Hawk got it for me.
The same way he gets me everything—with a precision that reveals how closely he pays attention to the things I don’t say. I never told him I wanted red lipstick. Never mentioned the brand. Never indicated, in any conscious or verbal way, that the application of a specific shade of red to my lips before a specific category of activity constitutes a personal ritual with a significance that I haven’t fully examined and don’t intend to. He justknew. The way he knows when I’m cold before I shiver. The way he knows when the void has pulled me under before I stop breathing. The way he knows that the things I need most are the things I’ll never ask for.
I uncap it.
The wax is smooth, pigmented, applying to my lips with the particular resistance of a high-quality formula that doesn’t slide but deposits. I line my lips with the steady hand of someone who has done this in bathrooms and bedrooms and the backseats of vehicles and the dark corners of buildings where the only mirror available was the blade of a knife. The application is precise—upper lip first, following the bow, then the lower, filling the shape with a color that transforms the flat, neutral line of my mouth into something that communicates.
What it communicates is up for interpretation.
I know what it communicates to me.
War paint.
I look in the mirror.
The woman looking back at me has dark blue hair and storm-gray eyes and red lips and brass knuckles and a kitten in her pocket and a body that was built for ballet and trained for violence and is currently standing in a bedroom at the top of a staircase while people who want her dead fill the floor below.
I watch myself turn it off.
The last traces of warmth that Ruby’s visit generated. The residual softness from the shower. The flicker of something that might have been anticipation when I heard the door breach and my body’s adrenaline system activated for the first time in weeks. All of it—every micro-emotion, every flutter of feeling, every fragment of the human being that Victoria Sinclair might be if circumstances had permitted her to be one—recedes. Retreats behind the void’s perimeter. Drops below the surface of the blank, featureless calm that I wear the way other people wear expressions.
There she goes.
The girl with the feelings.
Gone.
What’s left is what’s always left.
The machine.
The void.
The longest-surviving Omega at Knot Academy, who has outlasted every threat and every predator and every attempt to convert her existence into a past tense through the simple, devastating strategy of having nothing inside her that can be killed.
It’s time to remind them why.
I flex my fingers inside the brass knuckles. The metal tightens against my skin. Ruby shifts in her pocket—a small, warm redistribution of weight that I register as comfort rather than burden.
Footsteps on the stairs.
Multiple. Heavy. Climbing with the speed of people who expect to find their target in the bedroom and are eager to arrive before the target has time to prepare.
Too late.
I’ve been preparing for ten years.
I position myself beside the bedroom door—not in front of it, not behind it, but at the hinge side, where the door’s opening arc will provide a momentary screen between me and whoever enters first. My left leg taps once against the floorboard—the nerve-damaged limb finding its anxious rhythm, the muted percussion that only I can feel—and then goes still.
I exhale.
The breath carries the last of the warmth from my lungs and releases it into the cold bedroom air, where it dissolves like the final trace of something that once mattered.
Hawk will come.
I’m confident of this the way I’m confident of gravity—not because I understand the mechanism but because the evidence is comprehensive and the exceptions are zero. Whatever he’s doing, wherever he is, the moment his phoneregistered the tracker’s alert, his world narrowed to a single coordinate and his body oriented toward it with the particular, feral inevitability of a man whose sanity is architecturally dependent on my continued existence.
He will come hithering.
