Even if gratitude is another emotion I’ve filed under “things Victoria Sinclair doesn’t express” alongside joy, vulnerability, and the quiet, desperate wanting that surfaces in the moments between sleep and waking when my defenses are at their lowest.
Without him, I doubt I’d still be on this rollercoaster.
And I’m not sure if that’s a reason to be thankful or terrified.
The darkness comes.
Not the violent, sudden darkness of a blow to the head or the chemically induced darkness of anesthesia. This is gentler—a gradual dimming, like a stage light being lowered by a careful hand. The kitchen fades. The pain fades. The cold of the floor and the warmth of Hawk’s scent merge into a single, neutral sensation that feels like floating in water whose temperature exactly matches your own.
I don’t fight it.
Fighting requires energy and purpose and the belief that what waits on the other side of consciousness is worth the effort of remaining present for it. Right now, I’m not convinced of any of those things.
I feel myself being lifted.
Arms beneath my knees, behind my shoulders, cradling me against a chest that radiates the kind of heat my body has been desperate for since I hit the floor. Pine and smoke and iron envelope me completely, and for a suspended, weightless moment, I am not Victoria Sinclair—not the twin, not the survivor, not the monster, not the Omega hiding in the carcass of a condemned townhome in the forest of the cruelest sector of the cruelest academy in existence.
I am simply held.
Like a princess.
The thought almost makes me smile, but my facial muscles have already surrendered to the darkness alongside everything else.
I can only hope to wake to another misery of life.
This is my earned suffering. The consequence of vengeance.
But is it the end of my wrath?
The darkness swallows the question whole, taking me with it into a silence so complete it feels like mercy—the only kind I’ve ever been given that I didn’t have to bleed for.
Only death can tame that burning flame that yearns to never go out.
CHAPTER 2
Twenty-Seven
~VICTORIA~
Wet.
That’s the first thing my brain registers before anything else—a damp, cool pressure against my forehead that feels like someone placed a slice of winter directly onto my skin. It seeps into my pores with quiet persistence, drawing the residual heat of fever and blood loss out of me in a slow, steady exchange that my body recognizes before my mind does.
Cloth.
Wet cloth.
Which means someone put it there.
Which means I’m alive.
Again.
Consciousness returns in reluctant stages, like a guest arriving at a party they didn’t want to attend. First the sensation—the cloth, the dull throb beneath my ribs, the scratchy warmth of sheets pulled up to my collarbone. Then sound—the faint hum of the security system in the walls, the distant creak of the townhome’s frame settling against the forest wind, the soft drip of something in the bathroom that I keep meaning to fix and never do.
Because fixing things requires caring about the future.
And the future and I have a complicated relationship.
