The way it’s been for five years.
The way it should be.
Five years.
The number settles into my chest like a stone dropped into still water, sending ripples through the carefully maintained emptiness that I’ve spent half a decade constructing. Five years since I stood on that cliff and watched a chair disappear over the edge with my twin sister bound to it. Five years since the rain fell on my face and washed away nothing—not the blood under my nails, not the hollow where my heart used to be, not the understanding that revenge tastes exactly like ash and gives you exactly as much nourishment.
Five years since I became a murderer.
The word doesn’t sting anymore. It used to—in the early months, when I’d wake from nightmares drenched in sweat and clawing at the sheets, Vivian’s face burning behind my eyelids with that single, terrified eye locked onto mine. But the human psyche is a remarkably adaptive organ. It learns to absorb even the most devastating truths the way scar tissue learns to cover even the deepest wounds—not by erasing them, but by building something harder over the top.
I don’t regret killing her.
I settle into that truth the way I settle into the pain in my ribs—with practiced acceptance, without flinching, without the performative guilt that society would expect from a woman who ended her own sister’s life.
I regret the circumstances that made it necessary.
I regret being born an Omega in a world that treats our designation as an invitation for ownership.
I regret that Vivian looked at me and saw competition instead of a sister, because this world taught her that two Omega twins couldn’t both survive—that one would always have to be sacrificed so the other could thrive.
I regret the jealousy that poisoned us both, the Sinclair name that demanded we destroy each other for the privilege of wearing it.
But the act itself?
The kick. The fall. The sound of her body meeting the rocks.
No.
I’d do it again.
And that’s the part that should terrify me but doesn’t, because you can’t be terrified of something when you’ve already accepted it as fundamental to your composition. Like being afraid of your own bones. Pointless.
My legs give out.
Not dramatically—not the cinematic collapse of a woman overwhelmed by memory and grief. Just a quiet, mechanical failure of muscles that have been running on adrenaline and spite for too many hours. My back slides down the cabinet face, the smooth wood catching on the hem of my jacket as I descend, and my tailbone connects with the hardwood floor with a dull thud that sends a fresh jolt through my injured ribs.
I end up sitting with my knees drawn toward my chest, my left shoulder pressed against the cabinet, blood slowly poolingbeneath my right hip where the wound continues its stubborn, steady weeping.
A quick nap.
That’s all I need.
Twenty minutes on this floor and the pills will kick in and the bleeding will slow and I’ll have enough energy to crawl to the bathroom and stitch myself up the way I’ve done dozens of times before.
The cold of the hardwood seeps through my clothing almost immediately—an unwelcome but predictable companion. My body has never been good at retaining heat. Something about my particular Omega biology, the suppressants I take to mask my scent, and the general state of malnutrition that comes from living on the margins of Savage Knot’s economy means that cold finds me faster than it finds most people and holds on with more determination.
Elizabeth would scold me for sitting on a cold floor with an open wound.
The thought arrives uninvited, and I let it settle because fighting it requires energy I don’t have.
Elizabeth.
I wonder how she’s doing. How all of them are doing—the women who shared this particular brand of beautiful madness with me, the Omegas who understood what it meant to be forgotten by a system designed to consume them and chose to fight back instead of submitting gracefully.
Elizabeth Abercrombie, with her Shakespeare quotations and her stubborn refusal to let the world dim her light, even when it tried its absolute hardest. She has her pack now—Holmes and his boys, those ridiculous, dangerous, devoted men who look at her like she hung the moon and would burn the world to keep it lit.
She earned that.
