I open my eyes.
My bedroom materializes in fragments—the ceiling first, its off-white surface interrupted by the hairline crack I’ve been watching migrate from the north corner toward the light fixture for the past eight months. Then the walls, painted a gray so pale it’s almost lavender in certain light, though there’s nothing lavender about the life that exists within them. My blackout curtains are drawn, but the thin seam of light bleeding through the center tells me it’s morning. Maybe afternoon. Time has a habit of becoming theoretical when you’re unconscious.
The room is familiar in the way a cage becomes familiar to something that’s stopped trying to escape.
Not uncomfortable—I’ve made sure of that. The bed is the one genuine luxury I permitted myself when I claimed this unit: a queen-sized frame with a memory foam mattress that cost more than three months of ration cards because my spine—rebuilt by surgeons after the cliff, held together by titanium rods and sheer biological spite—demands proper support or punishes me with the kind of pain that makes knife wounds feel recreational.
The sheets are dark gray. Clean, because I wash them religiously despite being indifferent to most forms of domestic maintenance. Something about sleeping in dirty sheets crosses a line even I won’t cross, as if there’s some final standard of civilized behavior I’m clinging to as proof that I haven’t completely devolved into the feral thing Savage Knot seems determined to make me.
Small mercies.
Small, thread-count-specific mercies.
I’m tucked in.
The observation registers with a specificity that makes something shift uncomfortably behind my sternum. Not just covered—tucked. The sheets are folded neatly across my chest, the duvet layered on top with the kind of deliberate care that speaks of someone taking the time to arrange fabric around a body rather than simply throwing a blanket over it and calling it done. The wet cloth on my forehead has been folded into a precise rectangle, its edges aligned with a symmetry that borders on obsessive.
Hawk.
The name settles into my recognition like a key into a lock—smooth, certain, accompanied by the faint ghost of wild pine and smoke and iron that lingers in the fibers of my pillowcase. He carried me here. Changed my clothes, probably, since I’m no longer wearing the blood-soaked jacket and combat pants from last night. Instead, I’m in an oversized black t-shirt that smells faintly of cedar laundry detergent and?—
His shirt.
I’m wearing his shirt.
I file that information away without emotional commentary, the way I file most things that threaten to breach the walls. Observation noted. Response suppressed. Moving on.
Reluctantly—and I mean that in the fullest, most petulant sense of the word—I work on sitting up.
My body protests immediately. The wound in my side announces itself with a sharp, indignant flare that radiates outward from the bandaged area and wraps around my ribcage like a belt made of heated wire. My abdominal muscles, which normally cooperate with the basic act of vertical repositioning, have apparently filed a formal complaint with my central nervous system and are refusing to engage without significant persuasion.
I push through it.
Teeth gritted, breath held, core engaged through sheer force of will rather than any functional cooperation from the damaged tissue. The motion pulls the bandages taut against my ribs—white gauze wrapped in clean, tight spirals from just below my breast line to my hip bone, secured with medical tape that has been applied with the precision of someone who has done this many, many times before.
Because he has.
Because this is our routine.
I bleed. He fixes. I survive. Repeat.
I look down at the bandaging and confirm what I already suspected: the wound is professionally dressed, the gauze clean and dry, which means the bleeding stopped while I was unconscious. The edges of the tape are smooth, without creases or bubbles, and there’s a faint medicinal scent clinging to the fabric that tells me he applied an antiseptic compound beneath the wrapping.
I pout.
Not a dramatic, performative pout—those are for people who expect an audience. This is the private kind. The kind that happens involuntarily when you wake up to discover you’ve survived yet another night that your body was quietly hoping might be your last. The kind that sits on your lips like a question you’re too tired to ask.
Another day.
Another twenty-four hours of existing in a world that doesn’t particularly want you in it and that you’re not particularly thrilled to remain a part of.
Joy.
A sigh escapes me—long, slow, carrying the weight of five years of mornings exactly like this one. Different wounds, different nights, same outcome. Victoria Sinclair: persistently, inconveniently, stubbornly alive.
How long was I out?
The light through the curtains suggests several hours at minimum. My mouth is dry, which means significant dehydration. The pain medication has worn off completely, replaced by a raw, unfiltered awareness of every inch of damaged tissue that makes me feel like my body is sending me an itemized receipt of last night’s decisions.
