Which has never once stopped me from going somewhere I’m not welcome.
I must have been standing still for a while.
The realization arrives not through my own awareness—my relationship with the passage of time during dissociativeepisodes is unreliable at best, nonexistent at worst—but through a sensation so faint it barely registers against the baseline noise of my nervous system.
Fingers brush mine.
So ever lightly. A ghost of a touch. The pads of someone’s fingers trailing across the backs of my knuckles with a pressure so gentle it could be the wind, could be imagination, could be the residual sensory echo of a contact that hasn’t happened yet. The kind of touch designed to reach someone who has retreated into the void without startling them back to the surface—calibrated, careful, the tactile equivalent of someone calling your name from across a room they don’t want to disturb.
I blink.
Once. Twice. The rapid recalibration. The world sharpens from the flat, unfocused haze of the stare into the vivid, high-definition reality of marble and sunlight and the man standing to my right.
I look to my right.
As I always do.
Because he’s always on my right.
Hawk stands beside me with the particular posture of someone who has been standing in that exact position for however long I was gone—patient, watchful, his amber-gold eyes scanning the building’s facade and the surrounding grounds with the perpetual threat assessment that constitutes his resting state. He’s dressed today—actually dressed, not the boxers-and-nothing arrangement that constitutes his domestic uniform but dark jeans and a fitted black shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, exposing his forearms and the roadmap of scars that decorates them like evidence files.
He whistles—low, impressed, the sound carrying a note of genuine admiration that he directs at the architecture withthe casual appreciation of a man who respects craftsmanship regardless of what it’s being used for.
“Every time I see this building, they surely get an upgrade of some sort.”
His hand moves from the ghost-touch along my knuckles to something more deliberate. His fingers slide between mine—slowly, giving me time to pull away, to deflect, to deploy one of the thousand avoidance mechanisms I keep loaded and ready for moments of physical intimacy that weren’t preceded by either combat or the specific urgency of Heat. I don’t deploy any of them.
His hand wraps around mine.
Warm. Large. The calluses on his palm rough against the smooth coolness of my skin. He squeezes lightly—a measured compression that communicates presence without demanding acknowledgment, support without requiring reciprocation. As if standing beside me isn’t enough. As if the physical proximity that he maintains with the dedication of a shadow that has developed personal investment in the object casting it needs reinforcement through contact.
He didn’t have to come.
The thought arrives with the particular ache of a truth I’d rather not hold. The scratched-off portion of the invitation revealed this address and a room number. Twelve p.m. sharp. The invitation was for me—for the Omega, for Victoria Sinclair, for the woman who danced on a stage in Parisian shoes and caught the attention of a mastermind who builds freedom out of impossible gambles. Hawk’s name wasn’t on the letter. His presence wasn’t requested. His involvement wasn’t part of the terms.
And yet he’s here.
Trying to be present despite the uncertainty ahead.
Because that’s what he does.
Shows up. Stays. Squeezes my hand in front of buildings I don’t belong in and pretends we’re just two people going somewhere together, as if “together” is a thing we’ve officially agreed to be.
We’re on time. Five minutes to spare. The precision is mine—I calculated the travel time from my townhome to this building with the obsessive accuracy of someone who treats punctuality as a moral position. Being late is a luxury afforded to people who can afford to be disrespected. I am not one of those people. Tardiness in my personal code of conduct is reserved exclusively forkilling purposes—because making someone wait before you end them is a power move, and power moves are the only exception to the rule.
I squeeze his hand back.
The motion is small, deliberate, and accompanied by the cool pressure of metal against his fingers—the brass knuckles I wear like rings, fitted over my middle and index fingers of each hand, their surfaces polished to a dull gleam that catches the midday light and announces their presence without requiring verbal explanation.
My brass knuckles.
The most underrated weapon in Savage Knot’s combat economy. Fighting with your fists is considered primitive by the sector’s standards—an inelegant, close-range discipline that lacks the dramatic flair of blades or the clinical distance of projectile weapons. Which is exactly why I mastered it. Because no one expects the five-foot-nine Omega with the blank eyes and the ballet shoes to throw a punch that rearranges the structural integrity of your nasal bone and shatters the zygomatic arch in a single impact. The brass adds weight and focus to the strike—concentrating force into a smaller surface area, transforming a human fist into something closer to a hammer.
If you can’t breathe, you’re not going to last long.
Let alone remain conscious long enough for the second fist to connect.
Hawk is the opposite. Long-distance. Precision. Sniper rifles and—I dare say—arrows, because the man has an inexplicable affinity for archaic projectile weaponry that would be romantic if it weren’t also incredibly effective at putting holes in people from distances that make retaliation mathematically impossible. He’s also my boxing partner—not because he has a particular passion for close-range combat but because the idea of another Alpha training me in shorts and a sports bra triggers a feral episode that neither of us wants to manage.
