Jessica Vesper Calavera, with her sharp tongue and her sharper aim and the kind of fury that runs so deep it becomes indistinguishable from grace. She found Marcus and his crew—men equally forged in darkness, equally unafraid of the shadows she carries.
She earned that too.
Seraphine, with her counting and her precision and the quiet, devastating strength she hides behind rituals that most people mistake for weakness. She has her pack—Alphas who learned to count with her instead of trying to fix what was never broken.
Earned. Deserved. Claimed.
All of them, walking forward into something that looks like happiness, or at least the violent, complicated, blood-stained version of happiness that Knot Academy produces.
And here I am.
On a kitchen floor.
Bleeding.
Again.
The pattern is so familiar it’s almost comforting in its predictability. Go to the ring. Fight someone who outweighs me by fifty pounds. Win—barely. Drag myself home. Bleed on the floor. Take pills. Sleep. Wake up. Repeat.
The glamorous life of Knot Academy’s most persistent survivor.
A laugh escapes me—weak, breathless, barely qualifying as a sound. It echoes off the clean white walls and comes back to me sounding hollow. Everything sounds hollow these days. Laughter. Conversation. The rare compliment from a fellow fighter who respects my skill. The even rarer moment of genuine human connection that slips through the cracks of the fortress I’ve built around my emotional center.
Hollow.
Like the space behind my sternum where other people keep things like hope and attachment and the belief that tomorrow might be different from today.
I know the pain will dull. It always does. The pills will metabolize, the wound will close—it’s not deep enough to be fatal, I assessed that much during the walk home—and by morning I’ll be functional enough to move through Savage Knot’s corridors without anyone noticing the slight hitch in my stride or the way I favor my left side.
This is the life of Knot Academy.
The survival of the fittest.
Or the richest.
I’m neither, and I’m still here.
Make of that what you will.
I can’t stay outside these walls. That’s the bitter mathematics that keeps me anchored to this place despite everything. A mateless Omega in the outside world is a commodity—unprotected, unclaimed, legally vulnerable to any Alpha with enough resources and enough cruelty to take what they want. The government’s “alternative placement” programs. The laboratories. The nighttime auctions that everyone knows about and no one discusses in polite company.
At least inside Knot Academy, I have the right to fight back.
At least here, survival is a recognized currency.
The only reason I stay is?—
My thoughts trail off.
Not intentionally. Not the way a person pauses mid-sentence to gather their words or reconsider their phrasing. This is something else entirely—a disconnection, a severance of the thread between conscious thought and conscious presence that happens more and more frequently these days. One moment I’m in the middle of a sentence—even if only inside my own head—and the next I’m just... elsewhere. Nowhere.
Staring.
My eyes are open but they’re not seeing the kitchen. Not seeing the blood on the floor or the cabinet above me or the single framed coastline photograph on the wall. They’re fixed on a point in the middle distance that doesn’t exist—a void that my gaze has learned to seek out the way a compass needle seeks north. Automatic. Effortless. Terrifying in its frequency if I ever bothered to track it, which I don’t, because tracking it would mean acknowledging that something inside me is fundamentally fractured in a way that pills and stitches can’t reach.
The void.
My therapist would have a name for it.
