16. ~Vex~
~Vex~
Idon’t know when the switch happened.
That’s the trouble with the flick of it—it never asks permission, never announces itself, just clicks somewhere behind my eyes like a light thrown in a far room, and by the time I notice the new quality of the dark, the trade has already been made.
One of me went under. One of me surfaced.
Somewhere in the lavender steam and the deflating ache and the slow tidal pull of his heartbeat against my spine, I slipped from one self into another, and now I’m awake in the cooling water with no clear seam to mark where the change occurred.
Which means I’m awake in the arms of a man I know almost nothing about—some beautiful, murderous convict from the same mental prison I’ve volunteered to rot in for three years and change—and that, the sober part of me notes through the warm fog, is an opportunity.
The true test. The clean, quiet, undefended moment in which I find out whether my plan survives contact with him, or whether I’ve gone and done the one thing I swore I never would, and let a man become a variable I can’t solve for.
So I don’t speak…at least not yet.
I notice things instead, because noticing is the one habit that survives every switch, the through-line that stitches all my selves into a single dangerous garment.
The water has gone from hot to lukewarm, which tells me we’ve been folded into this tub far longer than I have any memory of. The herbal salts have softened to a ghost of themselves under the burnt-sugar of my own scent and the woodsmoke-and-iron of his.
And my body—this is the detail that genuinely unnerves me—my body is completely, bonelessly relaxed. Not performing relaxation. Not faking the ease of a creature lulling a predator. Relaxed.
For the first time in more years than I care to count, every muscle I own has simply… let go.
I could flick the switch back.
Reach for the part of me that files everyone under threat and wears Vex like armor, and let her take the room. But she’s still asleep down there, curled and quiet, and for once I find I don’t want to wake her. The mastermind can keep her watch from the back of the house. I’ll do the talking.
“Vex.”
He says it gently, my false name, the syllable softened to something almost reverent in the mouth of a man who has ended lives.
When I don’t answer, a thread of humor warms his voice, and he tries again, lower, like a man testing a lock he already suspects he holds the key to.
“Violet.”
“You’re a nuisance,” I tell the bathwater.
It’s a deflection and we both know it; insulting a man is simply the prettiest way I have of declining to admit he’s reached something true.
I have no intention of acknowledging that, so I let the accusation hang and feel my own face heat when his chuckle rolls up through his chest and into my back, vibrating along my spine like a struck chord.
His arms tighten around my waist—not restraint, exactly, more a quiet instruction not to scurry off, which is precisely what some skittish part of me wants to do, switch flicked, walls up, gone before he can see whatever it is I’m letting him see.
“I’m not teasing you,” he murmurs against the wet crown of my head. “I just enjoy your improved appearances.”
“Hmph.” I pout at the far tiles, supremely articulate, and let myself sink back into him anyway. The contradiction of it doesn’t escape me. Nothing escapes me; it’s simply that some things, today, I’m choosing to let win.
“What’s your motive,” I say.
I go straight for it, no garnish, because I don’t have the luxury of time.
A mind like mine isn’t a fixed estate I get to wander at leisure; the switch can come for me at any moment, drag whichever self is fronting back under and surface another with no memory of what was learned.
There is only so much sovereignty any one of me holds over the whole.
So when a door opens, I walk through it fast, before the house rearranges its rooms.
He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. That, more than anything, is what makes me listen.
“Someone hired me,” he says, plainly, his thumb tracing an idle line along my hip beneath the water, “to come to Blackthorn and kill the woman who burned her ex-Alpha to ash.”
The water laps at my collarbones. Outside the window, a bird I can’t name sings something obscenely cheerful into the valley.
I say nothing for a long moment. Then I huff out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Figures.”
I mean it—I’m not surprised, not even slightly.
The part of me always running the numbers had already filed a contract on my life as the likeliest explanation for half of what’s happened; a hand reaching into the most secure asylum in the country to plant a killer beside me is exactly the shape of the threat I’ve felt breathing down my neck since the bodies started.
What I didn’t have was confirmation. Now I do.
Someone paid for my death. A being with the reach to buy a convict and aim him.
The case file in the back of my skull turns a fresh page and begins, very calmly, to take notes.
Who? Who has the money, the access, the grudge.
Who wanted the woman who burns her owners gone badly enough to commission it.
The list is short, and one name on it is supposed to be dead.
That’s the splinter I can’t leave alone, even now, even melted into the arms of the very weapon that was aimed at me.
A dead man can’t sign a contract. Can’t wear a guard’s uniform and watch me seize on a cafeteria floor with eyes I once watched fill with fire.
And yet the math keeps arriving at the same impossible sum, the one I refuse to say out loud because saying it makes it real: that the freedom I bought with a single struck match may have been an illusion, that the body I never stayed to confirm may have gotten up and dusted itself off and started, patiently, to collect.
I file it. I don’t solve it.
Some equations you leave open on the page until they’re ready to be closed in person.
“But you came,” I say slowly, “and fucked her instead. Wild.”
“In the grand scheme of it,” he admits, “that part really wasn’t planned.”
“That’s how life is, isn’t it. Full of surprises.”
“Essentially.”
I let the confession settle, turning it over the way I turn over everything—for edges, for leverage, for the lie that usually hides in the seams of a too-clean truth.
There isn’t one. He hands me the knife of it freely, my own assassin, narrating the contract on my life with the same low calm he’d use to discuss the weather, and the absence of any angle is itself the most disarming thing he could have done.
“Did you mark me,” I ask. It’s not idle. The night is a blur of heat and knot and blackout; I genuinely don’t know.
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
“Yes.” No hesitation. No softening. Just the bare true thing, laid down between us in the cooling water.
I tilt my head against his shoulder, considering him. “For a killer,” I muse, “you’re one who actually enjoys consent. That’s odd. Most of your profession finds it an inconvenience.”
He’s quiet for a beat, and when he answers his voice has dropped into something older and rawer, a register I haven’t heard from him before.
“I was conceived out of rape,” he says. “So it only makes sense, to me, to ask. To make sure the future’s yours to be in charge of.
Marking you while you’re blissed out and blacked out—that’s not a claim.
That’s a theft. I’d be stealing a forever from you for a few seconds of feeling good, and I’ve spent my whole life being the consequence of a man who took what wasn’t offered.
I won’t be that. Not with you. Not with anyone. ”
I sit with that admission far longer than the conversation strictly requires.
Because it costs him something to say it, and I have spent my entire life around men who paid for nothing—who took the stage, the pole, the deed, the body, and called the taking love.
This one carries the weight of his own origin like a stone in his chest and has decided, against every brutal thing the world made him, that he will not pass the weight along. It rearranges him in my estimation. It rearranges, dangerously, a great deal.
“I can’t like you,” I say, which is the most honest thing I’ve managed all morning and also a complete lie.
“You’re using the wrong words,” he notes, mild as anything.
I huff and refuse to dignify it. He chuckles, the bastard, the sound rich with the certainty of a man holding a winning hand.
“You already like me,” he says. “Next predicament.”
So I give him the next one, because apparently this is a game now, and I have never in my life been able to resist a game.
“I can’t have a pack.”
“And why not?”
I open my mouth to tell him exactly why not—and find, to my genuine irritation, that I have no answer. The reasons are all there, surely, an entire architecture of them I’ve built over years, and yet when I reach for a single load-bearing beam, my hand closes on air.
Because a pack is a leash.
Three more people to disappoint or bury.
The last time I belonged to anyone he turned the belonging into a cage with my name engraved on the bars. None of it will come out of my mouth, because none of it, sitting in this warm water with his heart drumming steady at my back, feels true enough to say aloud.
“Next,” he concludes, far too pleased.
“You wouldn’t love me,” I say, and that one comes out smaller than I intend, the armor slipping for half a syllable.
“And what,” he says, dipping his head so the words land warm against my ear, “is there not to love, Pretty Darling?”
I can’t argue with him. I, who can argue with anyone, who has talked my way into a maximum-security asylum and out of three murder charges, cannot find the footing to argue with that. So I reach for the heaviest stone in the pile.
“I’m crazy.”
“Psychos,” he says, without missing a beat, “are the prettiest delicacies.”
“You’ll get bored.”