The book in his hand is another romance novel. I know this because Hawk’s reading habits follow a pattern so consistent it’s practically a personality trait—he devours them the way some people devour true crime or political thrillers, consuming stories about enemies who fall in love and lovers who become enemies with the same analytical intensity he applies to tracking threats and memorizing escape routes.
Stupid romantic novels.
With their enemies-to-lovers bickering that’s better written than anything our lives could ever produce.
Though ours comes with actual knives and actual near-death experiences, so there’s that.
The funny thing is that no one notices him. Not the young Omegas who chatter and giggle and cluster in their social formations like schools of fish finding safety in numbers. Not the staff who pass through the auditorium on their rounds. He just… blends. Disappears into the environment the way predators are designed to—not through absence but through stillness, through becoming so fundamentally part of the background that the eye slides over him without registering a presence.
A storm that wandered into a palace and learned to look like wallpaper.
Impressive, really.
If also slightly unnerving when you remember what lives beneath the stillness.
I begin stretching my arms—extending them overhead, fingers interlaced, pulling the long muscles of my sides and shoulders into elongation. The motion lifts the hem of my bodysuit slightly, and I feel the cool auditorium air against the thin strip of skin exposed above the waistband of my dark sparkling stockings.
Cold.
Always cold.
At least Hawk’s jacket is draped over my bag by the barre.
The man is a walking thermostat for my defective biology.
The auditorium door opens.
Miss Renard enters with the brisk efficiency of a woman who has been teaching dance in Savage Knot long enough to have developed a permanent furrow between her brows and the kind of posture that suggests her spine is held together by discipline rather than calcium. She’s small—five foot four in her character shoes—with close-cropped silver hair and eyes that could strip lacquer from a stage floor. A former dancer herself, though the years and the particular demands of existing within Knot Academy’s ecosystem have traded her performance career for a teaching one.
“Ladies.” Her voice carries the particular authority of someone who has been ignored too many times to waste energy on pleasantries. “You should perform your best today because we have a visitor.”
The chatter among the younger Omegas shifts frequency—curiosity replacing mockery, self-interest replacing cruelty with the speed that only the truly young can manage.
“You should know Violet Martinez, yes?”
The auditorium erupts.
Squeals. Actual, high-pitched squeals that bounce off the wooden panels and the tiered seating and the cracked warmup mirror with the acoustic fidelity of a room designed to amplify sound. The younger Omegas cluster together in a formation that resembles a beehive experiencing an electrical surge—bodies pressing close, hands gripping arms, eyes widening with the particular luminosity of genuine excitement.
“Violet Martinez!”
“The Violet Martinez?”
“Chairman of the International Alliance of Contemporary Dance Excellence?”
The titles spill from their lips with the reverent cadence of a litany—each one spoken as though the syllables themselves carry weight and significance beyond their phonetic value. They list her achievements with the breathless enthusiasm of fans reciting the stats of their favorite athlete, tripping over each other’s words in their eagerness to demonstrate knowledge that, in Knot Academy’s economy, translates directly to social currency.
Violet Martinez.
I correct my posture—a micro-adjustment of my spine, squaring my shoulders, re-engaging the core muscles that had begun to relax during the stretch—and listen without participating. My expression remains neutral. The void holds steady behind my eyes while, beneath it, in the spaces I don’t advertise, something that might be recognition stirs.
Violet.
Chairman of the International Alliance of Contemporary Dance Excellence.
A title for glamor.
CEO of the Forgotten Omegas initiative.
