A chance to escape this hell.
Opportunities.
Financial freedom.
A life where I wouldn’t have to return to the Sinclair empire—wouldn’t have to claim the throne that was built for me and defended by blood and purchased with a sister’s life.
A true way out.
The words echo in the chamber of my skull with the hollow resonance of something dropped into a deep well.A true way out.I turn the phrase over and over, examining it from every angle the way I examine threats—searching for the hidden blade, the concealed cost, the clause in the fine print that transforms liberation into a different kind of captivity.
Because nothing in Savage Knot is free.
Not air. Not safety. Not salvation.
Especially not salvation.
My left leg taps against the mattress in a steady, unconscious rhythm—the nerve-damaged limb finding its metronome, the reduced sensation converting anxiety into motion that I feel as a distant, muffled percussion rather than the sharp physical feedback my right leg would provide. I don’t try to stop it. The tapping is honest in a way that the rest of me rarely permits—an unfiltered broadcast of the internal state I spend every waking moment concealing.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Nervous.
I’m nervous.
What a novel fucking experience.
The sound of a switch flicking off pulls me from the void.
I blink.
Once. Twice. Three times—the rapid, involuntary recalibration that happens when I’ve been gone too long, when the dissociative state that passes for my resting mental frequency has carried me somewhere without geography or duration and the real world has to physically intervene to retrieve me.
The clicking stops.
The vinyl player goes silent—truly silent, the mechanical heartbeat ceasing as the tonearm lifts and the platter slows. My eyes drift from the envelope to the turntable, which sits on the low shelf beneath the window where I positioned it three years ago because the acoustic properties of that particular corner produce the warmest sound and I am nothing if not irrationally specific about the things I care about when I permit myself to care about things at all.
Hawk is there.
Of course he is.
Standing at the turntable in those damn sinful boxers and nothing else, his scarred torso illuminated by the thin seam of evening light that catches the topography of his body and turns it into a study in contrast—golden ridges where the light strikes, deep shadow in the valleys of old wounds, the whole composition looking like something a Renaissance painter would have produced if Renaissance painters had access to subjects who’d been through what Hawk has been through.
He flips the record.
The motion is practiced, careful—his large hands handling the vinyl with the specific delicacy of someone who understandsthat some objects deserve gentleness even if the person holding them was not built for it. He lifts the disc by its edges, rotates it, places it back on the platter with an alignment that is unnecessarily precise and therefore, by my standards, exactly precise enough.
Side A.
My favorite side.
He knows this.
Knows which side I prefer the way he knows which side I sleep on and which arm I favor when I’m hurt and which brand of pain medication works fastest with my particular biochemistry.
The database he maintains on my existence is as comprehensive as the one I maintain on his.
We are each other’s most dedicated students.
