.
The scar says she’s been hurt and survived the hurting and carries the evidence without apology.
The scar says she understands the cost of existing in a place that does not accommodate softness.
Ruby.
Named for the scar.
Named for the red that persists against the black.
Her eyes are extraordinary—silver as a base, layered with hints of gold and brown that shift depending on the light and her mood and the angle from which you’re looking, producing an iris composition so unusual that the first time I saw it, through the kitchen window on a night that smelled like rain and loneliness, something behind my sternum moved in a direction I didn’t authorize.
A little survivor.
In this unforgiving Academy.
Just like me.