And why did Violet—a woman whose strategic intelligence I respect the way I respect high-caliber weaponry, from a distance and with the awareness that it could be directed at me at any moment—have so much hope in her? Why was Victoria Sinclair theonlyOmega deemed worthy of our particular situation? Violet has access to the entire Forgotten Omegas network. An organization that spans sectors, that has successfully placed Omegas with packs across multiple Academy cycles, that has resources and personnel and the institutional memory of decades of matchmaking.
And she chose this one.
Her best.
Her favorite.
The only one who could carry the task.
Why?
I wasn’t expecting her to threaten Dominic.
Not her, specifically—that was Violet’s doing, and the feral Alpha’s. But Victoria’s particular contribution to the threat was more effective than either of theirs because it wasn’t a threat at all. It waspresence. She stood in front of our Prime—the man whose Alpha designation operates at a frequency that makes standard Alphas instinctively defer and most Omegas biologically submit—and produced nothing. No fear. No submission. No response of any kind that the dominance circuitry could identify as engagement.
She voided his power by voiding herself.
You can’t dominate something that doesn’t exist.
And whatever occupies the space behind Victoria Sinclair’s storm-gray eyes has decided, with apparent finality, that it doesn’t.
Dominic is the power player among us. Has been since the pack formed—since his designation asserted itself with the particular authority that Prime Alphas exert over pack hierarchies the way gravity exerts itself over celestial mechanics: automatically, universally, without negotiation. He’s used to getting his way. Not through cruelty—not usually—but through the sheer, unavoidable fact of his presence, which communicates authority the way large structures communicate permanence.
And she negated all of it.
With a blank stare and a refusal to breathe.
Which brings me back to the betrayal. The thing that sits beneath every other thought like bedrock beneath soil—always there, always load-bearing, always shaping the surface even when it’s not visible.
Damien.
Did the fucker really think of all the possibilities?
Did he sit in a room somewhere—a room that probably smells like expensive cologne and new beginnings—and map out every possible consequence of his betrayal, every potential response from the three people he left behind, every scenario in which his freedom might be threatened by the survival of the men he sold?
Did he calculate that we’d end up here? In an Academy for the damned, attending meetings in soundproofed offices, being assigned an Omega who stares into the void with the practiced emptiness of someone who has seen worse than us and survived it by refusing to see anything at all?
Did he plan for the masquerade?
Or did he assume we’d be dead by now, and the masquerade is a contingency he never accounted for because dead men don’t attend balls?
The part that unsettles me most—and I don’t use that word lightly, because very little unsettles a man who has killedhis uncle and reconstructed his life from wreckage—is that Damien knew us. Knew Dominic’s inflexibility, knew Lucien’s impulsiveness, knew my tendency toward over-analysis. He mapped our patterns and our weaknesses and our blind spots with the intimacy that only pack members possess, and then he weaponized that intimacy against us.
That’s the betrayal that cuts deepest.
Not that he left.
But that he used the knowledge of loving us to ensure we couldn’t follow.
“What are you thinking about?”
Lucien’s voice reaches me from a distance that suggests he’s been watching me think for longer than the question implies. I look over at him, meeting the gray-blue eyes that mirror my own with the particular awareness of a twin who knows that the question is rhetorical.
He can feel it.
We’re not telepathic. I want to be precise about this because precision matters and because the mythology surrounding identical twins has generated enough pseudoscientific nonsense to fill a library wing, and I have no interest in contributing to it. We don’t read each other’s thoughts. We don’t share a consciousness. We don’t finish each other’s sentences through some mystical neural link, though we do finish each other’s sentences frequently because we’ve spent thirty-four years learning each other’s cognitive patterns and can predict with reasonable accuracy what the other is about to say based on context, expression, and the particular variety of silence that precedes different categories of statement.
But there’s something.
