Outside.
Just at the horizon of my sightline. The edge of the visual field that the kitchen window provides—a narrow frame of the compound’s exterior, the pathway that runs along the residential row, the dark shapes of hedgerow and lamppostand the space between buildings where the Academy’s ambient lighting doesn’t fully reach.
Movement.
Subtle. The kind that most people would dismiss as wind-shifted shadow or the normal passage of compound residents moving between buildings at an hour when movement between buildings is common enough to be unremarkable. But I’ve been at Knot Academy for ten-plus years, and in ten-plus years, you develop a visual calibration for the difference between movement that belongs and movement that doesn’t.
This doesn’t belong.
The angle is wrong.
The speed is wrong.
The spacing between the shapes suggests coordination rather than coincidence.
I scoop Ruby.
The motion is smooth—one hand beneath her belly, the other cupping her hindquarters, the lift executed with the gentle efficiency of someone who has practiced this particular extraction enough times that the kitten doesn’t startle. She mews softly—not alarm, just commentary—and settles against my chest with the warm, vibrating compliance of a creature who trusts the hands that hold her.
I close the window.
Slowly. No sudden movements. The latch engages with a soft click that I muffle with my palm, because sound carries in Savage Knot’s evening air and the people producing the wrong-angled, wrong-speed, coordinated movement outside my building are listening for exactly the kind of auditory cue that saysthe target is home and aware.
“You’re going to need to be my sidekick tonight,” I murmur to Ruby, and my voice is the frequency I reserve for her—low, soft, stripped of the flat affect that characterizes my verbaloutput in every other context. “Seeing as you always seem to protect me.”
She mews again. The sound is small, fierce—the vocal equivalent of a creature half a pound heavier than a bag of flour declaring herself ready for combat.
I’ve been at this long enough to know the rules.
The rules of surviving Savage Knot as an Omega who has been hidden within its walls for a decade. The rules of reading movement and calculating threat and converting the information that your eyes and ears and nose provide into a behavioral response calibrated to the specific danger level of the specific situation. The rules of being prey who has studied her predators so thoroughly that the designation has become theoretical rather than functional.
I am prey who knows how to hunt.
And the first rule of prey who hunts is: never keep anything precious where they can find it.
I never truly leave anything valuable in this townhome overnight. The observation would sound odd to most people—who furnishes a home they don’t trust?—but most people don’t live in Savage Knot, and the ones who do either learn this particular lesson early or don’t live long enough to learn it late. I have a stowaway. A secondary location, known only to me and Hawk, where the things that matter are kept in conditions that matter: secure, hidden, inaccessible to anyone whose knowledge of Savage Knot’s infrastructure doesn’t include the specific passage that connects the building’s basement to a maintenance corridor that the Academy’s maps don’t document.
My valuables are there. Such as they are—not much, in the material sense. Documents. A small amount of currency in multiple denominations. A photograph I don’t look at but can’t destroy. And, as of two days ago, the ballet shoes that Hawk gave me for my birthday—because I wasn’t going to lose another pair.Not again. Not when these were chosen by hands that know me and given by a heart that I trust, and trust is a currency so rare in my economy that the objects it purchases become irreplaceable by default.
I move to the closet.
The motion is fluid, unhurried—the pace of someone who has been through this particular sequence enough times that urgency has been replaced by efficiency. I set Ruby on the dresser, where she sits with the patient attention of a creature who understands that the person she’s watching is transitioning from civilian to operational and that her role during this transition is to be small, silent, and out of the way.
I strip off the tank top.
The cold hits my damp skin immediately—a comprehensive reminder that my body temperature is already inadequate and that removing a layer of clothing is working against the thermal deficit rather than toward it. Goosebumps cascade across my stomach and chest, the involuntary response highlighting the tattoo work that covers my sternum—the florals and geometric linework that span from my collarbone to the space between my breasts, the ink appearing darker against skin that’s been paled further by the cold.
I reach for the vest.
It’s hanging in the closet’s back section—not with the clothing but with the equipment, positioned on a hook that places it at the same height as my chest for rapid donning. The vest is discreet—low-profile, designed to be worn under clothing without producing the telltale bulk that standard ballistic protection generates. Matte black. Lightweight composite panels that provide rated protection against handgun rounds while maintaining enough flexibility for the range of motion that my particular combat style requires.
Attached to its exterior is the knife guard—a secondary system of reinforced panels positioned over the kidneys and the lower spine, the areas most vulnerable to blade attacks from behind.
Is it romantic that your feral Alpha bought it for you?
As a gift for amazing sex during my last heat?
I smirk—the expression arriving on my lips as I slide the vest over my head and secure the side straps with the practiced efficiency of a process I’ve performed enough times that my fingers don’t need my eyes to find the closure points.
