Page 47 of Ruthless Knot

The pink envelope vanishes into my jacket like it was never there.

"Have a good day," I repeat, already moving toward the door.

Maria doesn't respond.

She's too busy searching the counter, her brow furrowed, trying to figure out where the letter went.

She won't find it.

The morning light hits me as I step outside, warmer now than it was before. The campus is starting to wake up—distant sounds of activity, students beginning their daily routines of violence and survival.

I stop on the steps.

Pull out the stolen envelope.

The pink wax seal gleams in the sunlight, marked with four drops of dried blood that I've been receiving for five years without ever asking why. Her handwriting—familiar as breathing, precious as air—spells out the P.O. box address I check obsessively every week.

S.E.

Cotton candy girl.

The beautiful, broken, bloodstained Omega who crashes into strangers and blushes when they hold her wrist and says things likesmoking alone is lonely as fuck, don't you think?

She's been writing to me for five years.

Sealing each letter with her blood.

Waiting for responses, I've apparently been failing to send consistently enough.

Forty-seven days, she said to Maria. She hadn't heard from me in forty-seven days.

The guilt is immediate and crushing.

I've been here—at this goddamn academy—for three weeks. Three weeks of settling in, of reconnaissance, of tracking down intel on the Eastman heir we're supposed to eliminate.

Three weeks of not having access to my regular mail drop.

Three weeks of her thinking I abandoned her.

Thinking I died.

Thinking she was finally, completely alone.

I bring the envelope to my nose, breathing deep.

Cotton candy.

Frosted sugar.

Cherry blossom.

The scent is already fading—paper doesn't hold it as well as skin—but it's there. Proof. Confirmation. The final piece of a puzzle I didn't know I was solving.

My pen pal.

The girl I've been writing to since I was nineteen years old, desperate and drowning in the aftermath of escaping the performance troupe, clinging to anonymous correspondence like a lifeline.

She's here.