5. ~Vex~
~Vex~
There’s an old saying—some tired little proverb about how, if a man could, he would—and I am pleased to report that it has been proven true in the deepest, dampest dungeon of this enchained madhouse, with one delicious amendment.
This particular man is a sexy, four-eyed genius.
And he could…so he did.
He has spoiled me with my very first gift inside seventy-two hours of meeting me, which is faster than any Alpha has ever managed to put something shiny in my hands, and the men who tried before him had the advantage of not being separated from me by a court order and a wall of reinforced glass.
I have been staring at it for an hour.
Sitting cross-legged on my bunk like a marionette someone forgot to operate, chin in my hands, gaze fixed and unblinking on the thing that materialized in the corner of my cell while I was off being therapized.
Because that’s the protocol now, apparently.
A girl gets a broken bottle pressed to her throat in the playpen, and suddenly she’s a delicate flower who requires counseling sessions and a few days of careful spoiling so she doesn’t suffer one of her infamous cynical crash-outs.
I was meant to be at lunch.
Somewhere with plastic cutlery and a counselor who believes in me. How am I supposed to sit through reconstituted mashed potatoes when a prize possession of gleaming luxury has appeared in the perfect corner of my world, glittering like a brand-new toy desperate to be played with?
Maybe that’s the very reason I won’t touch it.
I dare to acknowledge some small, soft, badly behaved part of me—the part I keep gagged and bound in the cellar of myself—is afraid that if I touch it, I’ll love it.
And I’ll love it too hard.
Loving things too hard is precisely how they get taken away from you in a place like this, by people who have learned that the surest leash on a dangerous animal is the thing it cannot bear to lose.
I bite down on my bottom lip, hard, just to feel the small bright pain of it confirm that I’m awake and this is real.
I’ve been given things before.
Mountains of things, in the life that ended in a fire of my own design. Dorian buried me in gifts the way men like him always do—handbags with names I was supposed to feel something about, jewelry chosen by an assistant, a hamster I actually loved more than the man who bought him.
But those weren’t gifts.
Those were down payments. Bribes against a future invoice, currency to keep the pretty Omega decorative, quiet, and his. Not one of them ever required him to look at me long enough to learn what I’d actually want.
This is a pole.
A dancer’s pole, installed in the one corner of a cell where the light pools just so.
Whoever ordered it didn’t skim a file and guess; they watched, listened, and they understood that the fastest way to the soft underbelly of a woman who trusts nothing is to hand her back the single thing that ever made her feel free.
That’s not a bribe.
That’s a man who has been paying attention.
Which is so much worse.
Because I’ve been rewarded. Or spoiled. I haven’t yet decided which word fits, and the distinction matters more than anyone watching through the walls could possibly understand.
A reward is earned, a transaction, a thing I can hold at arm’s length and feel nothing about.
Spoiling is different. Spoiling means someone looked at me and wanted to please me, wanted to watch me light up, and that—that is a far more dangerous gift than a length of polished steel, and I do not have a cellar deep enough to keep it in.
Finally, I rise.
I hold my breath the whole way across the cell, bare feet silent on the cold floor, approaching the new piece of metal where it stands floor to ceiling and catches the flat overhead light along its length like an invitation written in a language only my hands remember.
Anchored properly. Mounted into a ceiling with no void to crawl into and a flange I’ll never work loose, monitored, I’m certain, from an angle I can’t blind. Someone thought this through.
Someone gave me my favorite toy and made very sure it could only ever be a toy.
Clever. Infuriating.
There it is again, that maddening pair living in the same decision.
When my fingertips finally meet the cool steel, I shiver like I’ve been zapped—a current leaping the gap between the metal and me, racing up my arm and down my spine and pooling somewhere low and warm and entirely uninterested in my dignity.
It’s real.
Solid and chilled and real beneath my palm.
Pole work should be the bane of my existence. It’s the single thing on this earth that can swallow me whole for hours and spit me back out without a shred of resentment, and a woman who counts control as her only currency ought to despise anything with that much power over her attention.
I don’t. I never have.
It’s the one surrender I permit myself.
And the very best part is that I have music.
It’s one of the few luxuries this cell permits—a small earned speaker I keep dutifully charged, and a modest hoard of discs, a curated set of songs cleared by some committee that clearly never listened past the first thirty seconds of any of them.
I don’t notice the exact moment I cross the room and thumb the speaker awake.
I don’t notice when I peel myself out of the pink jumpsuit either, until I’m standing in nothing but a bra and a scrap of underwear I’m suddenly grateful I bothered with this morning, because I am not in the mood to gift the wall-cameras a show today. Today isn’t for them.
The music spills out low and dark and sinful, that slow narcotic build that swells beneath your sternum and pulls—all dim-lit, after-hours seduction, the kind of sound that makes a body remember it has hips.
Magnetic. Sin set to a beat.
It fills the cell, and it fills me, and the corner of the world I’ve been afraid to touch becomes the only thing in it.
I test the steel first, the way you greet an old lover you’re not sure still wants you. A casual circle, one hand light on the metal, my body swinging lazy around its axis, feeling the cool kiss of it against my palm and the give of the floor under the ball of my foot.
Then I stop being careful.
I dive. I go up—ballsy, greedy, all in—and my body remembers everything my mind swore it had forgotten. The climb. The grip switch at the top. The slow inverted spiral down, ankles locked, the world turning gentle circles around me.
Moves I haven’t pulled in years come unspooling out of my muscles like they’d only been waiting politely for me to ask.
I spin until the cell smears into ribbons of light.
I climb until my shoulders sing.
Sweat blooms at my spine and slides between my shoulder blades and makes the steel both treacherous and perfect, and I lean into the risk of that, into the acrobatic edges where one bad grip means a real fall, because the danger is the point, the danger is the whole gorgeous point—it wires me up bright and electric and alive.
And for a little while I am not what they say I am.
Up here, mid-spin, the cell stops being a cell.
The reinforced glass and the mag-locks and the little glass eyes in the ceiling all dissolve into smeared light, and the only laws left are the ones my own body writes—grip and release, tension and surrender, the long elastic moment at the apex of a trick where I belong to nothing, not gravity, not the state, not the men who think they own the air I breathe.
My scent thickens with the effort, strawberries and warm sugar blooming off my damp skin and crowding the small room until I’m breathing myself, drunk on my own perfume and the dark pull of the music and the simple animal joy of a body permitted, for once, to do exactly what it was made for.
I’m not a patient.
Not a criminal folded into a cell.
Not the grand prize on her plinth or the lunatic in the file or the goddess the Alpha wing crosses itself against. I’m a wild animal loosed across the open field of some impossible private oasis, running flat-out under a sky no one built to contain me, and there is no schedule, no count, no glass, no leash.
Just the orbit of the steel, the dark pull of the music, and the clean honest burn of my own body doing the one thing it was always best at.
Here’s the secret folded inside the freedom, the one I let myself look at only when I’m spinning too fast for anyone to read my face: I am not the fool I perform.
I never have been.
I could take this fortress apart in a handful of moves if the whim ever truly took me. Could play this whole watching, counting, scenting institution into checkmate so fast the board wouldn’t have time to understand it had lost.
The patience is a choice.
The madness is a costume.
And the only reason the king still stands is that I haven’t yet decided what I want more than the game.
I’m so far gone—so deep inside the music and the motion and the dangerous clarity of my own thoughts—that I don’t hear the cell door at all.
Not the buzz. Not the thunk.
Nothing—until a voice cuts through the dark velvet of the song and lands in the room like a dropped key.
“She’s clearly breaking the pole in. Climbing it would be impossible from a standing mount; I already checked the cameras.”
That voice.
I’d know it now in a crowd, in a coma, at the bottom of a well.
Low, unhurried, and certain of its welcome.
I pout before I even open my eyes, because the intrusion means the freedom is over, and because some childish corner of me wants him to know I’m put out.
When I do crack my lids, the world is upside down and turning, and it takes a beat to assemble the facts: I’m at the very top of the pole, ankles crossed and locked around the steel, body hanging inverted, arms dangling toward a floor that is presently above my head.
I’ve been spinning a great deal longer than I realized.
The room swims when I try to hold it still.
I peer down—or up, the geometry’s a negotiation right now—through the curtain of my own hanging hair, and I take inventory of my audience.