3. ~Vex~
~Vex~
They’ve moved me, and I want it on the record that I am taking it personally.
My oasis—my own square of regulated nothing, the one cell in this watching machine I have spent years training to feel like mine—is being scrubbed.
Not the usual contraband toss, where two bored orderlies paw through my paperbacks and pretend my dolls aren’t watching them do it.
This is a detailed, surgical, on-your-knees-with-a-brush kind of clean, the sort reserved for the suspicion that a patient has been quietly assembling the end of the world out of dental floss and good intentions.
Which, to be fair, I have done before.
Twice.
But here is the splinter under the nail of it, the small wrong note that has my whole morning tilted off its axis: I did not ask for this.
I am the one who decides when my orbit gets disturbed.
I request the scrubs. I choose the upheaval, schedule the chaos, rearrange my own little universe on a whim so that the staff stay convinced they can never quite predict me.
Control is the only luxury this place permits, and I hoard it like a dragon on a very small, very tidy pile of gold.
Someone has reached into my routine and changed the music without asking.
Someone has decided my rest required inspecting.
It smells like him, the decision.
Not in the room—he’s far too elegant to leave fingerprints—but in the shape of it. The patience. The way it studies me sideways instead of head-on.
Doc.
Dr. Lucien Graves, two days into a job that has eaten better men, already rearranging the furniture of my life to see what I do when the chairs move.
Clever. Irritating.
The two have never lived this close together in anyone I’ve met before, and I have met a great many people, most of them right before they regretted it.
It does not help that I dreamed about him.
Last night, in the borrowed bed of this borrowed room, my treacherous unconscious served up the good doctor in vivid detail—me, scaling that enormous frame like a girl shimmying up a tree she’s been told not to climb, peeling those architectural glasses off that infuriatingly composed face, fisting a hand in all that copper-gold hair and discovering, in the breathless logic of dreams, whether the man kisses the way he does everything else.
Slow. Deliberate.
Like my mouth was a difficult case he intended to solve thoroughly and then write up in a private notebook no one else would ever read.
I woke with my thighs pressed together and my own perfume gone embarrassingly sweet in the dark, and I lay there furious at the disloyalty of my own body, because a body, unlike a mind, has never once in its life had the sense to play the long game.
This is not, in itself, alarming.
I am an Omega with appetites and a heat I keep chained in the basement of my body on a cocktail of suppressants, in a building stuffed wall to wall with frustrated designations.
Wet dreams are practically the house wine here.
We all sip.
What’s new—what has me genuinely, professionally rattled—is the part where dream-me considered, for one humid heartbeat, abandoning the entire reason I burned my way into this place, just to stay a little longer in the taste of him.
That.
That is the problem.
Intelligence should not be a bar set this high.
I am an acrobat; I can reach almost anything I decide to reach, and I have never once decided to reach for a man’s mind.
Bodies, yes. Uses, certainly. But a brain that keeps pace with mine, that reads me back as fast as I read it, that ends a session before I’m ready because it understands that the surest way to unsettle me is to deny me an exit I planned for?—
It turns me on.
Dangerously.
In the specific, ruinous way that fire turns on the people who shouldn’t be allowed near it.
Which is precisely why I am in such a magnificent mood.
I skip the length of the temporary corridor to pass the time, light on the balls of my feet, humming something with no tune, and I count the new eyes in the ceiling as I go—three I recognize, one I don’t, freshly seated in the smoke detector by the supply closet.
I blow it a kiss. I do so love a growing audience.
I spend a pleasant minute wondering whether the rest of the morning’s adjustments are booby traps or merely more lenses, more careful little glass pupils installed to drink in the spectacle of me.
Either way, I intend to perform.
A goddess does not waste a full house.
The wall speaker crackles to life with the announcement I should have predicted from the disrupted routine, and didn’t, which annoys me more than the scrub did.
Co-mingling.
Today.
Nesting, the staff call it, in the coy voice people use for things they’d rather not look at directly.
Once a week, by protocol, they unlock the wall between the wings and let the violent Omegas and the violent Alphas occupy the same supervised air, because designations crammed too long in solitude don’t calm—they fester. Suppressants only hold the line so far.
Without the weekly release valve, the heats turn feral and the ruts turn lethal and the whole institute risks going up like a struck match, and Blackthorn has quite enough trouble with matches where I’m concerned.
So they herd us together for an hour and call it medicine.
It plays out the same every week, a grim little ballet I could choreograph in my sleep.
The couples who’ve sorted themselves over months peel off to the designated corners and take their sanctioned, supervised relief against the padded walls, watched by orderlies who have perfected the art of seeing nothing.
Others simply pair off to stare, two predators deciding the effort of conversation isn’t worth the calories.
A few prowl. Most perform a careful, scent-drunk circling, the air going thick and complicated with a dozen designations bleeding into one another—citrus, gunmetal, bruised peony, ozone, something three rooms over that smells like wet pennies and regret.
And me?
I mind my own business, and the room minds me from a respectful distance.
Because no one tests their chances with me.
Not anymore.
The first month, a brave fool or two came sniffing, drawn by a perfume that promises strawberries and birthday cake and the warm open welcome of an Omega in want.
They learned. They always learn. It turns out that burning your faithless Alpha alive in a custom suit and walking out of the blaze humming sends ripples of horror outward through even a psychotic institution, and the ripples reached the Alpha wing long before I did.
To them I am not a woman.
I am a cautionary tale with very good legs.
A goddess on a plinth, beautiful and venerated and absolutely not to be touched, lest the touching be the last thing the hand ever does.
Look all you like, gentlemen. The exhibit does not come down for anyone.
Not yet.
The mag-locks release down the corridor with their familiar throated thunk, and I take my place at the painted line where they make us wait—a row of drawn marks on the floor like a runner’s starting block, each Omega assigned a number, the numbers funneling us through the gate in an order the system can track and tally.
I follow my number toward the far end of the hall, that other side of my playground, and I let my mind drift loose the way it likes to while my body runs the choreography on its own.
I think about the Doc’s endgame, because I cannot stop thinking about the Doc’s endgame, which is itself a data point I dislike intensely.
He’s hired.
That much is plain. Slotted into the same haunted chair the institute keeps refilling, the latest clever man sent to take my measure.
But the previous tailors who came to fit me for a diagnosis were useless—dull instruments, every one, and I amused myself by playing badly enough to keep them entertained and well enough to keep them losing. Sport. Cardio for the mind.
This one is different. This one has potential.
I don’t like potential…
Potential is unfinished. Potential is a craft project left half-built on the shelf, and half-built things itch at me until I either complete them or take them apart to see what they’re made of.
I reach the end of my number, the far corner of the rec hall, and the thought drops out of my head all at once.
Because there’s no one here.
I pause at the boundary of the empty quarter and let the wrongness settle over my skin like a draft. The rest of the hall churns behind me—the murmurs, the wet sounds from the corners, the scent-soup thickening toward its weekly crescendo—but this whole side, my side, has been vacated.
No clustered patients. No prowling Alphas.
And, most telling of all, not a single security guard, when there is always a guard, when I personally rate two at a minimum, when the staffing chart treats my proximity like weather.
I pout.
Not from loneliness—loneliness is a feeling that requires wanting company, and I gave that up around the same time I gave up regret.
I pout because the absence is a puzzle missing its frame.
It’s as though the quarter has been quietly evacuated for the safety of the evacuated, cordoned by instinct rather than instruction, and I cannot for the life of me grasp?—
My eyes lock onto the reason.
He’s parallel to me, all the way across the dead zone, set against the far wall like a stain that won’t scrub out. Sitting. Just sitting, one knee drawn up, a brown glass bottle loose in his grip, and looking at me.
Not the way the others look.
Not the wary, sidelong, plinth-respecting glance the room has trained itself to give me.
He looks at me the way a man looks at the single piece of art that justifies the whole museum—slow and total and unhurried, drinking the sight of me in like he has all the time in the world and intends to spend every second of it on the curve of my face.
Obsession isn’t a strong enough word.
Obsession times a thousand, maybe, with interest compounding by the heartbeat.
I blink.