4. ~Riot~ #3
I’d let myself be burned down to the bones if it meant even one more second up close, one more rush of that scent, one more look at the crazy in her eyes.
I’m not sure if I can call it obsession yet.
What I do know, is it’s going to ruin me…and I can’t fucking wait.
Then it floods back in, and I’m just a wet animal kneeling in the dark again, biting my bottom lip hard enough to taste copper, wondering—idiot that the want has made me—whether she’s wild in bed.
She has to be.
A creature like that, all coiled grace and live-wire defiance, doesn’t go quiet and obliging when the lights drop. She’d fight me for the wheel. She’d laugh in my face and dare me to keep up.
Though there’s the rub, isn’t there. Prisoners don’t get beds for that kind of thing.
Mental cases get less. We get padded corners and supervised hours and a camera angled to make sure nothing private stays that way.
There’s no soft place anywhere in this building for a man to lay a woman down and take his time.
For her, though—I’d find a way.
I’d make a way out of solid rock with these hands if it came to it. She deserves better than a wall and an audience. She deserves to be laid down somewhere that doesn’t echo, somewhere warm, somewhere she could close those mismatched eyes and trust the dark for once.
She deserves tenderness.
Says the man who had her locked in a death grip an hour ago with broken glass kissing her pulse.
The hypocrisy’s rich enough to choke on, and I laugh at it, low and rough, the sound swallowed by the running water.
This must be the thing they’re always going on about.
The dangerous folklore of it—a certain woman who walks into a man’s life and rearranges the furniture of him without asking. She can’t change me; nothing changes a man like me, the bones are set, the cement’s long dry. But I’d let her think she had.
I’d play remade if that’s the price of standing close to her. I’d wear whatever shape validates the simple brutal fact of what she is.
A dangerous queen.
The realest thing I’ve scented in a building full of liars.
Vex. Sweet Violet.
A puzzle, and I’ve always had a weakness for the kind that bites back when you reach for it.
The cold comes back for me then, the way it always does once the heat of her image burns off—reclaiming my spine inch by inch, settling its weight into my joints, reminding me where I am and what I am and how little either fact has ever mattered.
I breathe through it, slow and even, the loose-hipped ride.
Somewhere above me the water keeps falling and the hidden lens keeps drinking, and I picture whoever’s on the other end of it, some bored soul in a monitoring room watching the asylum’s worst acquisition kneel in the dark and grin at nothing. I hope they’re unsettled.
I hope they go home tonight and can’t quite say why. It’s the only courtesy I have left to extend, and I extend it generously.
My grin is splitting my face ear to ear when the camouflaged stone groans and gives—a section of the wall I’d catalogued as solid swinging inward on a hidden seam, because this place hides its doors the way it hides its cameras, the way it hides everything—and there he is.
Doc.
Backlit and bone-dry and impeccable in the doorway, arms folded over that ridiculous chest, watching me drip and grin with the flat unamused patience of a man who has been kept waiting by a child.
“Was that necessary?” he says.
My cheeks ache, I’m grinning so wide.
“The neck-gripping,” I ask him, “or the part where I jerked off to the idea of that Omega being mine?”
“Ours,” Doc corrects, mild as milk.
That stops me.
I arch a brow at him, water sluicing off it, and let out a low appreciative whistle.
“Well. You’ve got a crush, Doc?”
“And you,” he sighs, leaning a shoulder into the doorframe like he’s got all night and none of my problems, “have an obsession. The distinction matters less than you’d hope.
” His pale eyes move over me, clinical, cataloguing, finding the blue of my lips and the violence of my shivering and rating none of it worth a comment. “Ready to come out?”
“Gotta wash off my cum first.”
“Use a towel.” He says it with an eyeroll so dry it could start a fire, like he’s discussed my emissions a hundred times and found them tedious on every occasion.
Then, almost as an afterthought, the thing that actually came down here to be said:
“Crowe’s here.”
I whistle again.
Longer this time. A drawn-out two-note thing, the kind you’d use to call a dog or warn a friend, because the arrival of Silas Crowe is both.
“Well, well,” I drawl, tasting the shape of it. “Now the holy trinity’s assembled.”
Three of us in one building.
The doctor who studies the monsters, the killer they couldn’t cage anywhere else, and the man who makes the dead beautiful.
If the people who run this place had a single working instinct between them, they’d feel the floor tilting under their feet right about now. They don’t. They never do.
That’s the whole reason men like us end up in rooms like this in the first place.
“Crowe volunteering again,” I muse, mostly to watch Doc’s face do nothing. “Let me guess. The institute thinks a soft-spoken undertaker with a poetry habit is a stabilizing influence on the violent ones.”
“The institute,” Doc says, “thinks a great many things that aren’t true. It’s the building’s defining feature.”
“Does he know about her yet?”
Something moves behind the glasses, gone too fast to name.
“He will.”
Two words, flat as a closed ledger, and I file the weather of them away, because the day Silas Crowe scents what I scented in that playpen is a day I’d pay good money to witness.
The man speaks about death like it’s a courtship.
I can only imagine what he’ll make of a woman who walks toward it humming.
“Don’t do that shit again,” Doc says—the neck, the bottle, the spectacle—and pushes off the frame to go.
He’s a stride away, half-turned into the corridor, when I call after him.
“What do I have to do to get a bed in that playpen?”
He pauses.
Looks back over his shoulder, two fingers rising to nudge the glasses up his nose, the gesture he hides behind the way I hide behind a grin.
“You’re not going back into the playpen.”
“You and I both know I am,” I tell him pleasantly, “so skip to the part where you answer the question.”
“You’re not getting a bed.”
“She wants a bed.”
That lands.
He holds the look a beat longer than he means to—I see it, the half-second of recalculation, the same flicker I caught in her when I said the wrong true thing—and then he turns his face away from me, which is the closest a man that controlled comes to flinching.
“I think she’d like pink silk sheets,” I add, helpful as anything.
He doesn’t answer.
He just walks, those measured unhurried strides carrying him off down the corridor, swallowing him into the building’s white throat, and the camouflaged stone begins to grind its slow way shut between us.
I tip my head back into the freezing flow and laugh—really laugh, the manic, full-bodied kind that bounces off four stone corners and comes back at me distorted, the laugh that empties the wing around me the way her presence empties a room around her.
Because I know exactly what just happened.
He’s going to leave me to five more minutes of chilled insanity.
A small, petty, doctorly punishment for the spectacle, dealt out with an eyeroll and a sigh. Fine. I’ll kneel here grinning in the cold and the dark-adjacent and take it like a gift.
Because I also know, sure as the blood under my skin, sure as the scent that won’t wash off, sure as the hook she set in me without even trying?—
That dangerous queen of ours is getting her silky pink bed in that playpen.
And I’m the one who’s going to lay her down in it.