He pulls back.
The smirk returns—his armor reassembling as efficiently as mine—and he straightens up, crossing his arms over that scarred, magnificent chest with the casual arrogance of a man who knows exactly what he just did to my internal architecture and feels precisely zero remorse about it.
“Now don’t get stabbed again.” His voice shifts to something lighter, the emotional depth of the previous moment folded away and tucked into whatever compartment he keeps his own vulnerabilities in. “Always giving me heart attacks at 3 in the morning, jeez.”
I huff, the sound escaping my nose with the indignation of someone who has been emotionally ambushed and is now scrambling to rebuild their defenses before the invader notices how thoroughly they were breached.
“You could have just let me die.”
The words come out lighter than I mean them to.
Or maybe exactly as light as I mean them to.
The line between joke and confession has been blurry for years.
He laughs—a real laugh, the kind that reaches his amber eyes and transforms his entire face from something predatory into something almost boyish, a ghost of whoever Hawthorne Kennedy was before the world sharpened him into the weapon he is now.
“Where’s the fun in that, Precious?”
Precious.
The nickname he gave me that I’ve never asked him to stop using.
The one I pretend I hate.
The one I would miss with every atom of my being if he stopped.
He leaves.
The doorway is empty. His footsteps pad down the short hallway toward the kitchen, and I hear the click of the stove igniting, the rattle of a pan being placed on a burner, the quiet, domestic sounds of a feral Alpha making breakfast in the kitchen of a condemned townhome in the forest of the cruelest sector of Knot Academy.
Surreal doesn’t begin to cover it.
I look down at the ballet shoes in my hands.
The velvet surface is warm from my touch now, the blush pink deepening slightly where my fingers grip the fabric. The ribbons spill over my knuckles in elegant cascades, catching light, shimmering with the subtle iridescence of material that was made to be seen on a stage under spotlights by an audience that gasps at beautiful things.
My birthday.
I’m twenty-seven today.
The number settles over me like a second skin—unfamiliar, slightly too tight, not entirely welcome. Twenty-seven. An age that Vivian never reached and never will, because I made sure of that on a cliff five years ago with a kick and a prayer anda cigarette smoked in the rain while the ocean digested the evidence.
Twenty-seven.
Vivian died at twenty-two.
I’ve now lived five years longer than my twin.
Five years of extra time that I didn’t ask for and don’t know what to do with.
A smile touches my lips.
Small. Uncertain. The expression of someone who has forgotten the muscle memory of genuine happiness and is rediscovering it the way you rediscover a language you haven’t spoken since childhood—haltingly, imperfectly, with long pauses where fluency used to live.
I want to cry.
Not from sadness—from the confusing, overwhelming collision of emotions that the shoes and the kiss and the whispered birthday greeting have triggered in a system that was not designed to process this volume of feeling after years of deliberate emotional starvation. My throat tightens. My eyes burn. The machinery of tears engages somewhere behind my sinuses.
