4. ~Riot~
~Riot~
Ishould’ve killed her when I had the chance.
It’s the only sensible thought left in my skull, and I keep turning it over like a coin worn smooth, because the rest of my thoughts have all gone somewhere warm and pink and dangerous, and the coin is the only cold thing in here that isn’t the water.
The water is everywhere.
It comes down from somewhere in the dark above me, a thin relentless flow gone glacial by the time it finds my shoulders, sheeting over my bare back, pooling around my knees where I’m made to kneel on stone that stopped having a temperature hours ago.
I’m naked.
Stripped to nothing and folded down into the center of a chamber built from old wet rock, four corners I’ve been staring at long enough to know each crack in them by name, the cold wrung so deep into me that my lips have surely gone the blue of a drowned man’s.
My body trembles in long mechanical waves.
I haven’t bothered to notice in a while.
Noticing is a luxury, and I learned to stop spending on luxuries a long time ago.
My knees are numb. That’s a mercy, actually—they screamed for the first stretch of this, the stone grinding into bone, and now they’ve gone quiet under the same anesthetic chill that’s claimed the rest of me.
The whole machine of my body has dialed down to a single low hum of suffering, steady and survivable, the kind of pain a man can live inside if he’s built the right rooms in his head to live in.
And here’s the part the staff will never understand, the reason their punishment is a gift I won’t thank them for: this is still better than the hole.
Solitary.
The dark box.
The enclosed nothing where the walls sit close enough to brush both shoulders and the lid of it presses down on the air until breathing feels like theft.
They think that’s the worse sentence. They think the cold-water chamber is the harder one, and they’re wrong, and I’d never correct them, because a man should keep the location of his own throat to himself.
Enclosed dark does something to me.
Reminds the animal part of my brain of a long, narrow place that begs a body to lie down in it and be still and let the earth close over—a coffin, if you want the ugly word, and I don’t, so I shove the thought back down into the pit I keep it in and weight the lid. Not tonight. We don’t do that tonight.
So I’ll take the water.
The water lets me see the corners. The water lets me kneel in the open with my eyes wide and my lungs my own.
Freeze me to death in a room I can see the edges of, and I’ll kneel here grinning, because the alternative lives in the dark, and I’ve made my peace with cold the way I never could with black.
They brought me here in a transport rig with more restraints than a man has limbs, six guards and a sedative gun and a transfer order stamped with words like exceptional risk and no general population. The asylum took delivery of me the way you’d take delivery of something that ticks.
Signed for me.
Locked me down.
Decided a cold-water chamber and a few stress positions would teach me the shape of my new cage.
Cute.
As if a cage has ever been the thing that taught me anything except how cages come apart.
The water finds a fresh rhythm against the back of my neck, and somewhere past the numbness my body files a complaint I won’t be reading.
Cold like this stops being temperature after a while and becomes a kind of pressure instead, a slow vise tightening behind the sternum, squeezing the breath shorter, narrowing the world down to the next inhale and the one after that. I’ve learned to ride it.
You ride the cold the way you ride a bad mount—loose in the hips, soft in the hands, never letting the thing feel you tense, because the second it knows you’re afraid it throws you.
I’ve lost count of the hours.
Time turns to soup in a place like this, thins out and loses its edges. But I haven’t spent the hours counting cracks or cataloguing pain or doing any of the dull penance this was designed to extract from me.
I’ve spent every frozen minute of it thinking about her.
That woman.
That impossible, candy-scented contradiction—perfection sitting at the absolute peak of insanity, a thing so finely made and so completely unhinged that the two facts shouldn’t be able to share a body and somehow do, seamlessly, like she was assembled on purpose by someone with a cruel sense of art.
She skipped into a quarter every other living soul in that hall had fled, dropped into a crouch at my feet, and dared—fucking dared—to counter me.
Nobody counters me.
Men who’ve heard a fraction of what these hands did in that prison go quiet and small and grateful for distance the second they catch my scent.
She caught it, broke it down behind those mismatched eyes like she was taking apart a clock to see what made it tick, and then she drank my beer and told me it tasted better than piss.
They call it a riot in the files, which is a small and tidy word for what it actually was.
A wing of two hundred men and one spark and a grievance old enough to have grown teeth, and somewhere in the middle of it, me—uncuffed for once, unguarded for a handful of minutes that turned out to be all the time the worst version of me has ever needed.
I don’t reach for the memory often.
It doesn’t come back as guilt, which is its own kind of damning; it comes back as quiet. A red and ringing quiet, the strange peace of a man who has stopped pretending to be anything other than the instrument he was built into.
They lost count of the bodies.
They didn’t lose count of mine, because mine kept standing, and that—more than the blood—is what earned me the transport rig and the asylum and the word exceptional on my paperwork.
So no.
Nobody crosses an empty room to steal my drink. The whole world has learned to give me the wide berth my reputation buys, and I’d gotten comfortable inside that moat of fear, mistaking it for solitude, mistaking solitude for peace.
And then a woman in a pink jumpsuit looked at the moat, decided it was a puddle, and skipped straight across it humming.
The cut on my neck still stings.
The chilled water keeps finding it, working into the thin seam her glass opened under my jaw, a small bright line of heat in all this cold. She did that. Pressed the broken bottle to my throat with a hand that didn’t shake and a voice scraped flat of all its sugar and drew my blood with a smile.
And God help me, it made me hard.
Hard and mean and stupidly, cynically delighted, in a way I haven’t felt in more years than I’ve kept track of.
It took everything in me—every scrap of the control they don’t believe I own—not to come up off that wall, peel her off her own clever little reversal, haul her into that corner she’d so generously diagrammed for me, and give her precisely the good time she’d threatened.
Right there.
Against the wall, under the camera she’d angled for an audience, with forty terrified spectators learning what the goddess sounds like when she finally comes down off her plinth.
I didn’t.
Restraint. Look at me…being civilized.
But next time they unlock that playpen and let me into the same air as her, I’m not wasting a single second on the pleasantries.
I need to know what she feels like.
Need to bury this ache to the root in the wet pulsing heat of her and find out if the piercing she bragged about drags the way I’ve been imagining it dragging for hours.
Pierced…
Dangerous little thing told me her cunt was pierced, leaning up on her toes against my mouth like the information was a party favor, and I’ve been paying for that sentence ever since.
Here’s what eats at me, kneeling in the cold like a sinner who’s lost the thread of his prayer.
I don’t obsess.
I haven’t obsessed over an Omega in all my cynical years—not since before, not since I was a man people still called normal, back when wanting someone was a simple appetite you fed and forgot, one warm body interchangeable with the next.
I’ve had lust. Plenty. Lust is cheap and quick and means nothing.
This is not lust.
This is a hook set deep in something that doesn’t usually have a soft enough part left to hook into.
Because she had it all—the agility, the grace, the sheer brass-balled nerve to put glass to the throat of the most dangerous man in a building full of dangerous men and call it foreplay.
And the best of it, the detail I keep circling back to like a tongue to a broken tooth: she didn’t know who I was.
Didn’t know, didn’t care, didn’t do the arithmetic everyone else does the moment they smell the blood under my cologne. Every other coward in that room had fled to the far wall to avoid breathing my air. She crossed the whole empty quarter just to steal my drink.
Laughable. Magnificent.
I don’t have the vocabulary for what it is, and I’ve never needed vocabulary before.
I look down at myself, there in the streaming cold, and confirm what I already knew from the ache.
Hard. Painfully, defiantly hard, in a chamber engineered to shrivel a man down to nothing, where the water runs cold enough to make the whole idea of arousal a biological joke. My body has overruled the temperature. My body has cast its vote, and it voted for her.
This Omega is going to be a problem.
I know it the way I know the weight of my own fists. A problem dressed in pink, skipping toward me across a room she should’ve had the good sense to fear.
And the worst of it is I can still smell her.
Hours later, soaked to the marrow in a freezing stone box, her scent is still wrapped around me like a spell somebody cast and forgot to lift.
Strawberries gone warm and soft. Spun sugar.
A deep rich note underneath like cake split open while it’s still hot from the oven, sweet enough to ache the back of the throat.
It clings to the inside of my nose, to the place on my mouth where she breathed her party-favor secret, and the cold can’t scrub it loose.