Because the body remembers what the heart has forgotten.
“Just so you know, I lost my ballet shoes,” I say, letting my head drop back onto the pillow with a soft thud. The admission comes out flat, stripped of the disappointment it probably deserves. “And I don’t have the means to go buy new ones, so. It’s all good.”
It’s not all good.
It’s nowhere in the vicinity of good.
But saying that out loud would require acknowledging that something matters to me, and I’ve made a career out of ensuring that nothing does.
I stare at the ceiling. The crack has migrated another centimeter since the last time I lay here cataloguing its progress. The light fixture—a basic overhead dome that came with the unit—has a dead insect trapped inside the frosted glass cover that’s been there since I moved in. I’ve named it Gerald.
Gerald and I have a lot in common.
Trapped in a glass enclosure, dead but still technically present.
Hawk sighs.
It’s a specific sigh—the one he reserves for moments when my particular brand of passive nihilism collides with his particular brand of stubborn investment in my continued existence. I hear his weight shift, the soft pad of bare feet onhardwood, and then the mattress dips beside me as he settles onto the edge of the bed.
His proximity rearranges the air. Wild pine and smoke and iron filter through the residual fog of sleep and medication, and my Omega biology responds the way it always does to his presence—a subtle unclenching, a loosening of the invisible fist that keeps my muscles in a state of perpetual readiness. My left leg, which has been tapping unconsciously against the mattress—a nervous habit I developed after the fall damaged the nerve pathways from my hip to my knee, the reduced sensation making it the designated outlet for anxiety I refuse to acknowledge—stills at the edges of his warmth.
“If you get up and ready,” he says, his voice pitched low enough to be felt as much as heard, “I’ll feed you. And enhance your mood.”
A laugh escapes me before I can stop it.
Not the hollow, echoing thing from last night on the kitchen floor. This one is small but genuine—a sound that surprises me as much as it probably surprises him, emerging from whatever locked compartment inside my chest still remembers how to produce it.
“Unless you’re fucking me,” I say, my eyes still fixed on the ceiling, on Gerald, on anything that isn’t Hawk’s face because looking at him when I laugh tends to make me feel things and I’ve used up my emotional quota for the week, “you can fuck off.”
His turn to chuckle.
The sound is lower this time, rougher, carrying an undertone that shifts the temperature in the room by several degrees in a direction my damaged body has no business responding to but responds to anyway because biology doesn’t care about logic or self-preservation or the elaborate emotional fortifications I’ve spent five years constructing.
“Well,” he says, and I can hear the smirk without looking. “We could have time for a quickie.”
I consider this.
Genuinely consider it, the way a strategist considers a battlefield proposition—weighing variables, calculating risk, assessing the potential return on investment against the cost of physical exertion with a freshly bandaged stab wound. My body, despite its current state of disrepair, votes yes with an enthusiasm that borders on treason against my higher cognitive functions.
I sit up.
The pain sings through my ribs again, but I ignore it with the ease of long practice, propping myself against the headboard and fixing Hawk with a side-eye that I’ve been told—by him, specifically, on multiple occasions—could strip paint off a wall at thirty paces.
He chuckles again, amber eyes glinting with the kind of warmth that would be devastating if I let myself dwell on it, which I won’t, because dwelling leads to attachment and attachment leads to vulnerability and vulnerability in Savage Knot leads to a very specific, very permanent kind of ending.
“Never refuse sex, huh?” he teases, and the easy familiarity in his tone is both comforting and dangerous in equal measure.
I huff—a sharp exhale through my nose that communicates exactly what I think about his observation without wasting actual words on it.
“Omegas have needs, in case you forgot,” I shoot back, adjusting my position against the headboard with a wince I can’t entirely suppress. “Mr. Feral Alpha.”
The title is delivered with the particular blend of affection and accusation that characterizes most of our verbal exchanges. Playful on the surface. Loaded with unspoken truths underneath.
Because Hawk is a feral-prone Alpha.
An unbonded one.
At thirty-five.
