Hawk’s demeanor changes.
Instantly. Completely. The transformation is so total that for a fraction of a second I’m watching a different person—the casual, cigarette-smoking bodyguard replaced by something harder, faster, more dangerous. The amusement drains from his face. The smirk vanishes. His amber-gold eyes narrow with a focus so intense it makes the marksmanship he demonstrated moments ago look recreational by comparison.
He pulls out his phone and looks at the screen.
I can’t help but look.
The screen displays a map—a schematic that I recognize as a layout of Savage Knot’s sector, rendered in dark tones with navigational markers overlaid in color. A purple dot pulses at the center of the display—not a standard location marker but a symbol: a crown with a rose beneath it, rendered in violet that blinks with the rhythmic urgency of a heartbeat. The symbol is moving. Slowly. And converging on its position from multiple directions are ten red dots, each one advancing with the deliberate pace of objects that know where their target is and are closing in.
The crown.
The rose.
Victoria.
Hawk curses.
The word is short, sharp, and carries none of the casual profanity he deployed during our conversation. This is the real thing—the involuntary vocalization of a man whose worst-case scenario has just appeared on a screen and is blinking at him with the patient urgency of a countdown.
“How fast can y’all run?”
The twins are opening their mouths to answer?—
But Hawk is already gone.
The cigarette hits the concrete floor. His weapon clears the holster in a motion so fast it registers as a blur. The magazine change happens mid-stride—the spent clip ejecting, the fresh one slamming home, the slide racking with a metallic finality that punctuates his first step toward the range’s exit like a starting gun. He moves with a speed that doesn’t belong to a man his size—six-three of scarred muscle and feral Alpha neurology accelerating through the concrete corridor with the particular urgency of a person who has been separated from the thing that keeps him alive and has just been told that the distance is being filled with threats.
We don’t need to know where he’s going.
A feral Alpha running like his life depends on it means one thing.
His precious maiden is in trouble.
CHAPTER 14
The Longest Omega
~VICTORIA~
The shower was hot enough to leave my skin flushed.
Not warm. Not the moderate, responsible temperature that people with functioning thermoregulatory systems select when they step under running water and allow the heat to do its ordinary work of cleaning and relaxation.Hot.The kind of hot that turns the bathroom into a steam chamber and leaves the mirror fogged from edge to edge and makes the tile beneath my bare feet feel like sun-warmed stone. I crank it to the upper limit every time because my body runs cold the way other people’s run warm—chronically, constitutionally, a baseline temperature that sits several degrees below normal and converts every ambient environment into something my skin interprets as an ice bath.
Hawk says I’m part reptile.
I told him reptiles are more dangerous than people give them credit for.
He said that was his point.
I step out of the steam and into the bedroom’s cooler air, and the temperature differential hits my damp skin with the immediate, punishing efficiency of a world that does not accommodate my particular biology. Goosebumps. Theinvoluntary response cascading across my arms and shoulders and the exposed planes of my stomach before I can close the bathroom door and trap whatever residual heat the shower left behind.
I dress quickly.
Black tights—high-waisted, fitted, the thick-knit variety that provides a marginal thermal layer while allowing full range of motion through the hips and legs. A tank top—also black, ribbed cotton, simple. The clothing is functional rather than decorative, selected for the same criteria that govern every material choice in my life: can I move in it, can I fight in it, does it make me invisible. The answers are yes, yes, and mostly.
I leave my hair down.
It falls past my shoulders in damp strands—the dark blue and its pale highlights darkened further by water, the weight of it heavy against my neck and the tops of my shoulder blades. The sensation is one of the few physical experiences I register without effort—the cool, wet press of hair against skin, the particular way it makes the cold worse while simultaneously providing a curtain of privacy that I value more than the warmth I’m sacrificing. Hawk would tell me to dry it. I rarely do. Something about the weight of damp hair feels grounding in a way I’ve never tried to articulate because articulating it would require examining why I need grounding, and that examination leads to places I’ve already visited and chosen not to revisit.
