I like it.
The admission surprises me sometimes, how fiercely I’ve come to guard this rotting little sanctuary. But the truth is simple: the forest doesn’t judge. The trees don’t whisper about the Omega who lives alone. The silence doesn’t ask questions about why a woman with my particular designation hasn’t been claimed by a pack, hasn’t submitted to the hierarchy, hasn’t done what every Omega in Savage Knot is expected to do—which is kneel, and smile, and be grateful for the privilege of being owned.
Fuck that.
Fuck all of it.
The interior is the opposite of the exterior—a contradiction I’ve always found fitting, given that my entire existence is built on the architecture of deception. Clean hardwood floors. White walls with minimal decoration—a single framed photograph of a coastline I’ll never visit sits above the kitchen counter, and I genuinely cannot remember if I hung it or if it came with the unit. Functional furniture in muted grays and blacks. A kitchen that’s rarely used for cooking but always stocked with medical supplies in the cabinet above the sink.
Priorities.
The only thing that disrupts the sterile cleanliness is me.
I track blood across the hardwood like a wounded animal marking its den—dark droplets falling from the saturated fabric pressed against my ribs, each one landing with a soft, wet sound that I’ve heard so many times it barely registers anymore. The crimson maps my route from the front door to the kitchen in a constellation of pain that I’ll have to scrub out later with hydrogen peroxide and cold water.
Later.
If there is a later.
I lean against the kitchen counter and the edge of the granite digs into my hip bone hard enough to leave a bruise, but the pressure is grounding. Something solid. Something real. Something that confirms I’m still here, still occupying physical space in a world that’s tried very creatively to remove me from it on multiple occasions.
My left hand reaches for the medicine cabinet above the sink.
Misses.
My fingers graze the bottom edge of the cabinet door, slipping against the smooth surface because my gloves are slick with blood—mine, mostly, though not entirely—and the angle requires me to lift my arm higher than my damaged ribs want toallow. The motion pulls at the wound, and a sound escapes my throat that I refuse to classify as a whimper.
It wasn’t a whimper.
It was an involuntary vocalization caused by the sudden displacement of damaged tissue.
Completely different.
I try again, this time bracing my right hand flat against the counter for leverage, and the cabinet door swings open with a squeak that sounds unreasonably loud in the quiet of the apartment. Inside: a pharmacy’s worth of supplies organized with the kind of meticulous precision that would probably concern a therapist if I had one. Gauze. Surgical tape. Antiseptic solution. Three different types of antibiotics that I acquired through channels best left undiscussed. And the pain medication—prescription-grade, the kind that dulls everything from knife wounds to existential dread with equal efficiency.
I shake two pills into my palm, consider the throbbing inferno in my ribcage, and add a third.
Living dangerously.
As if that’s not already the permanent state of affairs.
I swallow them dry—water requires walking to the fridge, and walking requires energy I stopped producing approximately forty minutes ago when that second-year Alpha drove his blade through my guard and into the meat between my ribs with a grin that suggested he thought he’d just won the lottery.
He didn’t.
I broke his wrist in two places and dislocated his shoulder before the referees pulled me off.
He’ll heal.
Probably.
I turn around and lean my back against the counter, breathing through the pain in shallow, measured intervals that my body has learned through years of repetition. Inhale for threecounts. Hold for two. Exhale for four. A rhythm as familiar as my own heartbeat—more familiar, actually, since my heartbeat has a tendency to become erratic when the blood loss reaches a certain threshold, and I’m hovering dangerously close to that threshold now.
The apartment settles around me in its usual silence.
No roommate to fuss over the blood on the floor. No pack Alpha to growl and demand to see the wound. No concerned Omega sisters hovering with warm compresses and worried eyes and the kind of gentle scolding that sounds like love if you let yourself hear it that way.
Just me.
