The violet irises—already vivid, already operating at a color frequency that borders on supernatural—deepen. The warmth retreats behind something older, something sharper, something that reminds me that Violet Martinez did not build the Forgotten Omegas initiative by being kind. She built it by being necessary. And necessary people do not ask for cooperation.
They create conditions in which cooperation is the only rational choice.
“Now.” Her voice drops. Not in volume but in register, the sonic equivalent of a room’s temperature falling three degreesin a single breath. “Let’s get straight into what I’ll be asking of you to receive immunity from the cruel world that’s desperate to have you lot disappear.”
CHAPTER 10
The Terms Of Disappearing
~VICTORIA~
Violet doesn’t waste time.
She stands behind her ebony desk with the red silk gown pooling around her ankles and the five crimson envelopes fanned across the polished surface like a dealer’s hand, and she lays out the ground rules with the clinical efficiency of a woman who has rehearsed this particular speech enough times that the words have been stripped of everything unnecessary and reduced to their structural components.
“One night,” she begins, her violet eyes moving across the semicircle of faces with the measured pace of a searchlight scanning a field. “One shot. You complete the task at hand while abiding by the rule that was written under the flap of the Omega’s invitation.”
All eyes land on me.
Five sets of them. Violet’s violet, calculating. The Prime Alpha’s aged-whiskey, guarded. The twins’ matching gray-blue—one sharp, one curious. And Hawk’s amber-gold, steady as always, positioned at the far end of the arc where he sits beside the quieter twin with the particular stillness of a predator who has assessed the room’s threat matrix and determined that his best tactical contribution right now is patience.
The flap.
The scratch-off.
The hidden requirement that Hawk’s blade peeled from the invitation’s surface two nights ago while we sat on my bed sharing a blunt and pretending that the future was something that happened to other people.
I reach into the interior pocket of my jacket—Hawk’s jacket, technically, the leather one that smells of pine and smoke and that he drapes over my shoulders with the regularity of a man who has internalized my body’s thermoregulatory failure as a standing item on his personal to-do list. The invitation is there, folded precisely in half, the red paper and its white calligraphic ink still carrying the faint impression of the wax seal that once held it closed.
I present it to Violet.
The exchange is brief—my cold fingers releasing the paper to her pale ones, the transfer completed with the minimal physical contact of two people who understand that gestures carry information and efficiency carries respect.
Violet unfolds it. Reads it. The grin that spreads across her dark red lips has the particular quality of a woman reviewing evidence she already possesses but enjoys seeing confirmed.
“Do you agree to the task?”
I consider the question with the same analytical framework I apply to every proposition in Savage Knot—searching for the hidden blade, the concealed cost, the clause in the fine print that transforms liberation into a different species of captivity. The task written under the flap was specific. Its implications are significant. And the woman asking me if I agree already knows the answer, which makes the question performative rather than interrogative.
She’s asking for the room’s benefit.
For the three men who don’t yet know what the flap conceals.
She wants them to hear me say yes before they hear what they’re agreeing to.
Masterful.
And manipulative.
But those two things have never been mutually exclusive in my experience.
“Well.” My voice carries the flat, uninflected tone that the void provides as my default setting—emotionless, practical, the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “It feels like there’s no plan B in this case.”
Violet’s smirk deepens. The statement is neither agreement nor refusal but something more honest than either—an acknowledgment that the choices available to me are not choices at all but variations on a single trajectory, and that accepting the invitation is less an act of agency than an act of recognizing that agency, in Savage Knot, is a luxury distributed unevenly and currently in short supply.
The Prime Alpha speaks.
“What is written under the flap?”
