“Another day looking dreadful because you’re alive.”
The voice comes from the doorway.
My pout deepens—genuinely deepens, the corners of my mouth pulling down with an almost childlike displeasure that I would never, under any circumstances, display in front of anyone other than the man currently leaning against my doorframe like he was architecturally designed to occupy that exact space.
Hawk.
Hawthorne Kennedy, thirty-five years old, six foot three of unbonded, feral-prone Alpha male who has somehow made “standing in a doorway wearing nothing but boxers” look like it belongs in a gallery exhibition titledThings That Are Objectively Unfair.
I take him in.
Not subtly. Not with the careful, peripheral assessment I employ in Savage Knot’s corridors where every glance is a potential vulnerability. Here, in the safety of my condemned little sanctuary, I let my eyes do exactly what they want—which is travel the full length of him with the unhurried appreciation of someone admiring a piece of art that also happens to be capable of killing you with its bare hands.
His hair is its usual state of beautiful disaster—dark blonde base threaded with those burnt orange and black highlights that catch the thin bedroom light like singed feathers. It falls across his forehead in uneven layers that would look unkempt onanyone else but on Hawk simply looks like an aesthetic choice the wind made on his behalf. His jaw is sharp enough to qualify as a secondary weapon, stubbled with a day’s worth of growth that catches gold in the light seeping through the curtains.
His eyes—predatory amber-gold, always assessing, always calculating threat levels and escape routes even in spaces he considers safe—are fixed on me with that particular blend of exasperation and concern that I’ve come to think of as his default Victoria expression.
Equal parts “you’re an idiot” and “I’m glad you’re breathing.”
But it’s his body that holds my attention longest, because Hawk’s body tells his story more honestly than his words ever will.
The scars.
They traverse his torso like a map of violence—a cartography of survival etched into sun-touched skin that stretches over lean, functional muscle built for speed and endurance rather than display. Across his collarbone: a jagged line from a blade that came too close. Along his ribs: parallel marks that speak of claws or serrated edges, healed thick and pale. Down his left side, disappearing beneath the waistband of his boxers: a burn scar, the edges smooth from medical intervention but the center rough with the texture of flesh that was never meant to repair itself.
I know the ones on his back are worse.
The ones he earned when his pack was massacred and the people responsible decided to leave their signature on the only survivor.
Looking at him—at the scars that mirror my own in their origin if not their geography—is like looking into a reflection that shows you the parts of yourself you work hardest to hide. We are the same, Hawk and I. Two creatures stripped to their essentialcomponents by violence, rebuilt not by love or healing but by sheer biological refusal to stop existing.
Two survivors who never learned how to be anything else.
“Sadly,” I reply, the word carrying enough dry resignation to dehumidify the room.
He smirks.
It’s an infuriating expression—that particular curl of his lips that manages to communicate amusement, challenge, and something warmer beneath the surface that he’d deny if you were foolish enough to name it out loud. He pushes off the doorframe with a fluidity that shouldn’t be possible for a man his size, his movements carrying that restless, animal-like awareness that never fully switches off even in safe spaces.
“We going to class, or what?”
I groan.
The sound is more dramatic than strictly necessary, and I let it carry as I collapse backward onto the mattress, the impact sending a fresh ripple of pain through my bandaged ribs that I ignore with the practiced efficiency of someone who treats physical discomfort as background noise.
“Fuck off.”
He chuckles—a low, rough sound that vibrates through the small bedroom and settles somewhere in the pit of my stomach where I refuse to examine it too closely. It’s one of Hawk’s more dangerous qualities, that laugh. It makes him sound human. Makes him sound like someone who knows how to enjoy things, which is an ability I’ve always envied in people and never figured out how to replicate in myself.
“Don’t you have a ballet thing today?”
I lift my head from the pillow.
The motion is instinctive—a reflex triggered by the one word in his sentence that still has the power to bypass every defense system I’ve constructed.Ballet.The single thread connectingme to a version of Victoria Sinclair that existed before the cliff, before the revenge, before the void took up permanent residence where my personality used to live. The version that could spend hours at a barre and feel something other than emptiness. The version whose body was an instrument of beauty rather than a catalogue of damage.
That Victoria is dead.
This Victoria dances anyway.
