5. ~Vex~ #2
Doc.
Three guards arranged in their nervous little crescent.
And—I tilt my head, still rotating in slow lazy circles—some random woman.
I keep spinning, and I let my gaze snag on her each time she swings back into view, and I notice, with a flicker of something I refuse to name out loud, a small ungovernable pinch low in my chest.
Jealousy.
Sourceless, baseless, sprung from absolutely nowhere, and pointed—if I’m honest, which I try not to be—somewhere in the vicinity of the woman standing too close to the man who gave me my gift.
I file it under things to interrogate later, in a quieter hour, when I can take it out and examine it without an audience. Obviously not now.
My eyes find Doc again, on and off, snatches of him stitched together between rotations—arms crossed, glasses catching the light, that enormous stillness of his anchoring the whole nervous room.
And he doesn’t rush me.
That’s the thing that knocks me sideways, gentler and harder than any drop ever could.
He doesn’t bark at me to come down, doesn’t order me clocked out of my euphoria and folded back into compliance the way every other set of eyes in this building would.
He simply waits. Watches. Lets me have the last of it.
And it’s so unpredictable of him, so contrary to every instinct this place runs on, that I almost miss the rest of what’s written on him.
He’s admiring me.
Not leering. Not assessing.
Admiring—the way a man admires a thing he finds beautiful and dangerous in equal measure and has decided he wants to keep looking at for a good long while—and that does something perilous to the shattered, taped-together ruin I keep where a heart is supposed to live.
I feel a piece of it shift. A fragment I’d long ago swept into a corner lift, turn, and settle back almost into place, and I want to scream at it to stay broken, because broken things can’t be used as a leash.
So I do what I always do with a feeling I can’t afford.
I throw my body at gravity to outrun it.
I let myself drop—a clean unspooling plummet down the length of the steel—and the three guards flinch as one, a synchronized little jerk of useless hands toward weapons that couldn’t catch a falling woman if they tried.
Doc doesn’t flinch.
Doc stays carved from stone.
Except…
I catch it, even upside down and falling, because catching things is what I do: the smallest betrayal in his stance.
A half-shift of his weight onto the front foot.
A fractional uncrossing of one arm. The aborted beginning of a lunge, a body moving to catch me before its owner gave it permission—and then the visible, deliberate effort it costs him to clock himself, to lock it down, to remember that he is a composed man in an expensive suit and not whatever creature just tried to fling itself across a room to keep me off the floor.
I tuck and arrest the fall at the last possible instant, a hairsbreadth above the concrete, catching the steel and bleeding the last of my momentum into a slow controlled glide—a cheap, theatrical little trick I learned as a clumsy novice and have used to stop hearts ever since.
My bare feet meet the cold floor without a sound.
Then I let go of the pole and stand there a moment, swaying, the blood relocating, the room still finishing its last few turns inside my skull. I breathe. Recalibrate. And the entire time, my gaze drifts back to the woman.
She’s a redhead. Deep, arterial red, scraped back from a face built on hard clean angles, the kind of beauty that looks like it would file a report about you.
A lanyard at her collar I clock and read in a single pass— S.
HALE, and beneath it the letters of an agency that doesn’t answer to this institute.
And here’s the predicament that prickles the hairs at my nape: I can’t scent her.
Nothing.
Not Alpha, not Omega, not Beta, not the faintest thread of a designation—just a clean, deliberate, manufactured nothing where a person’s scent ought to be.
Blockers.
The good kind, professional, the type a person wears on purpose when she walks into a room full of designations and refuses to give any of them a single thing to read.
In a building where scent is the oldest currency, she’s arrived carrying none, and that makes her either very smart or very frightened, and I’d bet my pole it’s the first.
She holds my stare.
Doesn’t blink, soften, or do the nervous flick-away the guards do.
In nine cases out of ten a look like that is a threat, a challenge, a thrown gauntlet. I don’t feel threatened. I feel the slow delicious uncoiling of interest, because if there is one flavor this dull institution has starved me of, it’s a worthy opponent.
I do so love competition.
“Does she simply stare for shits and giggles?” the redhead asks, to no one in particular, her voice as flat and unscented as the rest of her.
One of the guards mutters, “You’re probably a threat.”
“She doesn’t see you as a threat.” Doc says it lightly, certainly, the way another man might announce the time. “She sees competition.”
Every head in the room turns to him. Mine included. And across the small charged distance, his pale steel eyes find my mismatched ones and hold them, and we share a look that has the texture of a private joke and the weight of something else entirely.
“She thrives off that,” he adds, softer, just for me, though the whole room hears it. “Don’t you?”
My grin spreads slow and haunting across my face.
He’s read me again.
He keeps doing that, the infuriating, intoxicating man, peeling me open in front of witnesses like it’s nothing, and I cannot decide whether I want to bite him or keep him.
“Whatever did I do to deserve the company, Doc?” I drag his nickname out sweet and slow, and I tip him a wink that makes the nearest guard shift his weight.
“What great honor does a girl have, to be graced by you in person?” I hum the question, sauntering backward the two steps to my new pole, and lean against it like it’s an old friend, crossing my arms beneath my breasts in a way I know exactly the effect of.
“And thank you,” I add, honeyed, deliberate, watching his face, “for the gift.”
There. The smallest thing.
A muscle at the corner of his jaw, the ghost of an eyeroll caught and strangled before it can finish being born—the visible labor of a man refusing to react to me.
Which means I made him want to.
Which means I’m getting in.
Excellent.
“Charming,” Hale observes, dry as the blockers must have made her.
“The file warned me you’d be charming. It’s the first line, actually.
Before the arson, before the diagnoses. Subject is disarmingly charming.
” She steps a fraction closer, and the guards tense, and she ignores them entirely, which earns a flicker of my genuine respect.
“I find charm is usually a wall. People build the prettiest ones around the ugliest rooms.”
“Ooh.” I press a hand to my chest, delighted. “She reads. Doc, she reads. Wherever did you find her?”
“I didn’t,” Doc murmurs. “She found us.”
That lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there, a small cold splinter, because a man like Doc does not say a thing like that idly, and an investigator does not walk into a private fortress carrying no scent and a face like a verdict unless someone, somewhere, has decided the bodies in this building are no longer an internal matter.
“We’re investigating you.”
The redhead says it plainly, no ceremony, and she uses my real name to say it—the long, dead, dredged-up sound of it, Genevieve, the name that belongs to a girl who doesn’t exist anymore and never really got the chance to.
Something in me goes still.
The grin doesn’t fall, exactly, but the performance behind it falters; my shoulders sink a fraction, and I tilt my head at her like a confused little bird, the picture of harmless bewilderment, because harmless bewilderment has gotten me out of more rooms than any lockpick ever has.
“Investigating,” I echo. “Investigating what?”
No one answers.
The guards study their boots. Hale studies me.
The silence stretches and sours, and I do what I always do when a room decides to withhold from me: I turn to the single person in it I know will crack, because he can’t quite help himself where I’m concerned, because I’ve already proven I can make him react.
I look at Doc.
Hold his gaze and I pour everything into the look—the wide mismatched eyes, the lavender and the emerald both, the silent, seeping, soul-deep plea that has nothing to do with madness and everything to do with the simple animal fact that I have decided he is mine to extract answers from.
I hold it for ten seconds. Twenty. A full, unblinking thirty, long enough that the room forgets to breathe, long enough to watch the certainty in him bend under the weight of whatever it is I do to him that he hasn’t named yet either.
He caves.
“The death of a patient,” Doc says quietly. “Wren Halloway. East wing. They found her three hours ago.”
The bruised-peony girl. The sweet beaten thing two doors down who still flinched.
Gone.
Something genuine moves through me at that, quick and inconvenient—not grief, I retired grief years ago, but a cousin of it, a cold clean anger that someone reached into my building and snuffed out one of the harmless ones.
Wren wouldn’t have hurt a fly.
Wren apologized to doors when she bumped them. And while the inconvenient feeling rises, the other thing rises faster, the part of me that never truly sleeps: the machine. It starts to turn behind my harmless tilted head, sorting, mapping, asking the only questions that matter.
Three hours ago. East wing. A body, and a frame being built around me beam by beam, and a scentless stranger carrying a badge that doesn’t belong to this place.
Someone is playing my own game on my own board.
How rude…yet interesting.
And then he holds my eyes, and he gives me the rest of it, because he’s decided—for reasons I intend to spend a great deal of time unpacking—that I should hear it from him.
“And the prime suspect,” he says, “is you.”