By four minutes.
But four minutes is four minutes, and primacy is primacy, and I will die on this hill.
I put my lips around the cigarette. The paper is warm from his mouth—a sensation so familiar that it doesn’t register as someone else’s warmth but as shared warmth, the thermic equivalent of a language only we speak. I take a deep inhale, letting the smoke fill my lungs with the practiced patience of someone who doesn’t need the nicotine but appreciates the ritual, and release it in a slow, directed stream aimed away from the fabric samples spread across the worktable.
As if it really matters.
We’ll probably be wearing these samples in rooms that smell considerably worse than secondhand smoke before the week is out.
Cassian takes the cigarette back and returns to his position on the window ledge. He sits with one leg drawn up, his back against the window frame, crossing his arms over his chest in the particular posture that signals he’s shifted from casualpresence to active analysis. His gray-blue eyes are fixed on the cigarette in his grasp rather than the forest beyond the window—a redirection of focus that tells me he’s processing internally rather than scanning externally.
“What are you thinking?” he asks.
The question is open-ended in a way that Cassian’s questions rarely are—usually he asks specific things that require specific answers, because precision is his native tongue and ambiguity is my dialect. But this question is an invitation. A door left open for me to walk through in whatever direction the thoughts are taking me.
“Aside from our wardrobes and disguises,” I begin, and my voice finds the register that sits between my public performance and my private truth—the frequency that only Cassian gets, the one that carries genuine thought rather than curated amusement, “I’m wondering what’s special about the Omega.”
I turn the name over in my mind like a coin between fingers.
“Victoria Sinclair.”
The syllables are unremarkable on their surface—a first name that carries the weight of monarchy and a surname that suggests lineage without announcing it. Nothing in the name itself explains the woman who wore it into Violet’s office and stared down a Prime Alpha without blinking and sat next to the dangerous twin and told him she could bite back.
“Simple, common name,” I observe. “You agree?”
Cassian is sitting back on the window ledge, the afternoon light catching the sharp planes of his face and casting shadows that make his features look carved rather than grown. He stares at the cigarette in his grasp—the ember glowing low now, the paper burning slowly toward his fingers, the smoke thinning as the available material decreases.
I study him.
The act of looking at Cassian has never produced the uncanny-valley discomfort that identical twins reportedly generate in other people. For me, looking at my brother is like looking at a version of myself that was developed under slightly different atmospheric conditions—the same raw material, processed differently by the minute variations in experience that distinguish one twin from the other. We share the jawline—sharp, angular, the genetic inheritance of a family whose bone structure has been documented in portrait oil paintings for six generations. We share the gray-blue eyes, though his carry a steadiness that mine deflect with amusement. We share the lean, angular frame that makes tailoring a precision exercise and that makes combat a matter of speed rather than force.
Even our styles are similar—similar enough that strangers can’t distinguish between us and acquaintances can only distinguish between us when we want them to. We both favor the old-money aesthetic that our upbringing installed and our years of deprivation paradoxically reinforced—the particular sartorial language of men who dress as if wealth is an inherited characteristic rather than an acquired condition, which in our case it was, then wasn’t, then was again. The tailored silhouettes. The conservative palettes. The fabrics that communicate lineage through thread count. It makes us look older than our thirties, and we permit this because wealth is justifiable through fashion sense, and quiet money gains silence, and silence gains obedience.
The only visible difference sits on my wrist.
My tattoo—a piece I acquired during the homeless years, inked by a man whose studio was a folding table in a basement that smelled like disinfectant and regret. It’s small, precise, positioned on the inner surface of my wrist where the veins are visible through pale skin. An intentional placement. Apermanent reminder that the vulnerability it sits atop is both the thing that keeps me alive and the thing that makes me killable.
Cassian, by contrast, is unmarked. Clean. His skin carries scars from the same history that scarred mine, but no intentional markings—no ink, no adornment, no permanent alterations to the surface that he maintains with the particular care of someone who considers his body a precision instrument and precision instruments don’t come with decorations.
Clean like a virgin when it comes to his delicate flesh.
A fact I’ve teased him about and will continue to tease him about until one of us dies.
“A royal name, to me,” Cassian says.
His voice is quiet—the particular register that he uses when he’s been thinking about something for longer than the conversation suggests and has arrived at an assessment that he trusts enough to share. His gray-blue eyes lift from the cigarette and meet mine, and the look that passes between us carries the particular information density that only twins can transmit—a full paragraph of analysis compressed into a single, microsecond exchange of gaze.
“Defiant.”
One word. Delivered with the certainty of a verdict.
I smile.
Fully. Teeth showing. The expression that I reserve for moments of genuine delight—not the smirk, not the curated amusement, not the social lubrication that passes for happiness in professional settings. The real thing. Broad enough to engage the muscles around my eyes, sharp enough to reveal the canines that my Alpha genetics produced with slightly more prominence than average, warm enough to make Cassian’s eyebrow rise by a fraction because he knows this smile and he knows what it means.
It means I’m interested.
Genuinely, dangerously, perhaps stupidly interested.
