Page 64 of Ruthless Knot

Second:recognition.

Her spine goes rigid. Her hands—small, delicate, capable of violence I've seen evidence of on her bloodstained shoes—clench at her sides. She's close enough to a hanging page now to read the words, and I watch the moment understanding crashes through her.

The way her shoulders curl inward.

The way her breath catches, chest seizing beneath that pink corset.

The way her entire body seems tocollapsewithout actually falling.

Third:devastation.

The rain begins to fall in earnest.

Fat drops that splatter against the stage floor, against the hanging letters, against her upturned face as she stands frozen in the wreckage of her privacy. The cream paper darkens where the water hits. Ink starts to blur at the edges. Everything she wrote—every confession, every fear, every desperate reaching toward connection—begins to dissolve before her eyes.

And I can't fucking breathe.

I've never felt this before.

This...identificationwith another person's pain. This bone-deep understanding of exactly what she's experiencing, as if her emotions are somehow transmitting directly into my chest through the scent-bond we shouldn't have yet.

The first sob escapes her lips.

It's not a pretty sound. Not the delicate, performative grief that some Omegas deploy for sympathy. This is raw. Ugly.Real—the sound of someone whose heart is being ripped out through their throat, and there's nothing they can do to stop it.

My own heart clenches in response.

The sensation is foreign.

Painful.

The last time I felt something like this—this sharp, immediate ache for another person's suffering—was years ago. A different lifetime. A different version of myself, before I learned to armor my heart against attachment.

My mother.

She surfaces in my memory unbidden: soft hands and softer voice, pink hair like mine that she'd braid while humming circus melodies. The only person in the performance troupe who looked at me and saw a child instead of a commodity.

The only one who fought to keep me safe, to protect me, to love me in a world that had no space for love.

They killed her for it.

The people who owned us—who thought they owned us—slit her throat when she refused to sell me for a few stacks of money. Said she deserved to be with the dead who can't follow instructions. Made me watch so I'd understand the cost of defiance.

I was fourteen.

I haven't let myself feel like this since.

Haven't allowed another person's pain to penetrate the walls I built in the aftermath of her death. Haven't risked the vulnerability of caring whether someone lives or dies beyond my pack, my obligation, my narrow circle of loyalty.

But standing here, watching this girl—this broken, beautiful, impossible girl—sob in the rain surrounded by her ruined words...

I feel it.

All of it.

The same sharp, suffocating ache that consumed me when my mother's blood painted the circus tent floor.

And I understand, suddenly, what people mean when they say villains are the most romantic creatures in existence.