She walks over, eyes narrowing in that way that promises retribution, and punches me in the gut—not hard enough to hurt, but firm enough to make her point.
I chuckle, absorbing the hit without flinching, and pull her into a loose embrace.
“Sit down and eat, Precious. I’ll take care of your bandage before we head out.”
She settles into the chair with a sigh, but there’s a softness in her eyes now—a rare, unguarded warmth that lingers from our connection.
As I move to grab the medical kit, I can’t help but think:this is Us.
Broken, surviving, finding heat in the cold.
And for today, at least, it’s enough.
CHAPTER 5
Centre Stage
~VICTORIA~
The auditorium smells like rosin and ambition and the faint, chemical sweetness of industrial floor polish that never quite manages to disguise the older, more permanent scent of sweat embedded in the wood.
It’s a particular smell—the kind that settles into the architecture of a space the way memories settle into the architecture of a person, becoming so integrated that removing it would require dismantling the structure entirely. The main stage stretches thirty feet across, the marley floor a matte black expanse that absorbs light rather than reflecting it, designed to make dancers appear suspended against darkness rather than standing on a surface. Overhead, the rigging system holds rows of theatrical lights that are currently off, their metal housings cold and dormant, waiting for someone to decide this space deserves illumination.
It rarely does.
Savage Knot doesn’t invest in beauty.
It invests in control.
The auditorium exists because someone powerful enough to protect it decided that artistic expression served a strategic purpose within the Academy’s ecosystem—a pressure valve,perhaps, or a showcase for Omega talent that could be leveraged in negotiations and matchmaking ceremonies. Whatever the reasoning, the result is this: a single rectangular room with tiered seating for two hundred, a proper sprung stage, and acoustics that someone with actual knowledge designed before the original purpose was buried under layers of bureaucratic indifference.
The seating rises in graduated rows from the orchestra pit to the mezzanine level, upholstered in a dark burgundy velvet that was probably luxurious a decade ago but now bears the wear patterns of bodies that sat in them with varying degrees of interest. The walls are paneled in dark wood—oak, if I had to guess, though the original finish has been dulled by years of neglect into something closer to slate. High windows along the eastern wall admit columns of natural light that cut through the space at sharp angles, catching dust motes in their beams and making them look like slow-motion snow.
The warmup area is stage left, a section of floor marked by portable barres and a wall-mounted mirror that has a crack running diagonally from the upper right corner to approximately center mass—a flaw I’ve been using as a reference point for my alignment for the past three years.
The crack and I have an understanding.
It stays in its lane. I stay in mine.
I’m in a split.
Full center, my legs extended in a straight line that stretches from the point of my left toe to the point of my right, my hips square to the mirror, my pelvis flush against the cool marley floor. The position requires a flexibility that took years to develop and daily maintenance to preserve—the muscles of my inner thighs, hip flexors, and hamstrings elongated to their maximum range, the connective tissue warm and pliablefrom the twenty minutes of progressive stretching I’ve already completed.
My chin rests on the floor.
Both hands grip my left ankle, the fingers wrapped around the joint with the kind of controlled pressure that deepens the stretch incrementally without risking injury. My breathing is even, measured—four counts in, four counts out—and my core is engaged to protect the spine that was rebuilt with titanium rods and that reminds me of this fact every time I push it beyond what the surgeons said it could do.
The surgeons said a lot of things about what I couldn’t do.
I did all of them.
Spite is an excellent physiotherapist.
The stab wound is a presence beneath the black leather of my bodysuit—a dull, heated awareness on my right side where the bandages press against the damaged tissue with each expansion of my ribcage. It should probably keep me from doing this. Any reasonable person with a twenty-four-hour-old knife wound between their fourth and fifth rib would be in bed, or at the very least sitting in a chair doing something less mechanically demanding than a full center split with their chin on the floor.
Reasonable.
A word that has never once appeared in the same sentence as my name without negation.
