18. ~Silas~ #2
“Alive. Well. And—” she ticks the points off on slender fingers, “—in my professional estimation, very probably the man who paid to have Riot installed inside Blackthorn to dispose of me. Who somehow gathered the three of you into the same square footage. Who pulled the strings that brought a doctor, a convict, and a mortician into orbit around one inconvenient Omega.” She pauses, and her mismatched eyes glitter.
“Which brings us neatly to this charming little stalking letter, doesn’t it.
Proof he knows exactly where we’ve been moved.
Which means the ball, gentlemen, is firmly in our court. ”
“Grand,” Doc hums, in the tone of a man who has just been handed a far larger and far more interesting problem than the one he walked in with.
I confess my own mind has run ahead to the husband himself—to the shape of a man who would do all this.
He didn’t simply want her dead; that’s a thing money buys in an afternoon, a single quiet professional and a closed casket.
No. He bought a convict and walked him into the most secure asylum in the country.
He arranged, somehow, for a doctor and an undertaker to drift into the same orbit.
He has been patient, and theatrical, and personal about it, and now he writes letters that begin with my love.
That isn’t a man settling a score.
That is a man who cannot bear that the thing he once owned got free of him, and has decided that if he cannot have her caged, no one will have her at all.
I have arranged the funerals of a great many men like that. They are, without exception, the easiest kind to bury—because their need makes them careless, and carelessness is simply an open grave a person digs for themselves.
He thinks his obsession is a weapon. He has not yet met three men whose obsession is considerably better organized than his.
I clap my hands together, unable to help myself.
“So. Shall I begin the arrangement now, for your approval—or later?”
Riot’s head turns toward me with slow, predatory deliberation.
I lift both hands, the picture of wounded innocence.
“It could have been a wedding bouquet, you brute. You’ve no idea what I’m planning.”
“Fuck off and try it,” Riot warns, with the flat certainty of a man who would absolutely separate me from my arranging hands if I made the funereal one first.
I bite down on my lower lip to keep the snicker behind my teeth. Vex is openly smirking now, thoroughly entertained by the convict’s blunt, bristling possessiveness—and I note, with a fresh little curl of delight, that she enjoys that too.
The jealousy.
The proof of being wanted enough to be guarded. Another tell, filed beside the first. Our girl is a garden of them, and I intend to learn every bloom by name.
She crosses her legs, leans forward, and lifts the photograph of the burned room from the table—the ruin of the man she’s never denied killing.
She studies it. Not with fear, not with guilt; with something quieter and far harder to name, the long still attention of a person looking at a closed chapter she hasn’t reread in a while.
She holds the image long enough that I can’t stop myself.
“Did you love him?” I ask.
She blinks, slow, and lifts her gaze from the ash to find the three of us watching her—and here is the thing I notice, the thing my whole strange trade has trained me to notice: it isn’t the answer that matters.
It’s what lives in the eyes before the answer arrives. And what lives in hers, for one unguarded breath, is purity. Genuine, uncostumed, unperformed. Whatever she says next, I already know, because the truth is sitting plain in that mismatched gaze where the lunatic mask forgot to cover it.
“I did,” she admits, and it surprises me anyway, the bare honesty of it.
“He was my way out. He helped me with the paperwork—got it all filed, made it official, made me a divorced woman free and clear. You’ve no idea what a privilege it is, to be a single Omega again after… that. To belong to no one.”
Her thumb moves over the glossy ruin almost tenderly.
“I was wrecked in the head from the marriage. Properly broken. And he didn’t flinch from it. He embraced the broken thing I was, all the jagged pieces of me, and for a while it was the closest I’ve come to being loved as I actually am.”
Her thumb goes still.
“And then he cheated.” The warmth ices over so smoothly I almost miss the transition. “So I ask you, gentlemen—do you honestly believe I could let a cheater go on breathing?”
“Nope,” the three of us answer, in perfect, instant, unrehearsed unison.
It pulls a smirk out of her, and she sets the photograph face-down on the table with the gentle finality of a woman closing a coffin lid she made herself.
The ruin of a man who loved her, embraced her, freed her—and learned, too late, that the freedom she handed him did not extend to the freedom to betray her. There is a terrible symmetry to it that the artist in me cannot help but admire. She does not punish the men who cage her, in the end.
She escapes those.
She punishes the ones who promised not to.
And I understand her a little better for it, the shape of the rule she lives by.
The husband took her freedom and she took it back; that’s arithmetic, clean and survivable, the math of any cornered thing. But the boyfriend—the boyfriend gave her the one thing no one else ever had, gave her herself, and then proved the gift was conditional. That’s not a wound she could escape.
There’s no door out of a betrayal like that. There’s only the fire. I think of the three of us, then, with a small cold thrill that is not entirely fear and not entirely desire—because we have, every one of us, just been handed the terms.
Cage her and she’ll vanish.
Betray her and she’ll burn us beautiful.
Love her honestly, keep the one promise that matters, and she is the most loyal creature three monsters could ever hope to call their own. I find the terms entirely fair.
I find them, in fact, a relief. I have always preferred a contract whose penalty clause is written in plain flame.
“So,” she says, brisk, the chapter closed. “What’s the plan?”
“Plan?” I echo.
“We’re here, aren’t we. Tucked into a pretty valley with cameras in the walls and arches on the hills.
Clearly we’ve been positioned to play our little parts until my ex-husband works up the nerve to come finish what he commissioned.
So in the meantime—” she spreads her hands, gracious as a hostess, “—we’re playing house. Yes?”
When she frames it that way, it does rather snap into focus. We three look, as one, to Doc—because whatever the rest of us are, he is the head of this peculiar little body, the one who plots while Riot strikes and I arrange the aftermath.
“We play house,” Doc agrees, unhurried. “Until your ex-husband tries to strike.”
“Tries?” she repeats, one brow arching at the verb.
“He will not succeed at whatever gamble he’s playing.” Doc says it the way he says everything he’s already solved—as a settled equation, a sum that simply will not come out any other way. “He’s never dealt with the Holy Trinity.”
And that undoes me completely.
I throw my head back and laugh in pure, ringing glee, delighted past all dignity, because there is nothing in this world I love more than a man who underestimates the people he’s about to lose to. Riot only shakes his head at the both of us, the long-suffering patriarch of a household of maniacs.
The Holy Trinity.
I do adore it when Doc gets grandiose; it happens so rarely that it lands like scripture when it does. And the dreadful, delicious truth of it is that he isn’t wrong.
Separately we are each a problem a clever man might survive.
The husband could perhaps outspend Lucien, or outrun Riot, or out-wait me. But he will have to do all three at once, in a town with no exits, around a woman who has already proven she can dismantle better men than him while wearing a straitjacket.
He has spent untold money and patience arranging a trap. He has not noticed that he built it around the four most dangerous things in the valley and locked the door from the inside.
“Buckle your seatbelts, ladies and gents,” he drawls, rising and stretching until his spine cracks. “We’re off on a rollercoaster ride.” He scrubs a hand down his face. “Man. I need a beer.”
“Me too,” Doc huffs, with feeling.
“Me three!” Vex beams, bouncing upright in her cushion.
“No,” Doc says, without looking up.
“Awww.” She pouts, the full theatrical production of it. “Why?”
“Once you’re done your meds,” Doc mutters, already reaching for the pill organizer on the side table with the weary diligence of a man who has appointed himself the keeper of an unkeepable creature, “I’ll make you a milkshake.”
She beams at that, the pout vanishing like it was never there, instantly and wholly placated by the promise of dessert—this brilliant, lethal, husband-burning mastermind, lit up like a child over a milkshake—and the contradiction of her is so perfect, so impossibly delicious, that I have to press my lips together to keep from applauding all over again.
Strawberry, I’d wager, to match the sugar she already smells of. I make a note to learn her favorite by nightfall. A man should know these things about the people he intends to keep forever.
I let my gaze drift over the three of them—the planner already plotting, the killer already restless, the queen already glowing over a treat she hasn’t earned yet and absolutely will—and I feel something in my chest settle that has not been settled in a very long time.
The hunt is coming.
The husband is out there in the dark, jealous and patient and writing his pretty little threats, certain he holds the winning hand. He does not know what waits for him in this cabin.
He does not know he is the prey.
So I lean back, fold my pale hands, and let the smile spread slow across my face.
I guess we’re playing house until the stalking husband is jealous enough to come himself.