Three nights.
Seventy-two hours of systematic deconstruction that I observed from my perch in the adjacent building, my scope trained on the windows, watching Victoria work with the clinical precision of a surgeon and the patience of a predator that knows its prey has nowhere left to run. Each cut measured. Each wound deliberate. No wasted movement. No emotional expenditure that wasn’t immediately recouped by the cold, focused clarity in those storm-gray eyes.
She never flinched.
Not once.
Not when Vivian screamed.
Not when the screaming stopped.
Not when there was nothing left to scream with.
And on the cliff—that desolated outcropping above the black ocean—I watched from a ridge three hundred meters away as she stood before the chair, delivered her final words to the ruined thing that used to be her sister, and kicked it over the edge with a force that was neither excessive nor insufficient. Precise. The way everything about her is precise.
The chair crashing into the rocky waves made more noise than Vivian’s last breath.
It should have been morally wrong to witness.
Repulsive. Horrifying. The kind of act that makes you question the fundamental nature of a person’s soul.
Instead, it was the day I knew.
Not love. I don’t have the architecture for that word—not yet, maybe not ever. But something adjacent. Something with the same gravitational pull and the same terrifying permanence. The moment I watched her light that cigarette in the rain, standing on the edge of a cliff with her sister’s blood still under her nails and absolutely nothing behind her eyes, I wanted to imprint on this woman.
Wanted to make her mine.
To be the thing that stood between her emptiness and the void’s final claim.
How dare I say I fell for this Omega.
And yet.
Here we are.
The kiss deepens.
What began as gentle—my concession to her birthday, to the stab wound, to the fragility I’ll never insult her by naming aloud—shifts into something with teeth. My hands find her hips, fingers spreading wide over the leather, gripping with a pressure that walks the precise line between possession and restraint. I pull her against my front, and the contact is a detonation—her body against mine, the subtle curves of her pressed into the hard planes of me, her coolness meeting my heat in a thermodynamic exchange that turns the kitchen air heavy with the scent of arousal.
My groin presses against hers.
The hardness of me—already half-mast from the moment she walked in wearing that bodysuit, already straining against the thin cotton of my boxers with an urgency that has nothing to do with feral instinct and everything to do with this specific woman—grinds against the junction of her thighs through the leather, and the friction draws a gasp from her lips that breaks the kiss.
She pulls back.
Only inches. Her mouth is parted, her breathing disrupted from its usual controlled rhythm, and that porcelain skin is flushed with color that starts at her cheeks and spreads downward toward her throat. Her eyes are different now—the practiced emptiness cracked open, the storm-gray darkened to something closer to thundercloud, the cobalt rings nearly invisible as her pupils expand.
There she is.
Behind the walls.
My girl.
I smirk, and I know it’s dangerous—know that the expression on my face right now is the one that makes her blush harder and huff louder and pretend she isn’t affected by any of this even as her body broadcasts the evidence on every frequency.
I’m careful with the stab wound. Conscious of the bandages beneath the leather, conscious of the damaged tissue that’s still in the early stages of repair. My hands adjust their position on her hips, shifting pressure away from the injured side, rerouting the geography of our contact to accommodate the reality that the woman I want to devour is currently held together by gauze and stubbornness.
“How should we go about this?”
