The fact that he’s still functional—still capable of coherent speech, still in possession of his rational faculties, still able to smirk at me in doorways wearing boxers rather than rampaging through Savage Knot’s corridors in a dissociative haze of unchecked Alpha aggression—is something that defies every medical text and behavioral study I’ve ever read on the subject.
Feral Alpha syndrome. The clinical term for what happens when an Alpha of sufficient biological intensity goes too long without a pack bond, without an Omega’s stabilizing presence, without the chemical and emotional anchoring that their designation was neurologically wired to require. The early stages are manageable—heightened aggression, sensory hypersensitivity, periods of emotional volatility. But the later stages are not. Loss of verbal function. Dissociative violence. The complete erosion of the civilized overlay that separates a person from an animal.
Hawk should be there by now.
Years past it, actually.
And yet.
He has his episodes. I’ve seen them—the moments when his amber eyes go flat and distant and the man behind them retreats, leaving behind something older and more dangerous that operates on instinct alone. The first time it happened in my presence, I was genuinely afraid, which is saying something because I pushed my twin sister off a cliff and watched her die without flinching.
But those episodes have become rare.
Remarkably, conspicuously rare.
Ever since we started this.
Whatever this is.
Our arrangement—and I use the word with deliberate clinical distance because calling it anything warmer would imply things I’m not prepared to imply—is mutually beneficial in the way that only two broken people can engineer. I help him with the feral edge. My Omega presence, my scent, the physical intimacy we share when the need becomes too sharp for either of us to ignore—it grounds him. Anchors the rational mind to the surface, prevents the primitive Alpha from drowning the civilized one.
And he helps me with the Heats.
The suppressants I take manage the worst of it—mask the scent, dampen the pheromone output, reduce the biological urgency to a level that doesn’t compromise my ability to function. But they don’t eliminate it entirely. Every few weeks, the hormonal tide surges past the pharmaceutical barriers, and my body becomes a traitor—demanding things I’d rather not need, from a world I’d rather not depend on, with an urgency that makes rational thought feel like trying to swim upstream in a flooded river.
Hawk handles it.
Efficiently.
Thoroughly.
Without asking for anything afterward that I’m not prepared to give.
Which is everything.
It works. For both of us. A transactional intimacy built on survival rather than sentiment, need rather than desire?—
Mostly.
If you ignore the parts that feel like more.
Which I do.
Aggressively.
He rises from the bed, and the sudden absence of his warmth along my side makes me pout again—an involuntary expression that I catch too late to suppress, my lips curving downwardlike a child who’s had a toy removed. The cold rushes in to fill the space he vacated, and I pull the duvet higher around my shoulders with a shiver that has everything to do with my body’s chronic inability to thermoregulate and nothing to do with wanting him to sit back down.
Nothing at all.
Instead of sitting back down, he walks to my closet.
I tilt my head against the headboard, confusion creasing my brow. My closet is not a destination that typically features in our morning interactions. It’s a narrow, utilitarian space that houses my limited wardrobe—functional blacks, combat-appropriate layers, the occasional item of gothic elegance that I wear when Savage Knot’s social obligations require me to pretend I care about aesthetics. Nothing in there that warrants a special trip.
What is he?—
He emerges carrying a box.
Not a large box—roughly the size of a hardcover book, wrapped in matte black paper with clean edges and precise folds that suggest either professional wrapping or the kind of meticulous attention to detail that would be endearing if I permitted myself to be endeared by things. A ribbon sits on top—deep burgundy, tied in a bow that is somehow both masculine in its simplicity and unexpectedly beautiful in its execution.
