It’s my default—the impulse to draw things out, to test the edges of her composure, to make the Emotionless Queen show me something behind those fortress walls before I give her what she’s asking for without asking. The game we play. The push and pull that keeps us both sharp, both engaged, both reminded that the other person is real and present and not another ghost in a world full of them.
But she could have died last night.
The thought sobers me with the efficiency of a bucket of ice water. That stab wound. The blood on the kitchen floor. The way I found her slumped against the cabinet at 3 a.m., her skin the color of the walls, her pulse so faint I had to press my ear to her chest to confirm it was still there—and the four seconds of silence before I heard it were the longest four seconds of my life, longer than the silence after my pack was killed, longer than the years of feral isolation that followed.
She could have died.
And I wouldn’t have been there to stop it.
Because she doesn’t listen.
Because she never fucking listens.
I decide to be easy on her.
Today. Just today. Because it’s her birthday and she almost bled out on the floor and those ballet shoes made her eyes do the thing—the involuntary brightening that she can’t controland can’t hide and that I live for in a way that probably says something alarming about the state of my psychology.
I lower my mouth to hers.
Slow. Controlled. Giving her the fraction of a second she always needs to make the choice—to close the remaining distance or pull away, to permit or deny, to stay in the moment or retreat into the safety of the void. This is non-negotiable for me. No matter the heat between us, no matter the biological imperative screaming through my bloodstream like a Category 5 hurricane through a trailer park—she chooses. Every time. Always.
She doesn’t pull away.
She melts.
The tension that lives in her body like a permanent resident—the coiled, spring-loaded readiness that keeps her muscles engaged and her reflexes primed and her nervous system operating at combat frequency even in the safety of her own home—dissolves. I feel it happen against my chest, feel her weight shift as the rigid architecture of her posture surrenders to the pressure of my mouth against hers, her spine softening, her shoulders dropping, her center of gravity migrating from self-contained to shared.
She kisses me back.
Not tentatively. Not the careful, analytical kissing of someone managing a transaction. This is the other Victoria—the one that exists beneath the ice, beneath the void, beneath the five years of practiced numbness. This Victoria kisses like she’s trying to pull warmth from me through the point of contact, like my mouth is the only source of heat in a world that keeps her perpetually cold.
Her lips. Soft. Insistent. Tasting of the menthol toothpaste she uses and something underneath it that’s entirely her—coldiris and night rain and the faintest trace of sweetness that her suppressants can’t entirely erase.
Omega.
My Omega.
I’ve never been a romantic type.
In thirty-five years of existence, through the years before the massacre when I had a pack and a purpose, through the years after when I had nothing but fury and the grinding determination to not die on someone else’s schedule—I never developed the capacity for the softer arts. Romance requires a belief in continuity, in futures, in the premise that the person you’re holding today will still be there tomorrow. My life has systematically dismantled that premise at every opportunity.
I don’t do tender.
Don’t do affection as a sustained behavior rather than an involuntary lapse.
Don’t do vulnerability outside the specific, controlled confines of physical need.
At least, I didn’t.
Until Victoria.
Maybe it was the story. The lore of it—her lore—that wormed its way into the parts of me I thought were dead and cauterized beyond revival. The twin sister who schemed and manipulated and did everything in her power to erase Victoria from existence so she could claim the Sinclair empire for herself. The cliff. The fall. The years of recovery and reinvention, hiding in the shadows of Knot Academy while the woman wearing her stolen name paraded through elite society like a trophy wife who’d killed her competition.
And then the reckoning.
I watched it. From a distance, through a scope that I’d been using to track Vivian’s movements for weeks before the Forgotten Omegas made their move. I wasn’t supposed to bethere—wasn’t part of their operation, wasn’t invited, wasn’t welcome. But something about the intelligence I’d intercepted, the whispers about a woman in all black with empty eyes and surgical gloves who was going to end a family war in a Russian warehouse at Christmas—something pulled me toward that building the way gravity pulls objects toward the earth. Inevitable. Non-negotiable.
Three days.
