“Get us another Omega or quest.” His voice is tight—controlled but barely, the words wrapped in a tension that makes the muscles in his jaw visible beneath the skin. “I’m not doing it.”
He turns to leave.
His stride toward the door carries the measured fury of a man who has made a decision and considers it final—each step an exclamation point, each footfall a declaration that this meeting and its contents and the file on the desk and the photograph inside it can all go directly to whatever hell is most convenient.
Violet’s voice catches him at the threshold.
“Your father sold you and your pack.”
The words are delivered with the surgical precision of a scalpel applied to a specific nerve. Not shouted. Not raised. Spoken at conversational volume with the particular cadence of someone who has been holding this information in reserve for exactly this moment and is now deploying it with the timing of a weapon designed to stop forward motion.
The Prime Alpha pauses.
Mid-stride. His leading foot planted, his trailing foot still in the air, his entire body suspended in the physical limbo between going and staying. He doesn’t turn around. But he stops. And stopping, in the language of men who have been conditioned to treat retreat as unacceptable, is its own form of acknowledgment.
“Which is why the three of you have rather generous bounties on your heads.” Violet’s voice continues with the measured paceof someone reading terms of surrender to a party that has run out of alternatives. She hasn’t risen from her desk. Hasn’t raised her volume. The power differential is communicated entirely through content rather than delivery.
“But your father wasn’t the real enemy, was he?”
The question hangs in the soundproofed air like a blade suspended from a thread.
“It was your twin brother.”
Twin brother.
The Prime Alpha has a twin.
Had a twin.
The distinction between those two tenses is apparently the source of everything I’m witnessing in this room.
My left leg begins its muted tapping against the chair leg—the nerve-damaged limb finding its anxious rhythm while the rest of my body maintains the stillness of someone who has become very, very attentive to the information being revealed. I catalog each word Violet speaks with the same precision I apply to threat assessment in Savage Knot’s corridors, building a profile in real time from fragments that I suspect will be relevant to my survival in ways I can’t yet calculate.
“Who decided his salvation was more important than all of your lives,” Violet continues, her voice gaining the rhythmic quality of someone constructing an argument the way a mason constructs a wall—one brick at a time, each one load-bearing. “So instead of risking trying to survive Knot Academy like any other fulfilled pack would—to undergo our very generous Omega program, where you’d be matched to an Omega whether by fate or strategic choice—he sold you out.”
She pauses.
Lets the silence do the work that words can’t.
“For his freedom and his security. And is now reaping the rewards in another country with complete immunity while you?—”
The Prime Alpha’s hands curl into fists at his sides. I see it from my seat—the slow, controlled compression of fingers into palms, the whitening of knuckles, the physical manifestation of a rage so thoroughly restrained that it expresses itself only through the extremities.
“—can walk out that door.” Violet’s tone sharpens. “And I guarantee you and your fellow twin packmates will be dead before nightfall.”
The guarantee is delivered with the flat certainty of a weather forecast—not a threat but a prediction based on data that she clearly possesses in sufficient quantity to make the claim without hyperbole.
“That’s only if you try to leave Savage Knot sector through the dead forest, where anyone has the right to kill you for gain. And since your bounties are so generous outside these walls, I’m sure they’ve only spiked within them.” She tilts her head, those violet eyes assessing the back of the Prime Alpha’s skull with the clinical interest of a surgeon evaluating an approach. “And despite your pack’s unique talents in disguise and artistry, I really doubt you have enough skills to survive these Academy walls otherwise.”
The silence that follows is the kind that has mass—the kind you can feel pressing against your eardrums, filling the sealed room with a pressure that makes breathing feel like work.
One of the twins speaks.
The one beside me—the sharp-eyed one, the one whose smirk carries edges. His voice is lighter than the Prime Alpha’s, carrying a musicality that makes even skepticism sound like a melody.
“You make it seem like these two have a better chance of survival than we do?”
His brother—the one seated at the far end beside Hawk, the curious one with the cropped hair—nods immediately.
