Just like the piece on my chest. Florals in various stages of bloom woven together with geometric linework that spans from my sternum to my clavicle in an asymmetrical composition that I designed myself over three nights of insomnia and had inked by the only tattoo artist in Savage Knot who doesn’t ask questions about the scars they’re working around.
I should get another one.
The thought arrives with the particular certainty of a decision that’s been forming beneath the surface of conscious awareness for longer than I realized. A new tattoo. Something symbolic. Something that marks this moment—this birthday, this year, this particular intersection of survival and exhaustion and the confusing, unwelcome stirring of something that might be hope in a chest that has been empty for five years.
Twenty-seven.
It could be my last year.
The administration’s patience, the clock’s ticking, the body’s accumulating debt of damage that compounds with each fight and each night on each cold floor.
If it’s my last, I want it marked on my skin.
I want the proof to be permanent.
That I was here. That I existed. That for twenty-seven years, despite everything, the snake at my pulse didn’t win.
I correct my stance.
The transition from final pose to upright is deliberate—a slow unfurling, my spine stacking one vertebra at a time, my core engaging to support the reconstruction of my vertical axis. The stab wound throbs dully beneath the bandages, reminding me that the price of beauty is usually paid in the currency of damage, and I straighten to full height, my chin lifting, my shoulders drawing back with the particular precision that transforms standing into a statement.
I bow.
A reverence—one foot extended behind, a gentle incline of the torso that acknowledges the audience without supplicating to it. The motion is habit more than expectation, the muscle memory of a thousand recitals performed for a thousand audiences that ranged from rapturous to indifferent to nonexistent.
No one will clap.
They never do.
The younglings will return to their giggling, Miss Renard will nod politely, and the auditorium will absorb the performance into its wooden bones the way it absorbs everything else—quietly, without acknowledgment, as though beauty that occurs in Savage Knot is somehow less real than beauty that occurs elsewhere.
A single clap ignites the silence.
Sharp. Deliberate. The sound of one pair of hands meeting with a precision that suggests the person producing it understands exactly how much noise they’re making and exactly how much attention they intend to attract. The clap echoes off the wooden panels and the high ceiling, bouncing between surfaces with a clarity that the auditorium’s acoustics were specifically designed to amplify.
Every head turns.
Mine included.
He’s standing at the auditorium’s main entrance.
A single man. Tall—close to my height, which puts him around five-ten, maybe five-eleven—with a posture that communicates money the way some people’s posture communicates military training. Everything about him is deliberate: the way he stands, the angle of his chin, the unhurried rhythm of his applause that continues at a measured pace as though he’s not just acknowledging the performance but conducting an evaluation of it in real time.
He’s wearing a suit.
Red.
Not the muted burgundy that Savage Knot’s elite occasionally permit themselves, not the dark crimson of wealth trying to appear restrained. This isred—vivid, unapologetic, the color of arterial blood and expensive wine and the particular kind of confidence that only exists in people who have never once had to justify their presence in a room. The fabric catches the light from the eastern windows and holds it, shimmering with the subtle luster of material that costs more than my townhome’s annual maintenance budget.
I can’t make out his features clearly from centre stage—the distance and the angle of the light conspire to reduce him to a silhouette edged in gold, a shape defined by color and posture rather than specifics. But I can tell he’s not from the Academy.The suit alone announces that—nothing produced within Savage Knot’s economy or purchased through its channels would be that vibrant, that conspicuous, that fundamentally opposed to the aesthetic of understated menace that governs fashion within these walls.
An outsider.
In Savage Knot.
Wearing red.
Interesting.
