13. ~Vex~
~Vex~
Iwake up inside a film I never auditioned for, and I’m fairly certain it’s a musical.
Specifically the one with the hills and the nuns and the children stitched into curtains, because that is precisely the energy of the situation I find myself in—all sunlight and embroidery and the threat, at any moment, of someone bursting into song about their favorite things. I am wearing a white dress.
A genuine, frothing, absurd white dress, layered in those frivolous little flounces, the hem and bodice embroidered with tiny hearts in alternating red and pink, the sort of garment you’d put on a doll, or a bride, or a girl you intended to convince of something.
I have no memory of putting it on.
That, more than the dress itself, is the detail that lifts the hair on my arms.
I try to reconstruct the missing days the way I reconstruct everything—methodically, brick by brick—and the wall keeps coming up short. The cafeteria. Annalise’s grief and a needle in my neck. The cold flooding in and a pair of arms catching me.
After that, only fragments: a medical bay, a beeping that kept a stubborn rhythm, Riot’s voice rumbling somewhere above me, a kiss that tasted of chemicals and salvation. Then a great smeared blank, the kind a body draws over the hours it can’t afford to remember. They moved me through that blank.
They washed, dressed, transported, and installed me while I was too poisoned to vote on any of it, and the not-knowing sits in my chest like a stone, because I am a woman whose entire survival has been built on never once losing track of the board—and I have just lost track of days.
My hair has been washed. Not the hurried institutional scrub of the ward, but washed properly, conditioned, the pink and the violet of it freshly redone and gleaming, the healthiest it has looked in years.
My skin feels foreign—soft, dewy, glowing, as though someone laid me out while I was unconscious and layered me in creams that cost more than the average orderly’s month, buffing the asylum out of me like tarnish off silver.
I have been tended. Groomed. Prepared. And I do not know by whose hands, which is a sentence that should never be true of my own body and is, this morning, alarmingly true.
On the nightstand beside the mirror—the mirror I’ve apparently been staring into for hours, cataloguing this glossy stranger wearing my face—sits a fresh, full arrangement of peonies.
They are obscene with health, blowsy and pale and perfect, and their scent has colonized the entire room, sweet and heavy and faintly funereal in a way I can’t place and don’t like.
Peonies. Someone chose peonies.
The someone has a name and amber eyes and a habit of calling me his sweet peony, and the message is not subtle, and underneath the flattery of it lies a colder echo I can’t quite silence—because the last Omega I knew who smelled of peonies was bruised and beaten and currently resides on the mortician’s table.
A man who courts a woman with the same bloom that clings to his dead is either deeply romantic or deeply unwell, and in his case I suspect the honest answer is both.
Beyond the window: an afterlife.
That’s the only word my reeling brain offers for it—rolling green hills and old stone and a landscape so lush and gentle and golden in the morning light that it cannot possibly be real, cannot possibly be a place a person like me is permitted to wake.
There are gardens. A market square in the middle distance.
Arches, gone soft with moss, framing a valley that looks like the place souls go when they’ve finally been forgiven.
I am outside. I am not in the ward.
The reinforced glass and the dead fluorescent hum and the cameras seamed into the walls are gone, and in their place is birdsong and sunlight and a breeze that smells of cut grass and growing things.
Three years, seven months, and however many days my poisoned count has lost track of—that is how long it has been since air moved against my skin that hadn’t first been filtered through an institution’s lungs.
I had forgotten what unconditioned morning smells like. Grass and stone and distant woodsmoke and the green wet promise of a garden after dew. It is, objectively, the loveliest thing I’ve woken to in years.
And every cell in my body is screaming at me that lovely is the most dangerous condition a thing can be in, because in my experience the prettier the room, the worse the price of the door.
Which can only mean one thing.
At some point, while I was too poisoned to negotiate, I made a deal with the devil. And I cannot, for the unraveling life of me, remember the terms.
I slept…I realize…on silk.
Pink silk sheets, cool and impossible against my newly soft skin, and I have not slept on anything resembling silk since—since a wedding night, in another life, when I lay tangled in expensive linens beside an Alpha I genuinely believed would keep the vow he’d made me.
Love, honor, till death parted us.
He kept exactly one third of it; death is still pending, and entirely his fault that it’s on the calendar at all. I have not been comfortable, truly comfortable, in the years since I learned what his promises were worth.
Now here I am, swaddled in silk and hearts and peonies, the most comfortable I’ve been since the last time comfort was a trap.
Which is the thought that finally cracks the spell.
I run my palm over the silk one more time, feeling the cool expensive slide of it, and I let myself name the thing the comfort is trying to make me forget: I did not choose this.
Every gentle, gorgeous detail of this room arrived while I was unconscious and unconsulted, decided for me, applied to me, the way a thing is decorated rather than asked.
I have spent my whole life clawing back the right to choose, and I woke this morning into the loveliest dispossession of it I’ve ever experienced.
Pretty hands still moved me where they wanted me.
The only difference is that this time the hands seem to want me happy, and a cage built out of someone wanting you happy is the single hardest kind to ever find the will to leave.
Because comfort is a trap.
I learned that in three different rooms across three different lifetimes, and I do not unlearn things.
A reward is a leash; I knew that the morning a pole appeared in my cell, and I know it now with a clarity that cuts through the fog.
Someone has washed me and dressed me and perfumed my room and laid me down on silk, and someone does not do that to a thing they intend to keep at arm’s length.
Someone is courting and has decided to make my cage so beautiful I forget to test its bars.
The truly humiliating part—the part that has my pulse climbing and my scent thickening sweet and sharp in the still morning air—is that for the length of one hour at that mirror, it almost worked.
I am panicking.
I recognize the symptoms now that I’ve stopped pretending they’re wonder. The too-quick breath. The buzzing under the skin. The way my eyes keep darting the room for the lens that has to be here somewhere, because there is always a lens, and not finding it is somehow worse than finding it.
This is what undoes me—not chaos.
Chaos is my native country; I could nap in a burning building.
It’s the peace that frightens me. The stillness.
The absence of a single thing to fight, to outwit, to perform for.
I have spent so long being the most dangerous element in every room that I no longer know who I am in a room that isn’t trying to kill me, and the not-knowing is a kind of free fall.
So I do the thing I always do when the ground drops out: I work.
I make myself catalogue.
The lens, when I finally find it, is tucked into the carved rose at the center of the ceiling medallion, a single glass eye angled to take the whole room, and there will be others—in the lamp, the mirror frame, the vent—because they promised the institution a watched cage and they are men who keep the promises that serve them.
I count the exits: the door, the window, a second door that likely gives onto a bathroom.
I clock the absence of anything sharp, anything heavy, anything that isn’t soft and pretty and safe, which tells me the room was dressed by someone who knows precisely what I can do with a hard edge. They’ve thought of everything.
That should comfort me, that the men who took me are this careful.
It does the opposite. Careful is how you handle a thing you intend to keep.
My mind, traitor that it is, keeps working even as the rest of me comes apart—cataloguing, mapping, building the case file.
Arch Hollow, the rational part recites, because somewhere in the poisoned dark I heard the name spoken over a meeting I was too sedated to attend.
A controlled town. A gilded experiment. The three of them maneuvered the institution into letting them carry me out here, and the institution called it security, and the only question my unraveling brain can’t quite hold steady is the one that matters most: what do they actually want, and which of the prettily wrapped gifts in this room is the one with the hook inside it.
I have to get out of this room.
I have to move, do something, break the unbearable serenity before it finishes dissolving me.
So I cross to the door on legs that feel borrowed, and I wrap my soft, foreign hand around the handle, and I brace—genuinely brace—for the moment the dream tears like wet paper and reality comes roaring back to smack me flat.
I pull the door open.
Reality does not come roaring back.
Instead my eyes land on a pair I would know in any light, in any state, at the bottom of any spiral—those pale, knife-grey, cynically beautiful eyes that once studied me in total silence while an entire room of people fled to the far wall to avoid breathing his air.
Riot.