7. ~Silas~ #2
She doesn’t do it quickly. She does it slow, deliberate, obscene—cheeks hollowing, tongue dragging the length of my finger like it’s a lollipop she intends to make last, and the entire time her mismatched gaze never once leaves mine, bright and challenging and entirely, gloriously aware of precisely what she’s doing to the temperature of the room.
Does my cock twitch?
It does. How could it not?
The simple animal fact of her hot mouth working my finger has already sent my imagination galloping somewhere it has no business being—somewhere that involves those same sinful lips wrapped around a far less clinical part of me, sucking just as dangerously, slicking it with saliva like a good and greedy Omega earning her keep. I keep my face a polite, pleasant mask.
Inside it, I am briefly, comprehensively undone.
When my finger plops free of her lips, the sound rings out scandalous and wet in the cathedral hush, and I miss the warmth of her mouth the very instant it’s gone.
And here is the thing I will examine later, alone, in the cold private quiet of my workroom where I do my honest thinking: she knew.
She knew the test was real, knew her saliva was the proof that would clear her, and she could have offered it in a dozen clinical, sexless ways.
She chose that one. Slow, obscene, and eye-locked, performed for me and aimed at me and calibrated, I’d stake my reputation on it, to learn precisely how much it would cost my composure.
It cost a great deal, and the look she gave me as my finger left her mouth said she’d read every coin of it.
I have spent a decade being the most unreadable man in any room. She unstitched me with a parlor trick and a smile, and the worst part, the part that has me hopelessly far gone already, is that I want to let her do it again.
Then I am all efficiency, because that’s how I hide my appetites.
I produce a small kit from my coat with my free hand, swab the glistening finger along a treated patch, and seal it.
Without waiting for the room to find its voice, I sanitize, glove, and crouch to the body, drawing the slender tools I need to take a matched sample from the dead woman’s slack and waiting mouth.
“What the hell,” Hale finally manages, “are you doing?”
“Chemistry,” I say, almost tenderly, working. “The most honest language there is. It never flatters, lies, or develops feelings that ruin the third act.”
I draw the two swabs together over the little reagent card, and I already know—I knew the moment I caught the faint bitter-almond wrongness layered under the bleach—what the card is about to confess.
“Watch the colors.”
The reagent blooms. Two patches. Two different colors—one a flat, innocent grey, the other a deep and damning violet that has no business existing in a healthy mouth.
I let the room stare.
Vex does not stare. Vex crosses her arms beneath her breasts, tilts her head with the lazy curiosity of a cat watching a slower animal work, and speaks.
“I follow the parlor trick. You took my saliva to confirm there’s no match on the body—clearing my DNA, lovely, thorough.
” Her brow creases, prettily, dangerously.
“But I distinctly heard someone whisper strangulation when they hauled me in. So which is it? Because those bruises on her throat and a swab of her mouth are telling two very different bedtime stories.”
All eyes swing to her.
She looks semi-bored and faintly intrigued, and adds, conversationally, “And for the record—I’m not especially inclined toward the woman-on-woman persuasion.
Nothing against it; a wonderful time for those it suits.
Simply not my particular flavor of sin. So the notion that I’d put my mouth on the subject before killing her is, frankly, a bit insulting to my taste. ”
I could kiss her.
I settle for a smirk and the pleasure of confirming she’s already raced ahead to the answer.
“You heard strangulation,” I tell her, “because you were meant to. Everyone was. It’s a generous lie—violent, visible, the sort of death a frightened administration can hang on a violent, visible patient without straining itself. The truth is quieter and far more interesting.”
“Mm.” Vex’s eyes have gone bright and fixed, all the boredom burned off, the lunatic mask slipping to show the cold clean intelligence beneath.
“A quiet death dressed up loud. Whoever did this wanted two stories told at once—the loud one for the cameras and the cheap seats, and the quiet one for whoever was clever enough to taste the difference.” She tilts her head at the corpse, almost approving.
“That’s not panic. That’s composition. I do admire a tidy hand. ”
“Don’t admire it too loudly,” Doc murmurs from the wall. “They’re trying to hang it on you.”
“Oh, I know.” She beams. “That’s the rudest part. Stealing my whole aesthetic.”
“The throat is theatre,” I tell the room, rising, stripping the gloves with a snap.
“The bruising is a decoy, applied with care, postmortem or near enough that the distinction won’t survive a real autopsy.
She wasn’t strangled. She was poisoned—something delivered orally, something that reacts with the enzymes in saliva, which is exactly why the violet bloomed in her swab and not in our charming volunteer’s.
” I tap the card. “Which tells you the most important thing in this room. The agent had to be passed mouth to mouth, or placed directly on the tongue. It cannot be handled by fingers and left behind, because?—”
“Why not the fingers?” Hale interrupts. “Why go to the trouble of the mouth at all?”
“Because this institution keeps every patient’s prints on file,” I say, with the gentle patience one extends to a slow but earnest student.
“She died three hours ago. Your own team will have lifted every print from the scene and run it against the internal database before they so much as photographed the walls—standard procedure, the first reflex of any competent unit. And it came back negative. No patient prints where they shouldn’t be.
Which is the only reason you’re reduced to dragging a questionable, convenient, beautiful suspect to the crime scene to coax a reaction out of her she has no reason to give—because the evidence already cleared everyone it could point at, and somebody upstairs would still very much prefer a villain in pink. ”
Hale’s jaw works. The granite groans.
I turn to my swan.
“And what,” I ask her, sweet as a hymn, “were you doing three hours ago, my Sweet Peony?”
“Pole dancing,” she beams, with the unrepentant pride of a saint announcing a miracle.
I arch a single brow.
From the wall, Doc supplies, dry as a struck match, “She has a pole. In her cell. It’s monitored.”
I nod, slow and satisfied, and turn to face the held breath of the entire room.
“Then there it is. She didn’t do it. The chemistry confirms what her alibi already shouts.
Go find yourselves another monster.” I let the smile turn, just slightly, toward the grave.
“Your killer used the mouth precisely because the mouth cleans itself. Food, water, time…any of them flush the trace and break the chain. And…” I check my watch with theatrical leisure.
“lunch was served an hour ago, across every wing. Whoever carried that drug between their teeth has eaten it away by now. The trail isn’t cold. The trail has been digested.”
Hale’s frown carves deep.
Behind her, a few of the forensic techs have gone quiet and thoughtful in the specific way of professionals realizing the loud stranger is entirely, infuriatingly correct.
“That’s—” one of them starts, then stops, glancing at his colleagues for permission to agree out loud.
“The oral route would account for the negative print sweep. And the postmortem bruising pattern, if he’s right about the lividity—” He trails off under Hale’s glare, but the damage is done; the theory has found its second believer, and theories, like rot, spread fastest once the first soft spot gives.
And then—clapping. Bright, gleeful, unhurried applause, and every head turns to find its source already known: Vex, beaming, applauding me like I’ve closed the third act of her favorite play.
“Okay, that was genuinely incredible,” she declares. “When are we doing a crime-night marathon? I have theories about every unsolved case ever televised and absolutely no one worthy to share them with.”
“Anytime you’d like, Sweet,” I tell her, and I mean it down to the marrow.
“Should you,” Hale says acidly, “be flirting with your patient?”
“Last I checked,” I muse, “she isn’t my patient.” I gesture, fond, toward the body on the floor. “That one is. She’s mine now. I have a funeral to design and a floral arrangement to agonize over. So flirting with Genevieve?—”
“Vex,” she sing-songs.
“—with Vex,” I amend smoothly, “isn’t harmful in the slightest.”
“It’s harmful because you’re setting expectations,” Hale snaps.
“Expectations I am more than equipped to honor, Miss Hale, should I ever yearn to.” I let the grin sharpen into something with teeth in it.
“Unless you’ve developed a sudden, fascinating interest in me yourself?
It does happen. I receive a great deal of interest. There’s something about a man who’s comfortable around the dead. ”
Two of the guards snicker before they can stop themselves, and a furious flush climbs Hale’s pale throat as she informs the room, with great and unconvincing dignity, that she has no such interest whatsoever.
“A pity,” I say, entirely unbothered. “You’d find me a generous correspondent. I write beautiful letters. Mostly condolences, admittedly, but the form translates.”
“You are,” Hale states, “the single most unprofessional consultant I have encountered in eleven years.”