10. ~Vex~
~Vex~
Imust be surfacing from something—an overdose, a hallucinogen, the soft chemical fog of a body fighting to flush a poison—because I’m drowning, and the past is the water, and it has decided to haunt me like a plague that knows my name.
One moment I’m a ballerina.
Center stage, spine drawn long, every muscle obedient and gorgeous, performing perfection to a world that wanted me perfect—the version of me that existed before everything, the girl who believed the discipline of the body was a kind of prayer.
The lights are warm. The applause is real.
Then the stage tilts, the way stages do in fever, and the warm theatre lights curdle into something neon and low and sticky.
Now I’m on a pole.
Spinning to a beat that pounds through the floor and up through my bones, and the applause has gone wrong—craving whistles, the wet desperate shouts of drunk Alphas who paid for the privilege of believing I belong to them for the length of a song, money raining down through the dirty light while I climb and arch and smile the smile that keeps the worst of them at arm’s length.
I learned the pole here, in rooms like this.
Learned a lot of things in rooms like this. The body is still a prayer; it’s just that someone else collects the offering now.
Then I’m running.
Fighting, lungs tearing, the corridor narrowing to a dead end, and I turn at the wall to face the man who owns the deed to me—the man who told me, in that reasonable voice the worst ones always have, that I’d always be his because he paid good money for my freedom and a girl has to earn a debt like that. His face won’t hold still in the fever.
It keeps trying to become a face I burned.
This is the part of me no file holds.
No assessor ever dug deep enough to find the girl beneath the arsonist, the prodigy beneath the patient, the long ugly ladder I climbed down before I ever started climbing back up.
They wrote lunatic and closed the folder, and I let them, because the truth is a weapon and I never hand my weapons to people who’d use them on me.
Yet, the fever doesn’t care what I’ve sealed away. It simply opens every drawer at once and spreads the whole inventory out for me to drown in—the stage, the pole, the deed, the debt—every rung of the descent, in order, in flames.
And under all of it, dragging at me, the heat.
It’s unbearable.
A fever haze that won’t break, pressing down until I whimper with the sheer affronted annoyance of it, because I have always run cold and clean and I do not consent to cooking in my own skin.
I’d gladly stay down here drowning forever if only the water would stay frigid, if the cold would just hold—but the heat keeps rising, endless, no shore in sight, and I’m beginning to think the burning is the point, that the fire I walked away from has finally caught up to finish the job?—
Something cold presses against my forehead.
Real cold.
Blessed, deliberate, tender cold, laid against my burning skull like a benediction.
My first thought, surfacing toward it, is that this is Death’s own hand at last—come to lay its cool palm on my brow and finish the deed the flames started years ago—and that thought, absurdly, is what makes me react. Because I have never once in my life let anyone finish me.
So I move before I’m awake, the way I do everything, on instinct sharpened past the need for permission.
Noise crashes in around the edges of me.
Curses.
The clatter of something knocked aside, boots, a low chorus of alarm.
When I crack my eyes open, the world arrives muffled and dull, my emotions packed in cotton, every feeling arriving at a distance—and through that half-lidded, underwater haze I glare at the author of the chilled tenderness on my brow, and my glare lands on a pair of eyes that crinkle with appreciation the very instant they realize what they’re looking at.
Which is me.
Sitting astride a body.
With a knife at its throat.
He chuckles—low, rough, entirely delighted for a man currently one twitch of my wrist from a second smile—and the sound makes me sincerely wonder which of us is the certified lunatic in this arrangement.
I blink.
The fog thins by a degree.
My vision tightens its focus, and it confirms what the muffled part of me had already filed: I am very much about to stab an Alpha.
The sexy jumpsuit Alpha.
Who is, I note as the picture sharpens, not in a jumpsuit at all.
I have to trail my eyes down the length of him to confirm he isn’t entirely naked—he isn’t, there’s the low waistband of something merciful—but the confirmation comes at a price, because the journey down lays out a whole indulgent trajectory of muscle and ink, a sculpted, scarred, brutal expanse of him that taunts the part of me that does not, as a rule, go looking for attraction in any of its layers.
That part wakes up anyway.
Slowly, against orders, it stirs and stretches and takes a long appreciative inventory of the artwork written across his skin, the dark tangled designs climbing his ribs, banding his arms, inked over his heart.
I find myself genuinely curious, even here, even now, what each one means. '
What a man like this chooses to wear permanently.
What he’s decided is worth keeping on the outside.
A low rumble threads the air, a sound that thrums in a throat—and it isn’t coming from the man beneath me.
It’s coming from me.
A purr. Low and taunting and humiliatingly involuntary, rolling up out of my chest at the sight of him, and it makes his smirk deepen into something insufferably pleased before he speaks, his voice a gravel murmur pitched just for the two of us.
“Welcome back to the land of the living, Violet.”
Violet.
Once again, this maddening creature has dived clean through the camouflage and put his hand on the real thing underneath, the name I keep buried beneath all the brighter, safer ones—and I do not like it.
I don’t like how easily he does it, don’t like that he’s collected my truest name and uses it like he has the right.
I pout in pure dismay and draw the knife back from the bleeding little nick I’ve left at his throat, settling my weight more comfortably astride his hips—which is how I discover he’s hard.
Insistently, unrepentantly hard, beneath me, in a medical bay, with a blade still loose in my hand.
I arch an eyebrow at him. He arches one right back, then folds both arms behind his head and settles into the mattress like a man who has never in his life been more content, openly, shamelessly relishing every second of this.
I don’t have the energy to entertain his nonsense.
The exhaustion is already crawling back over me, heavy and grey, dragging at my limbs—so I let my eyes do the work instead, scanning the room from my perch.
Guards at the perimeter, guns drawn, which I file as decorative; men that nervous, that far away, are furniture with triggers and nothing more. Doc in the corner, arms crossed, watching me with that fathomless steel-blue patience, his library scent threading faint through the antiseptic.
Beside him, a tall pale shape it takes my sluggish brain a beat to label—the mortician, the funeral one, Crowe…Silas, that was it, lilies and beeswax and old graves.
The redhead detective near the door, scentless and sharp. And one more.
A figure in black I don’t recognize, long navy hair spilling past his shoulders, standing a little apart and watching me with an odd, fixed fascination that crawls under my skin and stays there. Not the hungry watching I’ve grown used to from the others. Something cooler. Like one that studies.
I dislike it instantly and completely, the way an animal dislikes a smell it can’t place.
I turn my head back to Riot, slow and deliberate, and lift the knife to point its tip across the room at the navy-haired stranger.
“I don’t like him.”
The words come out firm and flat, scrubbed of feeling, and they make Riot arch that brow again, like he wants confirmation that I mean exactly what I appear to mean.
So I pout. That, apparently, settles it past all doubt, because his amusement drains into something colder as he turns his head toward the man in black.
“Out,” Riot says.
The stranger and the detective both frown, exchanging a glance heavy with shared objection. Silas, delighted, begins to whistle a low tune.
Doc sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose between two fingers.
“I’d genuinely rather not add another body to this afternoon’s tally,” he says, mild as ever, “so I’d take him up on the suggestion.
” He says it with the flat certainty of a man who harbors no doubt whatsoever that Riot would cheerfully murder this stranger for the sole and sufficient crime of being disliked by me.
“Bishop. Detective. The room’s a touch crowded. ”
It makes me smirk, that certainty, even as exhaustion gnaws at the edges of it—the casual confidence that my whim is law enough to clear a room of armed authority.
The navy-haired man—Bishop, then—holds my gaze a beat too long, something unreadable moving behind his fascination, before he turns and goes, the redhead stalking out at his heels.
Silence settles in their wake.
The guards, sensing the temperature drop, slowly lower their weapons—apparently I’ve been downgraded from threat to invalid, which suits me, because the truth is I have nothing left.
I’m so suddenly, bottomlessly tired that I can’t hold myself up against it, and before I’ve decided to, I let my forehead sink down to rest against the warm bare expanse of Riot’s chest.
His scent folds around me—woodsmoke and worn leather and warm iron, the smell of a building mid-burn, and somehow it doesn’t frighten the part of me still drowning in fever; somehow it steadies it.
His hand comes up at once and cradles the back of my head, broad and careful, fingers threading into my hair, and that single gentle pressure flips something in me like a switch thrown in a dark room.
The fight goes out of me all at once.
I melt, a groan, low, because the melting comes with a price—my skull has begun to spin in earnest, the room tilting on a slow sick axis I want no part of.
“You good?” Riot rumbles beneath my cheek, the words vibrating up through his chest.
“Dying,” I mumble into his skin. “Of a headache. Tragic. Put it on my stone.”
Somewhere above and behind me, Doc’s voice, talking about a concoction—something to ease the withdrawal, to take the worst edges off the crash my body’s grinding through. I don’t catch the rest.
The words blur and smear and slide away from me, because I’m already slipping, the fever-water closing back over my head, pulling me down and under into the dark.
But this time the dark doesn’t take me back to the pole, or the stage, or the man with the deed to my body.
This time it takes me back to the cafeteria.
And it plays it slow.
Everything moving through honey, the brawl unspooling at a fraction of its speed—and the strangest part, the part that prickles even through the sedative drift, is that I’m watching it from outside myself.
Third person.
Hovering somewhere above the chaos, looking down at the small fierce orange shape that is me tangled with Annalise on the tile, and the suspended blade, and the screaming ring.
It’s deeply odd, this vantage. It’s also, I realize, useful, because from up here, slowed and detached, I can finally see the whole board at once.
And I see him.
A guard. Standing among the others at the room’s edge, weapon raised like all the rest of the shouting authority straining to wrestle the moment back into order—except he isn’t shouting.
He’s silent. Still.
Watching the seizing thing on the floor with a fixed, patient, haunting attention that doesn’t belong on a man doing his job, and the wrongness of him snags my dreaming eye and holds it.
I don’t know this face. The uniform fits and the posture passes, but I have catalogued every guard who works these wings down to the way they lace their boots, and this one is a stranger wearing the costume of belonging.
Then the dream tilts his face toward the light, and I see his eyes.
And the cold that pours through me has nothing to do with any drug.
Because I know those eyes.
I have seen those eyes up close, in firelight, watching me from a bed they were handcuffed to—watched them go wide and white and wet with terror as the curtains caught and the heat climbed past the point a body could survive, protective suit or no.
I watched those eyes beg.
I watched those eyes understand, at the very last, exactly who they’d underestimated. And then I walked out humming and left them to the flames, and I never once looked back, because looking back is for women with regrets.
Those eyes are dead.
I made certain.
Didn’t I?
That’s the splinter the dream drives in deepest. The doubt.
Because I walked out of that penthouse with the serene certainty of a woman whose plans don’t fail—I heard him screaming, I felt the heat at my back, I knew the math of fire and flesh—but I didn’t stay to watch the math finish. I never confirmed the body.
Confirming the body is the one discipline I skipped, the single sloppy seam in an otherwise immaculate piece of work, because I was so busy savoring my exit that I forgot the oldest rule of the trade I’ve made of vengeance: a thing isn’t dead until you’ve counted the bones.
Is my ex back from the grave I built him?
And if a dead man is wearing a guard’s uniform in my cafeteria, watching me die with his patient, terrible eyes—why?
What does a ghost want with the woman who burned him? What game brings a man back from the ash to stand at the edge of the room and simply, silently watch?
The question sinks its hooks deep, and I’m still hanging on it, still reaching for the impossible shape of an answer, when I feel a small sharp pinch at the crook of my arm and the spreading cool of something entering my blood.
My body unspools at once, every taut and frightened thread of it going slack.
The cafeteria dims. The dead man’s eyes wink out. The question itself loosens its grip and drifts away with everything else, the whole world thinning to nothing as the dark draws gently up over my head.
A moment of recovery before the beginning of a brutal storm.