“Agreed. That’s quite the claim.”
Violet’s smile widens.
It’s a specific smile—the one that precedes revelations she’s been holding in reserve, the expression of a woman who has been waiting for exactly this question because it provides the opening for information she wants delivered but wants to appear to deliver reluctantly.
Masterful.
Again.
She gestures to me.
The motion is elegant, deliberate—a single, fluid extension of her hand in my direction that turns my entire existence into an exhibit.
“Victoria has been hidden within Knot Academy for easily ten-plus years.”
Ten-plus years.
The number lands in my chest with the particular weight of a truth I rarely hear spoken aloud by someone who isn’t me.
Ten years of corridors and combat and cold floors and silent observation and the daily, grinding performance of being nobody while being precisely, devastatingly somebody underneath.
“She’s also studied and examined every sector.” Violet’s voice gains the cadence of a dossier being read—factual, comprehensive, delivered with the clinical detachment of someone presenting credentials rather than compliments. “Hard Knot. Dead Knot. Ruthless Knot. And she resides in Savage Knot.”
The sectors land in sequence like stamps on a passport—each one a territory I infiltrated, studied, catalogued, and survived without leaving a trace of my presence or a record of my passage. Years of silent work. Years of watching and learning and training my body and mind to absorb the operational intelligence of four distinct ecosystems of violence and manipulation and survival.
“Out of everyone here,” Violet continues, and her violet eyes find mine with a warmth that I don’t know how to process and therefore store in the same compartment where I keep everything else I can’t process, “she’s actually the most qualified. Surprisingly enough.”
Surprisingly.
The word is strategic.
Designed to make the men in this room look at me and see something they missed.
Which is exactly what Violet wants.
“And if I pressed a single button that would ignite a set of elite killers to drop into this room and eliminate everyone here?—”
She pauses. The silence is surgical.
“—I’m very confident she’d be the only one left standing.”
Everyone stares at me.
Again. Five sets of eyes, recalibrating their assessment of the woman in the borrowed leather jacket with the brass knuckles and the blank expression and the snake tattoo hissing at her own heartbeat. I feel the weight of their collective attention settle against my skin like a change in atmospheric pressure, and I respond to it the way I respond to everything?—
With nothing.
The void holds.
The void always holds.
Violet looks at Hawk.
Her violet eyes shift to the far end of the arc where he sits beside the quieter twin, his amber gaze steady, his posture the particular brand of relaxed that only people who are capable of extreme violence can achieve in rooms full of potential threats.
“You may survive,” she adds, and the qualifier is delivered with a tilt of her head that splits the difference between compliment and clinical observation. “Depends on that feral side of yours.”
He smirks.
