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The clock is nearly run down. And the silence of it—the gentle, golden, uneventful silence of a fortnight in paradise—doesn’t soothe me. It coils. It’s the held breath before the orchestra crashes back in, the long flat note before the drop.

Somewhere out past the mossy arches, my husband is letting the deadline ripen, and I have spent enough of my life around men who plan to know that the quiet ones are never quiet because they’ve given up. They’re quiet because they’re aiming.

That, I suspect, is the real reason I can’t sleep.

Not the body’s restlessness, though it’s there—the low unbonded ache that creeps through an Omega’s system in the dark, the heat that makes me reach for someone before I’m awake enough to choose it.

Riot has learned the scent of that need the way a wolf learns a wounded thing, and most nights he’s in my bed before I’ve finished wanting him there, all woodsmoke and warm iron and quiet competence, soothing the edge off me with his hands and his weight and the low rumble of his voice until my body stops keening.

The ache isn’t what kept me up tonight.

Tonight it’s the other thing, the strategist’s thing, the part of me that never fully sleeps and is currently pacing the cage of my skull whispering that two weeks is up, that the board is set, that somewhere a man who once called me his diamond is finally tired of waiting to collect.

It hasn’t been idle, the fortnight.

That’s the strange and disorienting part.

I started pole classes, which has forced me into the company of other Omegas for the first time in years—and which has done something to me I wasn’t braced for. I don’t have to perform the lunatic there. I don’t have to be Vex, all teeth and glitter and calculated mayhem, keeping a room off balance so it never gets close enough to read me.

I can just… be.

Normal, or something adjacent to it. Controlled, which feels foreign on my own skin, like a coat tailored for a woman I haven’t met. The other girls have started to recognize the shape of their own stories in mine—the marriages that became cages, the men who became sentences, the violence that was only ever self-defense wearing the wrong paperwork—and there’s an ease in that recognition. For once I’m not the oddest thing in the room.

I’m just another woman who survived more than she should have had to, learning to spin in the light.

There’s a peculiar grief in it, too, that I didn’t expect.

Because the pole was never recreation for me, once.

It was the auction block my husband left me on when he decided I was worth nothing, the stage where I learned to turn my own body into currency because no one would let me earn a living any other way. I climbed it the first time in despair and came down a little more broken each night.

Now here it is again, the same cold steel, the same muscles screaming the same way—except the room is full of women who understand, and no one is buying, and the only eyes on me belong to a pack that watches me dance the way you’d watch a wildfire you were rooting for. Same apparatus.

Opposite world.

I didn’t know you could reclaim a thing that had been used against you.

I’m learning that you can, one revolution at a time.

And I started the blades.

Self-defense three nights a week, daggers my chosen instrument, and the steel has handed me back a version of empowerment I’d forgotten the taste of—the specific, spine-straightening certainty of being armed and competent in my own body. It’s also revealed one more thread Silas and I share, because the man adores bladework, swords and daggers and anything with an edge and an intimacy to it, and he’s taken to training me himself in the hours outside the formal classes, whenever I’m restless enough to want it.

Our instructor is an Omega who used to be army, all clipped competence and old scars, and she commutes—back and forth from this town to the island off the northern shore, the one where the pack-less Omegas are kept apart, because this pretty valley is, beneath its charm, fiercely ‘Alpha-approved’ territory.

Barney told me, last week, in the orange glow of his forge, that the rules weren’t their choosing—that the whole old-fashioned baloney of Alpha authorizations and segregated sectors came down from on high.

The man who owns this place is old-school to his marrow, but he built it, in his backwards way, to empower and protect the bold ones—the Omegas reckless enough to claw out of captivity—with bargain clemencies and a walled little world where they might flourish back into a society that would otherwise execute them on sight. Better that, he reasoned, than sending a woman home to be slain as a criminal for the crime of killing the man who was killing her by inches.

I understood it.

I always understand the architecture of a cage; it’s the one subject I’ve never needed a tutor for. I know this one is temporary, a borrowed shelter on the way to somewhere unmonitored.

Yet, it left a splinter in me I haven’t been able to work loose, lying awake tonight:what about the ones who don’t get a way out?

The girls with no doctor consolidating their accounts, no killer warming their sheets, no undertaker stitching them a dress in colors that mean defiance. The ones still inside the ruins, with no trinity of obsessions to burn the world down on their behalf.

Do they ever find their salvation?