17. ~Vex~
~Vex~
“So. Before I was whisked away to this—oasis,” I say, gesturing at the absurd, sun-drenched cabin around us, “another body turned up at Blackthorn?”
“Three,” Doc says.
I arch an eyebrow, and I let it stay arched, because I am, honestly, impressed.
Three more in the time it took my poisoned body to crawl back from the edge. Whoever is doing this works fast and works clean, and a small professional corner of me admires the productivity even as the rest of me files the implications.
“Let me guess,” I muse. “The working theory is that I sleepwalked out of a guarded medical bay, murdered three people in three separate wings, and tucked myself back into a coma before anyone noticed. The criminal mastermind strikes again, comatose.”
None of them deny it.
I cross my arms and sink deeper into the enormous floor cushion that has apparently become my throne—a ridiculous, cloudlike thing the size of a small car, swallowing me to the ribs in buttery softness.
I have no idea whether it came with the cabin’s deliberate, cozy, woodsmoke-and-cedar charm or whether one of my three keepers acquired it specifically because they suspected I’d like it.
I suspect the latter.
I have, irritatingly, no complaints.
The whole place is like this—warm wood and soft light and the faint resinous perfume of a hearth that’s always just been used—and so far, against every instinct I own, I like it here.
They’ve given me the essentials, if not the tour.
Arch Hollow is a small town tucked into the throat of the valley, wrapped in its own private grid—a closed, surveilled, cleverly engineered system that not even our collected intellects have managed to find the seams of.
Yet, some of the most dangerous people in the country live out their sentences here, and the strangest part is that they live them in peace, because killers, it turns out, keep a certain professional courtesy among their own kind.
There’s no glory in murdering a peer who could murder you back. Being assigned a place this gentle reads, to people with histories like ours, as a reward bordering on a miracle—which is precisely why it should be regarded with suspicion, but I keep that thought to myself for now.
No one, they tell me, has ever escaped Arch Hollow without dying in the attempt.
I watch Riot’s pale eyes light at that particular detail like a boy handed a locked box, and I know—I simply know—that he is already mapping the walls, already itching to be the first, and that he’ll wait with the patience of a wolf for me to give him the nod before he tries.
I file that under things to revisit. The fridges are stocked.
There are markets and cafes and, mercifully, a bookstore. We’re permitted to drive the looping roads, to wander the gardens, to stand under the mossy arches and pretend at liberty in a place built to be a beautiful, breathing maze.
A person could get used to peace like this.
That’s the trap of it, and I know it’s a trap, and I find I want to walk into it anyway. The only genuine question—the one humming under everything—is whether I get to. Because peace is a thing offered to people who aren’t actively being hunted, and I am very much being hunted.
I’ve already started cataloguing it anyway, the way I catalogue every cage I’m placed in.
The grid hums at a frequency I can almost feel in my fillings—something deep in the walls and the road and the moss-furred arches, watching, counting, the way Blackthorn watched, only prettier about it. The neighbors are the truly fascinating data.
Somewhere out there, past the bookshop and the bakery, live men and women who have done the kinds of things that get a person filed under irredeemable, and they tend their window boxes and nod good morning and do not, by some unspoken treaty of the damned, lay a finger on one another.
It’s the most civilized arrangement I’ve ever heard of, and the most fragile, and I cannot stop turning over the question of what happens to that fragile civility the day something arrives that doesn’t honor the treaty.
Something that came for one specific girl and won’t care who it has to go through to reach her.
“So they fast-tracked this whole charming alternative,” I say, “because?—?”
“Because the dead all share one trait,” Doc says. “One specific commonality. The kind a curious public would assemble in an afternoon.”
“Which is?” I glance between the three of them, and it’s Silas who answers, his amber eyes warming as he leans against the windowframe and hums the truth of it low and sweet—the profile, the shared shape of every girl on his table.
Survivors.
Omegas filed away as violent for the unforgivable crime of fighting back against the men who owned them. Women exactly like me.
My head tilts.
The frown that pulls at my mouth isn’t fear; it’s the deepening focus of a mind sliding a new piece into a half-built frame. Someone is harvesting the women who survived.
And the institution that caged us is so terrified of the optics that it has handed three of its most dangerous men a fourth dangerous woman and called the arrangement a safety measure.
“So,” I summarize, ticking it off, “the CEO decided it’s tidier to have me out here than at Blackthorn—so no more patients keep dropping dead while I’m drooling in a coma three rooms away and ruining his alibi for me.
They can’t prove it’s me, they can’t prove it isn’t, and above all they cannot afford the headline.
So they exported the problem to a pretty valley and called it clemency. ” I shrug. “Accurate. And foolish.”
“Why foolish?” Doc asks, and there’s a glint in it—he knows the answer, he wants to hear me arrive at it.
“Because moving the bait doesn’t un-bait the hook.” I spread my hands. “What, precisely, is stopping whatever’s been hunting me from simply… following me here?”
“Nothing,” the three of them answer. In unison. Flat, certain, and weirdly harmonized, three voices of three very different timbres landing on the same grim syllable, and the sound of it sends a thrill up my spine that has no business being pleasant.
I smirk and roll my shoulders into the cushion. “Fun. We get to play cat and mouse, then.”
“The fact that you’re happy about it,” Riot declares, with the satisfaction of a man confirming a diagnosis, “proves we belong together.”
“That,” Doc says, without looking up from the file in his lap, “is your cock talking.” He slides Riot a flat sidelong stare while the convict only chuckles, entirely unrepentant, the rumble of it warming the room like a second hearth.
I look between the three of them—the planner with his fountain pen and his glasses, the killer sprawled across the loveseat like a panther deciding whether to nap, the undertaker haloed in window-light—and I say the thing I’ve known since the medical bay, since the pole, since three obsessive shadows arranged themselves around me like points of a compass.
“So you three are a pack.”
It isn’t a question.
I don’t do questions I already know the answers to; I only ask the ones whose answers I want to watch a person give.
“Yes,” Doc answers, simple and unbothered.
“Does the CEO know that?” My eyebrow climbs.
A pack of three of the most dangerous men in the system, bonded and aligned, installed around the very patient they were hired to evaluate—that is not a detail an institution would knowingly approve.
That’s a detail an institution would have a stroke over.
“Not a damn clue,” Silas hums, delighted. Then, as if it’s an afterthought of no consequence whatsoever, he adds, “Oh—I checked the mail, by the way.”
“Anything valuable?” Doc mutters.
“Just a letter.” Silas crosses the room with that gliding, unhurried walk and passes a pale envelope into Doc’s hand—and Doc’s brow furrows the instant he reads whatever’s written on the front.
The three of them go still over it. Not panicked—these are not men who panic—but focused, sharpened, the temperature of the room shifting by a degree as all that lethal attention narrows onto a single rectangle of paper.
“What?” I ask, when the silence stretches past my patience. I sit forward in my cushion, scenting the change in them before I understand it—a tightening in the air, woodsmoke and library and lilies all going alert at once. “Ooh. Is it for me?”
None of them answer, which is its own answer, so I do what I always do with a thing three powerful men don’t want me to have: I reach out and snatch it clean from Doc’s fingers.
The look he gives me—startled, affronted, a man unused to being relieved of anything—is so genuinely delicious that I giggle as I tear into the flap. He moves to stop me, one hand lifting, and I wave him off without looking up.
“Relax, Pretty Boy. If it were powder or poison meant to finish me, they’d have done it in the hospital while I spent a week as an unconscious vegetable with my mouth open and no one guarding my IV. Nobody mails a corpse a death they already had a free shot at.”
It’s sound enough logic to ease the tension out of his shoulders by a fraction—enough, anyway, to let me unfold the page.
I clear my throat, and I read it aloud, performing every syllable, because if someone’s gone to the trouble of a handwritten threat the least I can do is give it a dramatic table read.
“‘I’ll grant you this much—I’m impressed you’ve carried your little masterplan as far as you have.
Truly. But this is where the road ends, my love.
You and your collection of pet criminals are about to learn precisely what becomes of anyone foolish enough to attach themselves to a psychotic bitch who deserves to burn in hell.
You, of all people, should know how a fire ends. See you soon.’”
“I’m not a criminal,” Doc says, with crisp, wounded dignity, as though that’s the load-bearing error in the entire document.
Silas loses it.
He throws his head back and laughs like a man at the funeral of someone he despised, bright and unhinged and far too loud for the cozy little room, one pale hand pressed to his chest. Riot doesn’t laugh.
Riot uncrosses and recrosses his arms, that storm-grey gaze fixed on the page in my hand, and asks the only practical question in the building.
“What’s the point of the message?”
“It’s posturing.” I turn the page over, checking the back for anything cleverer than menace, finding none.
“No demand, no terms, no instructions. Just feelings.” I shrug.
“Sounds like an angry ex, frankly.” And I rip it, once, clean down the middle—not because the words frighten me, but because a person who writes you a letter wants you to keep it, and I have never once given anyone the thing they wanted simply for asking.
Though I do keep the things that matter.
Not the paper—the paper is theater—but the tells underneath it, the ones the writer didn’t mean to leave. The looping, unhurried hand of someone who had time and wanted me to know it.
My love, that small poisoned endearment, used by exactly one kind of man: the kind who believes ownership is a form of devotion. And See you soon, which is not a threat from a stranger. A stranger threatens what you are.
This threatens because of what we were. Whoever penned this knows me—knew me, in the biblical and the catastrophic sense—and that narrows my short list to a length I could count on the fingers of a single ruined hand.
“You’re not afraid,” Doc observes. It isn’t a question from him either; it’s a data point, logged with that unreadable steel-blue calm.
“Why would I be?” I counter.
“Why indeed,” Silas purrs, wiping mirth from the corner of one amber eye, “when our darling already burned her ex to cinders and walked out humming. Hard to lose sleep over a ghost you’ve personally cremated.”
And there it is.
The assumption.
The lovely, tidy, universal assumption that sits at the center of my entire file and my entire myth, the one everyone from the CEO to the courts to these three obsessive men has accepted as the simple bedrock fact of me.
I look at the torn halves of the letter in my lap. I think about the handwriting. I think about See you soon, and the particular, intimate venom of my love, and the one name on my short list that is supposed to be ash.
And I decide that perhaps now—lovely, dangerous, pack-bonded now—is the moment to clear a little air.
“Well,” I say, drawing the word out, feeling the cushion swallow me soft as I settle in for it. “Seeing as we’re sort of a pack now, or whatever this gloriously unhinged arrangement is—maybe it’s time I came clean about a thing or two.”
“What?” Riot says, instantly alert, the lazy panther gone and the predator surfaced.
Doc sets down his pen.
Silas’s smile slows.
All three of them turn toward me with the full, terrible weight of their attention, and I feel it settle over my skin like heat off a fire—and some preening, theatrical, deeply unwell part of me has been waiting my whole life for an audience this perfectly suited to the punchline.
Here is the thing about a secret kept long enough: it stops being something you hide and becomes something you own, a card sewn into the lining of your sleeve, warm from your own skin.
I have carried this one through courtrooms and intake interviews and four years of a padded cell, through every assessor who thought they’d mapped me and every man who thought he’d caught me.
None of them ever asked the right question, because the wrong answer was so much simpler and they all wanted simple. Mad girl burns her abuser.
Tidy. Quotable. Closed.
They never once paused to wonder whether a girl with my particular history might have collected more than one man worth burning—or whether the fire they all keep talking about was the first of its kind, or merely the loudest.
“You didn’t burn your ex to death,” Doc says slowly, reading my face, reaching for the recalculation.
“Oh, I did.” I let the emphasis land, savoring it, every consonant crisp. “I absolutely, gloriously did. Watched him cook. Hummed the whole way out the door.”
I tip my head, and I let the sweetest, most lunatic smile I own bloom slow across my face, and I deliver the finishing blow with the gentle relish of a woman laying down a winning hand three players never knew she was holding.
“But you’re not asking the prime question.”
The room holds its breath.
Three of the most dangerous men alive, leaning toward a girl in a giant cushion, and not one of them sees it coming.
“Which ex,” I purr, “are we referring to?”