I look at my twin.
Lucien walks beside me with the particular stride that he deploys in unfamiliar territory—unhurried on the surface, calculating underneath. His lips are curved in that cunning smirk that he wears like other people wear watches—constantly, habitually, an accessory so permanent that its absence would be more notable than its presence. But his eyes tell a different story. They dart. Everywhere. Left to the hedgerow. Right to the lamppost. Forward to the curve of the path. Back to the shadow between two buildings where someone could conceivably wait with the patience of a person who has calculated the value of twin bounties and decided the risk-reward ratio favors action.
Scanning.
Always scanning.
The smirk says we’re fine.
The eyes say we might not be.
This is Lucien’s particular genius—the ability to operate on two frequencies simultaneously, presenting one to the world while processing the other in silence.
This entire Academy is unknown to us. The observation is not complaint but inventory—a factual accounting of our tactical position that produces neither anxiety nor comfort because both responses are equally useless when the data is insufficient. We barely received a tour upon arrival. Violet’s people escorted us from the intake point to our quarters through a route that was deliberately circuitous—I counted the unnecessary turns, the backtracking, the strategic use of corridors that led nowhere before redirecting to corridors that led somewhere—designed to ensure we couldn’t reconstruct the path from memory. Standard disorientation protocol. Effective. Annoying.
After that, we were left to fend for ourselves.
Three men with bounties, no map, no allies, and a collective understanding that the wealth and status we carried like identification in our former lives meant precisely nothingwithin these walls. Because everyone in Savage Knot is wealthy. Old money, new money, stolen money, inherited money—the currency of privilege is the default denomination here, which means it buys nothing. There will always be someone richer. Someone more connected. Someone whose family name opens doors that ours merely approaches.
Wealth is armor in the outside world.
In Savage Knot, it’s decoration.
And decorations don’t stop bullets.
I think about Lucien’s question.
The thinking is deliberate—not the instant, reactive processing that my brother performs, where question and answer are separated by a gap so small it barely qualifies as consideration, but the slower, deeper analysis that my particular neurology favors. I turn the question over. Examine its surfaces. Test its weight against the context that produced it.
Do I think she’s pretty?
Victoria Sinclair.
The Omega who sat in Violet Martinez’s office three hours ago and stared at Dominic Virelli until she forgot to breathe.
“She’s more attractive than I expected.”
The admission emerges in my natural register—measured, precise, carrying exactly the information I intend to convey and nothing more. Not evasion. Not understatement. An accurate assessment delivered with the clinical specificity that my brother has spent thirty-four years translating for people who find my directness unsettling.
More attractive than I expected.
Which is itself revealing, because my expectations were deliberately low.
I’ve never been drawn to Omegas.
The statement requires context that I rarely provide because the context invites assumptions I’d rather not manage. It’snot a question of orientation—neither Lucien nor I operate outside the heterosexual designation that our Alpha biology rather emphatically endorses. And we’re not inexperienced. The bedroom has been visited. The mechanics have been executed. The physical requirements of the Alpha designation—the rut cycles, the hormonal imperatives, the particular neurochemical urgency that the body generates when it decides that reproduction is a priority regardless of the mind’s opinion on the matter—have been addressed with the efficiency of men who treat biological needs as maintenance rather than recreation.
Out of “must.”
To keep our sanity.
Not a need to explore.
Not a desire to expand.
Just the mechanical servicing of a system that will malfunction if ignored.
The Omegas we’ve encountered in our previous life were?—
