The title that actually matters.
The girls don’t know that part. They know the public version—the trailblazing dancer who made history, the connected powerhouse who has placed more Omegas in elite programs like Juilliard than any other single figure in the Academy’s history. They don’t know about the sisterhood that operates beneath the surface. The network of Forgotten Omegas who found their vengeance through Violet’s organization and emerged from the other side with packs that were equally forged in darkness.
“Oh my god, remember Elizabeth Abercrombie from Hard Knot?”
The name sends a ripple through me that the void absorbs before it reaches the surface.
“Yes! And Jessica from Dead Knot!”
“Seraphine from Ruthless Knot too!”
“They all got their happy ever afters. Like,actualhappy endings. Packs and everything.”
The girls’ voices overlap in a cascade of admiration and aspiration, each name spoken like a talisman against the fear that lives in every unclaimed Omega’s chest—the fear that they won’t be chosen, won’t be wanted, won’t escape the system before it consumes them.
Happy ever afters.
What a convenient summary of the blood-soaked, trauma-woven, knife-edged journeys those women actually walked.
Elizabeth, who was raped and nearly killed and spent five years pretending to be nobody while building an empire of revenge beneath the surface of a dance scholarship.
Jessica, who was left for dead by six Alphas and reconstructed herself into something lethal enough to make them regret leaving a witness.
Seraphine, with her counting and her precision and the quiet, devastating strength that most people mistook for fragility until they learned the hard way that it wasn’t.
Happy ever afters.
Sure.
If you skip the parts where they almost died getting there.
“If we impress her, surely she can do the same for us!”
The optimism in the statement is so pure, so uncontaminated by experience, that it lands in my chest like a physical object—something small and hard and achingly familiar, a reminder of a version of myself that believed effort and talent were sufficient currency for survival.
They’re not.
But telling them that would require a cruelty I reserve for people who’ve earned it.
The girls laugh and giggle, clustering together to negotiate the performance order with the particular brand of competitive politeness that young Omegas employ when they’re simultaneously cooperating and jockeying for advantage.
Miss Renard watches them with an expression I recognize—the specific exhaustion of someone who cares about her students but has been ground down by the system they exist within until caring feels less like a virtue and more like an endurance sport. Her eyes, sharp and assessing, scan the warmup area with the efficiency of a woman who has been evaluating talent for longer than most of these girls have been alive.
Her gaze lands on me.
Stays.
I’m mid-stretch when I feel it—that particular weight of attention that comes from someone who is looking at you with intent rather than passing curiosity. My arms are extended overhead, fingertips reaching for the rigging as my obliques elongate along my left side. I don’t pause. Don’t acknowledge the assessment. Simply continue the motion with the fluid precision of a body that has been trained to perform under observation without letting observation affect the performance.
“Victoria?”
I pause mid-stretch.
Not dramatically—with the controlled stillness of a mechanism receiving new input. My arms lower to my sides, and I give Miss Renard the expressionless stare that has become my default interface with the world—the blank, unreadable surface that reveals nothing, invites nothing, and communicates with the eloquence of a closed door that the person behind it has no intention of opening.
“Why don’t you kick-start this?”
The giggles from the younger Omegas are immediate.
