“And she will probably remain the highest on that leaderboard.”
We have nothing to say.
The silence that follows is not the uncomfortable variety—not the silence of people who are at a loss for words. It’s the silence of recalibration. The silence of three men whose understanding of the woman sleeping fifteen feet away has just been rebuilt from the foundation up, and who need a momentfor the new architecture to settle before they can construct responses on top of it.
Hawk looks away. Faces the far wall. Continues.
“Victoria’s sister.” The name he conspicuously does not use. The twin he refers to by relation rather than identity, as though naming her would violate something he considers sacred or contaminate the air in a room that contains the person she betrayed. “She framed Victoria. Orchestrated the entire thing—manufactured evidence, corrupted allies, turned the infrastructure of the Sinclair empire against its rightful heir with the particular, intimate thoroughness that only someone who shares your blood and your secrets and the specific layout of your psychological defenses can achieve.”
Intimate thoroughness.
The phrase hits my ribcage with the force of a fist.
Because that’s what Damien did.
Exactly what he did.
Used the intimacy of a twin bond to map the defenses and then used the map to dismantle them.
“Forced her into isolation against her own empire,” Hawk continues, and each word is heavier than the last, as though the history gains mass with each telling. “Forced her to remain in the shadows until the perfect opportunity arrived. Here. In Knot Academy. Where she’d wait for the right moment to strike.”
He pauses.
“And when she did?—”
The pause extends. The amber lighting holds steady. The silk drapes don’t move.
“—she got the vengeance everyone would want when their sibling betrays them.”
The words sting.
Not metaphorically. The sentence enters my auditory system and produces a physical response—a constriction in my chest,a tightening at the base of my throat, the somatic expression of a truth that applies to me with a specificity that Hawk can’t know about and that I can’t hide from because my body doesn’t consult my composure before reacting to stimuli that hit too close to the bone.
She got the vengeance.
She killed her twin.
The twin who betrayed her.
The way I?—
The way I might have to.
If the masquerade brings Damien within reach.
If the masked gathering that Violet has engineered produces the convergence that the whispers promise.
If I find my brother in a room full of strangers and the opportunity to do what Victoria did to her sister presents itself?—
Will I take it?
Can I take it?
She could.
She did.
And she sleeps peacefully on that bed, which means either she’s made peace with it or the void has absorbed it into the emptiness where everything she can’t process goes to disappear.
