When her survival became something that mattered to me—not as a general principle, not as the baseline empathy that most functioning beings extend to other living things, but as something specific. Personal. The kind of mattering that rearranges your priorities without asking permission and installs itself at the top of the hierarchy like it’s always belonged there.
It shouldn’t matter.
I’m thirty-five years old, unbonded, feral-prone, and operating on borrowed time in every measurable sense. My pack is dead—massacred in a politically motivated hit that wasburied by wealth powerful enough to make evidence dissolve and witnesses forget they ever had eyes. I survived because I was away. Because I wasn’t there. Because the universe decided that the cruelest punishment wasn’t dying with them but living without them, carrying the empty space where four bonds used to anchor my neurology like a phantom limb that aches during storms and never stops reminding me of what it was connected to.
A bonded Alpha who loses his pack goes feral.
That’s the medical fact.
The clinical trajectory.
And I should be there by now—should be more animal than man, more instinct than thought, more destruction than function.
And yet.
She’s standing in the kitchen, bare-legged in black leather, half-asleep and probably still bleeding under those bandages, and the feral part of me—the part that claws at the edges of my consciousness during stress, that surfaces in episodes of dissociative violence I can’t always predict or control—isquiet.
Completely, unnervingly quiet.
The way it only ever is when she’s near.
I’m oddly obsessed with her. I can admit that to myself now—have been admitting it, grudgingly and incrementally, for the better part of three years. The obsession isn’t rational. It defies the careful calculations that have kept me alive in a world that would prefer me dead. She’s a liability, technically. An Omega whose very designation makes her a target in Savage Knot’s economy, whose survival depends on suppression and disguise and the constant, exhausting performance of being something she’s not. Attaching myself to her is strategically indefensible.
And I did it anyway.
Because I know the skeletons in her closet.
Just like she knows mine.
And neither of us has flinched.
“You’re going to get cold without stockings.”
The words come out steadier than the internal monologue preceding them would suggest. I’ve had years of practice separating what I feel from what I express—it’s a survival skill, not unlike Victoria’s own emotional fortress, though mine is built from different materials and guarded by different demons.
She huffs.
That sharp, nasal exhale that communicates more than most people’s dissertations. I’ve become fluent in Victoria’s huffs the way a meteorologist becomes fluent in barometric pressure—reading the subtle variations in tone, velocity, and nostril involvement to determine the current emotional forecast.
This one translates roughly to:I heard you and you’re right but I’d rather be stabbed again than acknowledge it.
“I don’t want to listen to you,” she says.
I chuckle, turning back to rescue the eggs before they cross the threshold from overcooked to inedible. The spatula scrapes against the skillet’s surface, and I plate them alongside the toast that is, admittedly, darker than intended but not unsalvageable.
“You never want to listen to me.” I set the plate on the counter and lean against the opposite surface, crossing my arms. “Like how I said don’t go outside last night because it’s been vicious out there lately. Sector Three had two kills in the ring this week alone. The enforcers are agitated. The lower tiers are scrambling for ration cards. It’s not a time for midnight strolls.”
I fix her with a look that I know she’ll see straight through but deliver anyway.
“But where did you go?”
She stares at me.
Blankly.
Those storm-gray eyes meeting mine with the vast, impenetrable nothing that she’s perfected into an art form. No guilt. No defiance. No sheepish acknowledgment that she walked directly into danger approximately four hours after I specifically told her not to. Just... flatness. The emotional equivalent of a dial tone.
I wait.
