3. ~Vex~ #2
Make myself look away from him, sweep the hall, and the second piece of the puzzle clicks into its frame.
Everyone has migrated.
Bodily, completely, to the opposite end.
The couples rutting in the far corners have gone uncharacteristically discreet, swallowing their moans, keeping their grunts low and apologetic, as though noise itself might disturb the man’s peace and noise has consequences.
The orderlies are clustered at the exits.
And the guards—my guards, the institute’s proudest hardware—are wearing the specific, sweat-sheened expression of men who have decided that whatever happens in this quarter is happening without their participation.
They’re frightened.
All of them.
Frightened of him.
And then his scent reaches me on the recycled air, finally crossing the gap, and it explains a great deal.
Where the Doc smells like a private library, this one smells like the building burning down around it.
Woodsmoke and worn leather, a low feral base of gun-oil and crushed black pepper, whiskey gone warm in the glass, and underneath it all the unmistakable bright-metal note of blood that has learned to think of itself as cologne.
It is not a pleasant scent.
It is a warning printed in a language older than words, and my own designation—the traitor—reads it and shivers and leans toward it anyway, the way a moth has opinions about candles.
Takes me an embarrassing extra moment, lost in the dark architecture of how he smells, to notice the last detail. He’s still cuffed. Even here, even alone in an evacuated quarter with every weapon in the room trained loosely his way, they did not dare uncuff him to drink his sanctioned hour’s beer.
And the cuffs are black.
Not institutional steel. Matte black, fitted, set—I lean, I squint, I am nothing if not thorough—with a scatter of small black gemstones along the band, catching no light and giving none back.
Custom. Decorated. The institute saves its prettiest restraints for its ugliest residents, and someone has dressed this man’s wrists like a craftsman who got distracted halfway through and wandered off.
An incomplete craft project.
That, I think, is the precise thing that ticks over in my brain, the small fatal click of a lock deciding to open.
Because I cannot abide an unfinished piece.
And this one is sitting across an empty room, staring at me like I’m the finest thing he’s ever been allowed to see, wearing half-finished jewelry on the wrists they’re too scared to free.
Well.
It would be rude not to introduce myself.
I skip.
Straight across the forbidden quarter, light and quick and grinning like the lunatic the file insists I am—and, fine, perhaps the file has a point, perhaps I am, on certain Tuesdays—and I land in a neat crouch directly in front of him, close enough that his scent stops being a warning and becomes a room I’ve walked into.
Behind me the hall makes a collective sound, a single indrawn breath shared between forty terrified throats.
His eyes lift to mine.
Slow. Cynical.
A pale, near-colorless grey, the grey of a knife held up to a window, ringed in something darker—beautiful in the way certain weapons are beautiful, designed with no thought for beauty and arriving at it anyway. Up close his stare doesn’t soften. It sharpens.
He looks at me like he’s already decided something about me and is simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up to his conclusion.
I dismantle his scent in my head, sorting it into its parts the way I sort everything—the leather, the smoke, the iron, the warm dark animal heart of it—and I file the whole profile away in the drawer where I keep things I intend to use later.
Then I take his beer.
I don’t ask.
Asking is for people who expect to be told no, and I have never once in my life expected to be told no.
I simply lift the bottle out of his cuffed grip, and the room gasps again, louder, a chorus of horror as though I’ve spat on an altar, as though the goddess has just done something even the goddess isn’t allowed to do.
I take a swig.
I regret it immediately.
“Ugh.” I pull the bottle back and frown at it with frank betrayal, tongue working against the bitter wash of cheap warm lager. I pout. I shrug. “At least that ain’t piss. That’s only fun during sexy times.”
I slide the bottle back into his hand, and—here is the interesting part, the part I tuck away with the scent profile—he takes it.
He lets me put it back. He doesn’t snatch, doesn’t snarl, doesn’t do any of the dozen feral things a man who turned a prison riot into a slaughter with his bare hands ought to do when a strange Omega drinks from his bottle.
He just watches me, and his fingers close around the glass where mine just were, and something about that—the warm overlap of where I touched and where he holds—sends a wholly unauthorized spark skating down my spine.
“Name,” I say.
Nothing.
He drinks, eyes never leaving me, and the silence stretches long enough that I expect it to be permanent. Good. I respect a man who understands that the cheapest thing he owns is his own answer.
So when a full minute crawls past and he still hasn’t given me a syllable, my grin only widens.
“Vex,” I offer, since one of us should have manners. “For now.” I rise out of my crouch in a single uncoiling motion, brush invisible dust from my pink knees, and flash him my sweetest, most ungovernable smile. “Enjoy play time.”
I spin on my heel and skip away, leaving him with his terrible beer and the warmth of my fingerprints on the glass.
I let myself drift again as I go, sliding back into the pleasant fog where I do my best thinking, turning the Doc over and over—what he wants, what he’s hiding, whether the half-built man at the wall is a coincidence or a card someone dealt onto my board on purpose—when the air at my back changes.
Closeness. Heat.
The smoke-and-iron weather of him, suddenly directly behind me, where a cuffed man pinned to a wall by forty frightened gazes has absolutely no business being.
I don’t startle.
Startling is for prey.
I simply tip my head back and let my eyes climb to his, which are even more arresting at this distance, even more cynical, even more dangerously, beautifully made.
“First Pretty Doc,” I muse, delighted. “Now Pretty Inmate.” I pout up at him. “A new move’s about to be played on the chess board.” I hum the last of it, pleased with the symmetry, two glittering pieces sliding onto my squares in the space of two days.
Somewhere to my left, a guard finds his voice.
“V-Valentine. You need to—you need to return to your number. Now…please.”
The please is what tells me how bad it is.
I drag my gaze off the Alpha to glance at the guard, and the poor man freezes mid-breath, eyes going wide and white over my shoulder—and that’s my only warning before an arm like a cabled tree branch wraps my front and I’m hauled backward into a chest that is all heat and granite, a broad hand spanning the column of my throat, holding me precisely, perfectly still.
Steel sings out of holsters across the hall.
Commands erupt—drop her, hands where we can see them, on the ground, on the ground—every blunt and pointed thing the institute permits suddenly leveled at the man wearing me like a coat.
I never felt him break the bottle.
Only register the result of it: the jagged green crescent of the bottle’s neck pressed to the soft skin under my jaw, the points of it kissing my pulse, his grip on my throat firm enough to be a statement and gentle enough to be something far more unsettling than a threat.
So this is what passes for a hostage situation.
If you’d call it that.
I’m not sure I would.
The hall is a wall of noise—shouting, the scrape of boots, somebody’s panic button shrilling, the orderlies bellowing protocol numbers at each other like the numbers might help—and I let it crash over me for exactly as long as it amuses me, which is not long, because all of it, every frantic decibel, is so deeply, hilariously unnecessary.
I start to giggle.
It bubbles up from somewhere genuine, and once it starts I can’t be bothered to stop it, and it tips over into a laugh, full and bright and entirely the wrong sound for a woman with broken glass at her throat.
The hall goes silent in stages, the way a room does when the thing happening in it stops following the script. Every eye swings to me. The shouting dies.
And I laugh harder, hard enough that the body caging mine shifts in what I can only interpret as bafflement, the hand at my neck loosening a degree, the glass easing back a breath from my skin.
I sigh, pure relief, and tilt my face up to look at him properly.
He’s upside-down from this angle and somehow even more handsome for it, which strikes me as genuinely unfair.
“Talentedly dangerous and hands-on?” I beam. “Absolute turn-on.”
I drop my voice to a confiding whisper, just for him, just under the held breath of the room.
“But if you’re going to threaten me with a good time, sugar, we do it in that specific corner over there.
It’s my favorite. The camera sits a fraction higher on that wall, so if you bend me over and have your way, a man built as wide as you covers the goodies completely.
” I pat the forearm crushing my ribs, fond as anything.
“I do love to entertain my audience. But my pretty pussy is precious and exceptionally valuable, and not just anyone has earned the right to enjoy the sight of her.”
I rise onto the very tips of my toes inside his grip, stretching my mouth up toward the underside of his stubbled jaw, and I let the next words ghost warm against his skin.
“She’s pierced, too.”
I wink, and sink back down off my toes, and feel the shudder that moves through the granite at my back like a fault line deciding whether to slip.
“Miss Valentine.”
The voice cuts across the silent hall the way a scalpel parts skin—quiet, unhurried, certain of its welcome.