Because the music will start and the movement will follow and for three minutes and forty-seven seconds—the exact duration of the song I identified while bleeding against a concrete wall—I will be something other than empty.
My eyes lift.
They find him without searching—drawn to that top corner of the mezzanine the way a compass is drawn to north, the way tides are drawn to the moon, the way all broken things are drawn to the one force that keeps them from falling apart entirely.
Hawk.
He’s not reading anymore.
The paperback romance sits closed on his knee, his thumb marking a page he has no current interest in returning to. His amber-gold eyes—those predatory, constantly calculating eyes that assess threats and map escape routes and catalog the movement patterns of every person in any room he occupies—are fixed on me.
Only me.
The attention is a physical thing. I feel it cross the distance between his seat and the stage like a beam of concentrated light, warming the skin of my face and throat with a precision that my body’s chronic coldness responds to immediately. His gaze holds none of the mockery that saturates the younger Omegas’ attention. None of the clinical assessment that Miss Renard employs. None of the institutional calculation that governs every other set of eyes in Savage Knot.
His attention is just…his.
Steady. Warm. Unwavering.
The kind of attention that says: I see you. I’m here. I’m not leaving.
Our eyes lock.
Across the empty seats and the dust-filled light and the distance that should make this kind of eye contact impossible, our gazes connect with the silent, electric certainty of two points completing a circuit. Something passes between us that I can’t name and refuse to try—something that lives in the frequency between the words we don’t say and the truths wedon’t acknowledge and the feelings we’ve both agreed are too dangerous to examine in a world that weaponizes vulnerability.
Such a dangerous acknowledgment.
The kind I should ignore.
The kind I try to ignore.
Every time.
And can’t.
Especially when I dare admit—in the quietest, most buried chamber of my chest—that I enjoy it.
His attention.
His presence.
The way he puts down his book when I step onto a stage, as though everything else in the world becomes irrelevant the moment I begin to move.
Deep down, I enjoy it more than I’ll ever confess.
And that terrifies me more than any blade.
I take a breath.
It fills my lungs slowly, expanding my ribcage against the bandages, against the leather, against the residual pain that serves as a permanent reminder that this body has been broken and rebuilt and broken again and rebuilt again and will continue this cycle for as long as the universe insists on keeping me operational.
I close my eyes.
The auditorium disappears. The giggling Omegas, the cracked mirror, the empty seats, the columns of dusty light—all of it folds away like scenery being struck after a final performance, leaving only the stage beneath my new shoes and the darkness behind my eyelids and the waiting silence that precedes music the way a held breath precedes a confession.
I am twenty-seven years old.
I am an unclaimed Omega in the cruelest sector of the cruelest academy in existence.
