Annoying.
Every single time.
But the effect is immediate. My heart rate stabilizes—I can feel it recalibrating, the arrhythmic flutter smoothing into something more reliable, more insistent. The edges of my vision sharpen. The fog retreats, not entirely but enough that the cursing above me resolves into individual words I still can’t understand but can now at least register as separate units of increasingly agitated speech.
And then the scent hits.
Wild pine.
Smoke.
Iron.
Hawk.
The recognition floods through me with a warmth that has nothing to do with the injection and everything to do with the way my Omega biology responds to this particular Alpha’s proximity—a response I’ve spent three years trying to analyze, suppress, and ultimately accept as one of the few genuinely inexplicable phenomena in my otherwise ruthlessly logical existence.
His scent infiltrates my nostrils like a trespasser who knows exactly where the security gaps are, bypassing every wall and filter and suppressant in my system to reach the primitive, designation-driven core of my brain that most Omegas learn to manage and I’ve simply learned to ignore.
Most of the time.
The blanket of calm that always accompanies his presence descends over me like something physical—a weight, a pressure, a gravity that pulls the scattered fragments of my consciousness back into alignment. My breathing deepens without my permission. The tension in my shoulders—tension I wasn’t even aware I was carrying—releases by a fraction.
It should be studied, really.
The effect this man has on my nervous system.
Published in some academic journal under a title like “Unexplained Autonomic Regulation in Unbonded Alpha-Omega Proximity: A Case Study in Mutual Stubbornness.”
He’s still cursing. The language resolves slightly—something Eastern European, maybe, or a dialect I haven’t encountered. His hands have moved from my face to my ribs, probing the wound with a clinical precision that contradicts the barely controlled fury in his voice. I feel the pressure of his fingersassessing damage, gauging depth, calculating the same equation I already ran during the walk home.
Not fatal.
I could have told you that.
If my mouth was currently accepting commands from my brain, which it’s not.
I try to speak again. Manage something that might be his name or might just be a vowel sound paired with a consonant that vaguely resembles the letter H. My consciousness is already surrendering—the combination of blood loss, pain medication, and the injection creating a pharmacological trinity that my body has no interest in fighting.
He’s here.
That’s enough.
Hawk. Hawthorne Kennedy. The feral-prone, unbonded Alpha who has no business being in my apartment, no business knowing the security code I change every seventy-two hours, no business injecting me with stabilizing compounds that he acquires from sources he refuses to name and I’ve stopped asking about.
He’s probably the reason I’m still here.
The admission rises through the fading layers of my consciousness with the quiet insistence of a truth that’s been waiting for a vulnerable moment to surface. Not something I’d ever say aloud—I’d rather take another blade to the ribs than give anyone, even Hawk, the ammunition of knowing they matter to me. That knowledge is a weapon in Savage Knot, and I’ve seen what happens when people learn you have something—someone—you’re afraid to lose.
They take it.
They always take it.
But in the dissolving margins of awareness, where the walls I’ve constructed become translucent enough to admit privatetruths, I can acknowledge what I’d never say aloud to his face. He has changed my life. Not with grand gestures or dramatic rescues—though there have been those too, more than I can count on the fingers that are currently going numb from cold and blood loss. But with the smaller things. The consistent things. The way he appears at the edges of my worst moments with medicine and fury and hands that shake not from fear but from the effort of restraining an Alpha instinct that wants to destroy whatever caused the damage he’s treating.
I’m grateful for it.
For him.
