16. ~Vex~ #2
“When I can put you in every position imaginable?” His hand slides a lazy, proprietary inch along my thigh under the water, and heat licks up through the calm despite my best intentions. “I sincerely doubt it.”
“We’ll never obtain freedom,” I say, and I mean it as the trump card, the unanswerable one, the wall no amount of charm can climb. Two people like us, with our pasts and our paperwork and our body counts, do not get to be free. We get to be managed.
“And yet,” he says, unhurried, “somehow we’ve landed ourselves in a quiet little town of controlled convicts that gives us more room to breathe than two people with our histories had any right to dream of.
Real beds. Real doors. A whole valley of pretty arches and the illusion of a leash long enough to forget it’s there. ”
His arms tighten, and his voice drops into something low and conspiratorial and devastating.
“So tell me, Violet—if they handed us this much by accident, what makes you so sure we can’t talk our way to the heart of Monaco one day?
Sipping the finest wine someone else paid for, looking out over the water, wearing new names nobody’s put a charge on yet, a confirmed pack and not a cage in sight. ”
And the terrible thing—the genuinely dangerous thing—is that I can picture it.
Vividly.
The water and the wine and the new names.
Me, in some sun-warmed room above a glittering harbor, belonging to a thing that doesn’t hurt.
I let myself see it for exactly three seconds before I put it away, because a vision that lovely is the most lethal weapon anyone has ever pointed at me, and he’s holding it like he doesn’t even know it’s loaded.
It’s a clever trap, whether he built it on purpose or stumbled into it.
The other men in my past leashed me with cruelty—you learn fast how to slip a cruelty, how to outwait it, how to set it on fire.
No one ever thought to leash me with a future I might actually want.
There’s no manual for that. No exit drilled into me for the cage that looks like a harbor at golden hour.
And the strategist in the back of the house, the one who has never lost a fight she chose, sits up and notes, with real unease, that for the first time in years she isn’t certain she’d want to escape even if she could find the door.
“Will all sides of me remain yours?” I ask.
It’s the realest question I own, the one no man has ever been offered, because no man has ever known there were sides to claim. They’ve had Vex and thought they had all of me. They’ve never even glimpsed the rest of the house.
“Every side,” he says.
And I let myself do the thing I never do.
I tip my head back against his shoulder and look up at him, and he looks down to meet me, and I search that hard scarred face for the tell—the flicker, the calculation, the small dishonest thing that lives in the eyes of every person who has ever made me a promise.
It isn’t there.
There is no deceit in him at all, none, just those pale grey eyes steady and certain and fixed on mine, and I realize with a small private vertigo that this is the first time in my entire life a man has looked at me and not lied.
The rarity of it makes my heart do something undignified and skip.
“Would you die for me, Puddin?” I whisper.
The name leaves me before I can stop it, and it means more than he can possibly know—because Puddin was the one soft warm thing I ever loved without condition, a small heartbeat in a cage that asked nothing of me and never once let me down, and I buried it and built a shrine to it and swore I’d never hand that name to a living soul.
I just handed it to him.
The deepest part of me, the part that does the burying, gave him the name it keeps for the only love that never betrayed it.
“If that’s what you wish, Pretty Darling,” he says, with an utter, unflinching conviction that does not waver by a hair.
And it makes me smile.
A real one—not the bright cracked grin I wear like teeth bared, not Vex’s glittering threat, but something soft and unguarded that I haven’t felt on my own face in so long I’d forgotten the shape of it.
The walls come down.
All of them, all at once, the whole fortified architecture of selves simply lowering its drawbridge, and for one suspended moment I look at this dangerous, devoted, impossible man the way I might have looked, in some other life, at the one good man I always wished the world had bothered to send me.
His eyebrow arches.
Something shifts in his gaze as he reads the change in mine, and when he speaks, it’s careful, like a man naming a wild thing that might bolt at the wrong syllable.
“Not Violet,” he says.
I shake my head, slow.
“Nor Vex.”
Another shake.
“Genevieve,” he whispers.
And I give him the deepest, truest nod I have ever given anyone—because he found her.
The one underneath all the others, the girl whose name they printed on the file before the world taught her to wear sharper ones, the self I keep so far down that I half believed she’d drowned years ago.
He reached past Vex and past Violett and pulled the realest of me up into the light, and named her correctly on the first try, and didn’t flinch at what he found.
And then I blink.
The light in the far room flicks. The drawbridge hauls back up. And I surface into the cooling water with a jolt of disorientation, my mouth already moving on instinct while the rest of me scrambles to catch up to a conversation I have apparently not been present for.
“Vex,” Riot announces, with the fond exasperation of a man greeting a returning houseguest.
I pout, because that’s the first thing that arrives, and stare at the lukewarm bath and his arms around my middle and try to reconstruct the missing minutes from nothing.
There’s a warmth in my chest I can’t account for. A wetness at the corner of my eye I refuse to investigate.
“Um,” I manage, and let it fall, and pout harder. “I need a catchup.”
“Violet was here,” he reports, clearly enjoying himself. “And then, I think—Genevieve?” He says the last name like he’s still a little stunned to have met her.
I whistle, low and impressed, despite the strange ache the name leaves behind.
“Wow. You’re like the chosen messiah of insanity. Three for three and the morning’s barely started.”
He laughs, the sound rumbling warm against my back.
“So all your sides of crazy enjoy me,” he says, insufferably smug. “I’m clearly blessed and favored.”
“Don’t get cocky, criminal.” I smirk, settling back into him with a comfort that should alarm me far more than it does, and reach for safer ground. “Where are your partners in crime, anyway?”
“Doc’s somewhere in the house. Probably loitering outside a polite distance, waiting for our little sex frenzy to wind down before he shows his face.”
“Courteous of him,” I say. “He could have joined. Rude not to extend the invitation.”
“He’s a perfectionist.” Riot snorts. “He’d want to make it romantic. Candles. A whole production. He’d have notes.”
“How sweet,” I coo, and mean it more than I’d admit. “And Crowe?”
“Probably out on a spree. For flowers.”
“Fun.” I tip my head back to grin at the ceiling. “Still planning my funeral, then. How absolutely divine of him. I do hope he’s landed on a color scheme.”
“We’ll work on slowing that down,” Riot mutters, more to himself than to me, with the grim resolve of a man adding an item to a list, and the sheer domestic absurdity of it—a convict quietly vowing to dissuade a mortician from prepping my burial—sets me giggling into the water like a woman half my age and none of my crimes.
It strikes me, somewhere underneath the giggling, how strange a household I’ve fallen into.
A planner who builds candlelit perfection and watches everything through hidden glass.
A killer who runs my bath and guards my sleep and asks before he takes.
A mortician who courts me with the same blooms he lays on the dead.
Three obsessions, three flavors of devotion sharp enough to cut, and somehow not one of them aimed at the part of me they could profit from—all of them, impossibly, aimed at the part of me nobody was ever supposed to find.
I have spent my whole life being wanted by men who wanted what I could do for them.
These three frighten me precisely because they seem to want the doing of nothing at all.
They just want me here.
Breathing.
Theirs.
“So,” I say, when the giggling subsides into something soft and drowsy, “can I nap a bit more before we get on with planning world domination?”
“Yes,” he assures me, and his arms gather me closer, his chin coming to rest atop my damp hair like he was built to hold exactly this. “Sleep some more. You’re not used to comfort, huh?”
I consider lying. It’s reflexive, the lie, the way breathing is reflexive. But the water is warm and his heart is steady and somewhere in the house a perfectionist is waiting and somewhere in the valley a madman is gathering blooms, and the truth slips out before Vex can stop it.
“Not really,” I admit. “No.”
“Then embrace it, Darling.” His voice is low, certain, a vow disguised as a lullaby. “We’ll handle everything else.”
The odd thing about it, the truly impossible thing, is that I actually believe him.