3. ~Vex~ #3
I roll my eyes upward and find him at the far edge of the quarter, exactly where a sane man would not stand: Dr. Lucien Graves, in a suit this room cannot afford, arms crossed over that enormous chest, two fingers rising to nudge his glasses up the bridge of his nose as though he’s watching a lecture run slightly long.
There’s a bottleneck of armed guards between him and me and he regards them, and the broken glass at my throat, with the mild interest of a man checking the time.
So he came to watch the co-mingling. My session. My first one with him in the building.
How flattering…or is it telling?
I file it.
I stick my tongue out at him, because he’s being insufferable and someone should tell him.
Then I spin.
Fast—faster than a captured Omega should be able to move, faster than the arm around me can correct for, the spin I’ve drilled ten thousand times on poles they took away and beams they don’t know I practice on.
The motion peels me out of his hold and torques his own momentum against him, and the surprise of that alone rocks the big body back half a step. But the surprise that matters, the one that drops the hall’s collective jaw, isn’t the slip.
It’s that he’s no longer holding the broken bottle.
I am.
And it’s at his throat.
Silence, total and crystalline.
The tension in the room pulls so taut I could pluck it and play a note. I step into him instead of away, crowding the man who outweighs me twice over, the green glass steady against the thick artery in his neck, and I lean up to whisper the way you whisper a secret to a lover.
“Name.”
My voice has gone flat.
Stripped of the sugar, the skip, the lunatic music. Deadpan as a closed door.
And I watch what it does to him—watch his pale grey eyes drop from mine to my mouth and climb slowly back, watch the heavy bob of his throat against the edge of the glass, the swallow of a man who has just felt the temperature of a room change and found, to his evident interest, that he likes the cold.
“Riot,” he says. First word he’s given me.
Low, gravel-dragged, unbothered.
I grin, and I press—just a fraction, just enough—and a single bead of blood wells up bright against the green glass and slides down his throat in a thin red thread. He doesn’t flinch.
He watches me watch it, and his scent darkens, the smoke thickening, the iron note swelling to meet the fresh copper at his neck, and the air between us turns frankly obscene.
“No weapon raised against me shall prosper,” I murmur, sweet as a hymn. “Unless it’s cock. I’m partial to a thick, veiny thing weaponized against my exceptionally generous pussy. But that’s the only blade I let near me, sugar.”
I toss the bottle.
It shatters against the floor with a crash that lands like a gunshot in all that pin-drop quiet, glass skittering across the tile, and not one soul in the hall so much as breathes.
“Play with me next time,” I tell him, and turn to go. “And if you ignore me again, I’ll give you a concussion and tell them it was my alter-ego. Jezebel. Nasty piece of work, that one. Terrible with names.”
I’m three steps gone when his voice rolls after me, dry as ash.
“Probably not even her real fucking name.”
I stop.
Something shifts.
I feel it move through me like a draft through an opened door—the sugar draining out, the playground music cutting off mid-note, the bright manic surface of me going abruptly, glassily still.
When I look back over my shoulder, I already know the grin I’m wearing has changed into something with no warmth in it at all.
“Violet,” I say.
Just the one word.
But my voice has gone entirely wrong—lower, older, scraped clean of the performance—and he notices. He would. This one notices the way the Doc notices, with that same predator’s attention to the smallest tell.
I watch the involuntary tick at the corner of his eye, the flicker of a man who has just heard a true thing slip out from behind a hundred false ones and understood, instantly and entirely, that it was real.
That it cost me something to say.
We hold the look.
It pulses between us, taut and dark, carrying a great deal more than a taunt—recognition, maybe, the awful intimacy of being seen by something that hunts the way you hunt. For one suspended heartbeat I am not performing for anyone: not the cameras, not the room, not even myself.
Then I blink, and she folds back down into her box, and I am Vex again—sugar and skip and ungovernable grin, the goddess restored to her plinth.
“Bye, Riot.” I beam at him, light as spun candy. “Nice playing with you.”
I skip away humming, and I feel both their gazes ride me the whole length of the hall—the cynical pale grey at my back, the cold steel-blue ahead—two obsessions taking my measure from opposite ends of a room that emptied itself in fear of one of them and forgot to be afraid of me, which has always been their mistake.
The Doc gives Riot a long look as I approach, a wordless thing that passes between the two big men over the top of my head, territorial in a register too quiet for the guards to hear.
Then he uncrosses his arms, nudges his glasses once more, and turns on his heel—assuming, with that maddening certainty of his, that I’ll fall into step behind him.
I do.
Not because he expects it.
Because ever since the good doctor walked through Blackthorn’s doors with his fountain pen, library scent, and his habit of changing my orbit without asking, this dull and tidy little asylum of mine has become dangerously, deliciously interesting.
And a goddess never could resist a game with stakes worth the playing.