The pain medication helps. Two pills swallowed dry in the bathroom before Hawk drove me here—his leather jacket draped over my shoulders without being asked because the man has apparently developed a sixth sense for the precise moment my body temperature begins its predictable decline into hypothermic territory. The numbing herbs he applied to the wound during last night’s patchwork surgery have left a pleasant tingling beneath the gauze that blunts the sharper edges of the pain, reducing it from a scream to a murmur.
Bless his sinful heart.
The soreness fromthatis another matter entirely.
Not the wound. The other thing. The kitchen table thing. The thing that happened after the birthday kiss and the bird teasing and the moment he scooped me up and set me on the edge of the table like a meal he’d been starving for. The sexual tension between Hawk and me never truly ends—it doesn’t resolve or dissipate or reach a satisfying conclusion the way normal tension does. It simply oscillates. Builds to a peak, releases in a physical collision of considerable intensity, and then immediately begins rebuilding, fed by proximity and near-death experiences and the particular chemistry of an Omega whose suppressants can’t fully mask her scent around the one Alpha who’s learned to read what’s beneath them.
Near-death experiences, specifically, spike it to dangerous levels.
Something about the biological imperative to reproduce when faced with mortality.
Or maybe we’re just fucked up.
Probably the latter.
“Oh mygod, she looks like she got hit by a truck.”
The voice comes from stage right, accompanied by the particular pitch of laughter that young women produce when they’ve found something they consider worthy of collective mockery. High, sharp, travelling in a frequency designed to carry—not whispered, not concealed, delivered with the full-volume confidence of people who have never been given a reason to fear the consequences of cruelty.
The younglings.
I don’t look up.
My chin stays on the floor, my hands stay on my ankle, and my eyes—currently fixed on a point approximately six inches in front of my nose where the marley surface shows a faintscuff mark from someone’s heel—don’t shift. Not because I’m disciplined, though I am. Not because I don’t care, which I’d like to claim but can’t entirely prove. But because reacting to them requires energy, and I’ve allocated today’s limited supply to things that matter.
They don’t matter.
Repeat as needed until the void believes it.
“Did you survive another night of hell?”
More laughter. A different voice this time—lighter, with the practiced sweetness that young Omegas learn to deploy when they want their mockery to appear harmless. I catalog it without acknowledgment, filing the tone and cadence into the mental database I maintain of every person in this auditorium’s vocal patterns, threat levels, and potential utility.
Old habits.
Survival habits.
“She’s gonna wind up dead. Clearly.”
A third voice, followed by a chorus of giggles that ripples through the warmup area like stones dropped into still water. I count the voices—six distinct sources, which means the entire cohort of young Omegas currently enrolled in the dance program is present and participating in today’s edition ofLet’s Mock the Old One.
Charming.
Original, too.
They’re young. That’s the thing I remind myself of when the comments land with more precision than I’d prefer—not on my pride, which was dismantled years ago and rebuilt into something more utilitarian, but on the quieter, less defended spaces inside me that still remember what it felt like to believe the world was fair.
The youngest is eighteen. A first-year with wide eyes and the particular kind of optimism that Savage Knot hasn’t hadtime to crush yet. The oldest among them is twenty-two—still young enough to believe that finding a pack is a matter of effort and merit rather than the complex, often arbitrary calculus of timing, chemistry, and institutional politics that actually governs Knot Academy’s matchmaking apparatus.
By twenty-five, most Omegas have secured their packs.
By twenty-five, the desperation begins to show—the carefully hidden panic in the eyes of women who are approaching the invisible deadline that separates “selectable” from “dismissable.” The administration doesn’t publicize the cutoff. They don’t need to. Everyone knows. It’s embedded in the culture the way rot is embedded in the walls of my townhome—invisible to newcomers, obvious to anyone who’s been here long enough to learn where to look.
I’m twenty-seven.
As of this morning.
Happy birthday to me, indeed.
