18. ~Silas~
~Silas~
“She’s a runner, she’s a track star,” Riot croons, low and tuneless and entirely delighted, sprawled across the loveseat like the punchline of a joke only he finds funny. “Slipped every cage they ever built—didn’t you, darling.”
Poor Doc pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers, as though the pressure might squeeze the imploded puzzle back into a shape he’s allowed to solve.
It won’t.
I could tell him it won’t, but I’m enjoying his suffering far too much to interrupt it.
As for me—I am, at this precise moment, on cloud nine. Possibly cloud ten.
Because holy living hell, we have done it, we have actually gone and found her: a genuine mastermind wearing the costume of a lunatic, an Omega who may well be cleverer than the three of us stacked end to end, because she has outwitted every legal system, every investigator, every credentialed predator who ever thought they had her measured—and that roster, I will say with some authority, includes me.
I have read the bodies of statesmen and the confessions of men who ran nations. I have never in my life encountered intelligence like this folded so neatly inside a frame so easy to underestimate.
So I clap.
Genuinely, helplessly, I bring my pale hands together in slow applause for the psychotic queen reclining in her cloud of a cushion, because she has earned an audience and I have always been the most appreciative one in any room.
She is the most exquisite mastermind of brilliance ever to draw breath, and—the part that makes my chest go tight and giddy—she is ours.
I want to be clear about the magnitude of what I’m applauding, because the men in this room with me are extraordinary and she has eclipsed every one of them without appearing to try.
Lucien plans the way other men breathe; I have watched him route around obstacles that would stop a government. Riot is a force of nature with a body count that reads like weather.
And I—well.
I have spent a decade making inconvenient deaths look like accidents and inconvenient men disappear into beautiful arrangements, and I am very good at it, and I do not say that lightly. The three of us together have never met the problem we couldn’t dismantle.
This woman walked into a maximum-security asylum on purpose, wore the mask of a drugged lunatic for years without a single crack, let every investigator in the country build the wrong file on her—and she did it all while running a game so long and so patient that even now, holding most of the pieces, I cannot yet see its final shape.
That is not cleverness.
Cleverness is common.
That is artistry, and I have spent my whole life starving for artistry of this caliber.
“Now say that one more time,” I tell her, leaning in, “so I can savor it properly and give some real thought to how I intend to reward you for being such a clever, psychotic peony.”
She laughs, bright and unhinged and pleased, and lifts one finger in correction.
“You forgot to add sweet to the equation.”
“An unforgivable oversight,” I agree, “and frankly an understatement—because you’ve just implied you have more than one ex, which means that sweet nectar of yours must be some addictive serum, a delicious slow poison that ruins every soul lucky enough to taste it.
” I cut my gaze to Riot, lounging and smug.
“Which means you, brother, are most likely next.”
Riot shrugs, supremely untroubled. “Unlike the previous applicants, I’ve no intention of graduating to ex.
” He laces his scarred hands behind his head.
“We can be the new Harley and Joker, if she likes. Though at this rate I’ll have to be the submissive one, on account of not being half as cunning as our Pretty Darling. ”
“That,” Doc says, finally surfacing from his nose-pinch, “is the single most self-aware thing you’ve said since I met you.”
“I contain multitudes, Doc.” Riot doesn’t even open his eyes. “Mostly violence. But multitudes.”
“And if we’re assigning roles,” I offer, because I can never resist a casting call, “I’d like it formally noted that I’m the one who handles the bodies, the flowers, and the eulogies, which makes me indispensable in a way the rest of you simply aren’t.
You can’t have a tragic love story without someone to arrange the funerals. ”
“No one is having a funeral,” Doc says, with the air of a man who has said it before and expects to say it again.
“Not with that attitude,” I murmur, and Vex laughs so brightly it nearly knocks me off my chair.
She beams.
Openly, at the praise—and I file the detail away with the quiet thrill of a collector spotting a tell no one else has clocked. Our girl enjoys being worshiped.
Not the empty flattery the world throws at a pretty face; the real thing, the recognition of her brilliance spoken aloud by people clever enough to mean it. She drinks it like nectar herself.
I find, oddly, that I adore knowing it, because worship is the one offering I have an infinite supply of. I have spent my life adoring things that couldn’t adore me back.
Here, at last, is something that can—and does—and wants to.
She shrugs, and repeats it, that gorgeous detonation of a sentence, soft as a blade sliding home.
“Which ex are we referring to?”
Doc uncrosses his leg and leans forward over the low table, drawing a folder from the stack he’s assembled there—because naturally there’s a stack, the man builds a case file the way Riot builds a body count, compulsively and well.
He flips it open, and there it is, spread between us in glossy clinical horror: her own case.
The scorched penthouse.
The black ruin of a room, the heat-warped furniture, the photographed remnants of the body they managed to recover from the ash.
“So you’re telling me,” Doc says slowly, tapping the photograph, “that this—the man you were criminally charged with murdering—is a different ex than the one we ought to be worried about.”
It isn’t quite a question.
It’s a man laying his recalculation on the table to be confirmed, and I glance at him and see he’s gone fully serious, the dry amusement burned off, every gear in that formidable head turning at once—and, alarmingly for him, the pieces are sliding into place and they fit.
“Yup.” She nods, once, crisp. “The one I cooked was the ex I dated after I left my husband.”
“Husband?”
All three of us say it at the same time, in three different registers of disbelief, and she snickers at the chorus like we’ve performed it for her amusement.
“You think a woman of my caliber couldn’t get wifed up early?”
And—point taken, frankly.
A genuinely excellent point. We were introduced to her in a place of regulation jumpsuits and chemical fog, filed under dangerous and forgotten, but that is the packaging, not the contents.
The contents are a multitalented marvel who could walk into any room on the planet and walk out owning the richest man in it.
A millionaire. A billionaire, if she were so inclined.
Though the curious thing—the thing I keep turning over—is that she doesn’t seem inclined toward money at all. Doesn’t seem to need it, or want it, which is its own kind of power, the kind that can’t be bought because it isn’t for sale.
Then again, how would I know? I’ve only ever watched her in cages.
I’ve never once seen her move through the world as a free creature.
It reframes the whole architecture of her, this revelation.
A husband, young. A bad marriage that broke something in a girl who was already a prodigy at surviving.
I think of the fevered things she said in her overdose, the fragments the orderlies logged and dismissed as delusion—a stage, a pole, a man with a deed to her body—and I begin, with the cold pleasure of a puzzle solving itself, to assemble the real chronology.
The ballet first, surely, all that discipline and grace.
Then the fall into rooms that paid for the grace and took the dignity. Then a husband who must have looked, for a moment, like rescue, and turned out to be the most expensive cage of all. And then the boyfriend who burned.
She has been someone’s property more times than any of us have been free, and she has carved her way out of every single ownership with her teeth, and called the carving madness so the world would stop watching her sharpen the knife.
I could weep.
Instead, simply adore her, which is the response that comes more naturally to me.
Which is a deprivation I intend to remedy. The thought arrives fully formed and entirely delicious: taking our Pretty Peony into the town.
A proper outing.
Watching her pick over a market stall, choosing her something extravagant she’d never choose for herself, spoiling the psychotic darling the way she has plainly never once been spoiled by anyone whose spoiling didn’t come with a leash attached. The giddiness of it nearly undoes my composure.
She’s ours.
We get to keep her.
We get to keep, learn, and watch her bloom out of the dark we found her in.
I have no real notion what Doc or Riot are thinking, but Riot is the easier read.
The man is reclined and loose and radiating a contentment that says, plainly, that this woman could confess to slaughtering his entire bloodline and he would simply ask her how she’d like the bodies arranged.
He is not letting go.
That ship has not only sailed, it has burned to the waterline in a penthouse fire. Doc, on the other hand—Doc is quietly losing his mind. And here is the delicious part: it has nothing to do with what she’s done.
The murders don’t trouble him in the slightest. What’s eating the man alive is the dawning, intolerable certainty that she is smarter than he is, and there is no creature on earth Lucien Graves resents like the one who out-thinks him.
“So,” Doc says slowly, leaning back, settling his glasses with two fingers as he fixes that steel-blue stare directly on her. “This husband.”
“Is alive and well,” she finishes for him, sweet as arsenic.