19. ~Vex~
~Vex~
“Fucking all day is not a valid way to spend the day,” I declare between kisses, which would land with considerably more authority if I weren’t saying it with my mouth still chasing his.
Riot chuckles against my lips, breaks the kiss, and delivers a sharp, proprietary slap to my bare backside that makes me yelp.
“Then change,” he says, “so we can go out.”
I huff and step back and cross my arms over my chest, standing in the middle of the sun-warmed room in nothing but the velvet ribbon at my throat and the marks he’s left scattered down my body like a map of the morning.
I gesture, with great wounded dignity, at the closet.
The very, very empty closet.
“With what?!” I demand. “I don’t even have a jumpsuit! You’ve relocated me to paradise and forgotten the small matter of dressing the prisoner.”
Riot, the absolute menace, does not appear remotely troubled by this logistical crisis.
He saunters to the side chair and drops into it, all loose-limbed satisfaction, beer in one scarred hand and the other settling lazily around himself with no shame whatsoever, openly admiring the view I’m presenting like a man at a private gallery he owns.
His scent fills the room—woodsmoke and warm iron gone thick and content—and the heat of his stare alone is enough to reawaken interest I genuinely do not have time for.
“I didn’t think that far,” he admits, taking a slow pull of his beer.
I laugh, sharp and helpless, and shake my head at the ceiling.
“No shit, Sherlock.” I plant my hands on my hips. “Where’s Doc? He’d be the solution to this problem. The man probably color-codes his contingency plans.”
It should alarm me, how easy this is.
The banter, the bareness, the sunlight pooling on a floor I woke up unafraid on for the second morning running.
I have spent my entire adult life treating ease as the most dangerous weather a room can produce, the lull before the hand closes, and here I am bickering naked with a convict about my lack of a wardrobe as though the world isn’t hunting me, as though three days ago I wasn’t seizing on a cafeteria floor with poison in my blood.
The spiral keeps not coming. That’s the part my mastermind can’t reconcile and my body refuses to question.
I have simply, somehow, stopped bracing for the blow.
The door opens on cue, as though summoned, and there’s the man himself—Doc, immaculate and unhurried, taking in the scene with the faint arch of a single brow. Two naked patients, one sprawled and smug with a beer, the other standing exasperated in nothing but a ribbon.
His gaze sweeps the wreckage of the morning, declines to comment on it, and settles on me, because he plainly sees no value in directing a question at Riot in his current state.
“And I’m to assume,” he says dryly, “you need me for something outside of the fuckery.”
I smirk, because I can never resist.
“You know, you could always join. Or is Doc shy?”
His eyes descend—slow, deliberate, a clinical and entirely nonclinical sweep down the length of me that raises gooseflesh in its wake—before they climb back and lock onto mine with that fathomless steel-blue calm.
“You don’t want me to fuck you right now,” he says, mild as still water. “You like this—the sacred, silly playfulness you have with Riot—and you want to keep it sealed in its own jar, untouched by the rest of us. Not yet. Not today.”
I pout, because the bastard is right, and slide a glance at Riot, who is grinning like a man who got thoroughly laid—which, in fairness, he has, repeatedly, all morning—before I turn back to Doc with a glare.
“Your honesty infuriates me.”
“What do you need, Vex?”
“Clothes.” I sweep an arm at the gaping closet like a magician’s reveal of absolutely nothing.
“You geniuses moved me into a fairytale and stocked the fridge and forgot that I might, on occasion, wish to be dressed. My jumpsuit has vanished into thin air. And while I’m perfectly happy to tour the town in my birthday suit—” I tip my head at Riot, who takes a serene swig of his beer, “—this one would slaughter anyone who caught a glimpse of my naked splendor, and that’s just unfair murder.
The victims wouldn’t even know what they’d done. ”
“Essentially,” Doc agrees, with the gravity of a man confirming a law of physics. “Silas should be back shortly.”
“Back from where?”
“The clothing store. He said he needed a zipper.”
“A zipper?” I repeat, and my curiosity sits up and takes notice, because Silas does nothing without a reason and most of his reasons are delicious.
“Don’t,” Doc says, reading my face with the resignation of a man who has watched me chase a mystery off a cliff before.
“Whatever you’re assembling in that head of yours, simply wait the ninety seconds for him to arrive and show you.
You’ll ruin his surprise, and he’s unbearable when his surprises are ruined. ”
“I would never,” I lie, beaming, already three theories deep on what an undertaker wants with a zipper, none of them appropriate for a bright spring morning and at least one of them genuinely concerning.
“Back!”
The sing-song call floats in from the hall, and Silas comes practically skipping through the door—actually skipping, the long graceful glide of him bouncing with uncharacteristic delight—which earns him a flat look from Doc and a stretch from Riot that cracks half the bones in his spine.
“You only skip,” Riot observes, “when you’ve finished some project you’re proud of. So let’s see it.”
Silas looks genuinely, boyishly excited, which is enough to draw me forward despite myself, arms crossed over my breasts as I watch him produce, with a flourish?—
A dress.
And it’s stunning, in the most deranged possible way. The colors are odd and singular and entirely mine—pink melting into purple in a soft two-toned ombre, the whole thing scattered with neon-green accents that catch the light and twinkle like sparks off a live wire.
It is a walking billboard for mayhem. It is also, against every law of taste, the perfect garment for a bright spring afternoon. He produces a knitted sweater next, a soft pale green threaded with lavender and magenta buttons, and then?—
Then he holds up a collar.
And that—that—takes every clever word I own and quietly removes it from my head.
I walk toward it without a sound, without a quip, without the running commentary I narrate over my entire life, and the silence of me must be loud enough to startle them, because not one of the three says a word as I reach out and take the thing in my hands.
A heart hangs at the center of it, twinkling, and across the face of the heart, in bold and unmistakable red, is a single word.
THEIRS.
I turn it over with fingers that have gone strangely careful. On the reverse, engraved small and neat, are three names.
Theirs. All of them.
A claim with the receipts attached.
I should hate it. That’s the response a sane woman would have to a band engraved with the word THEIRS—I, of all people, who has spent a lifetime being labeled property by men who mistook a collar for a contract and a contract for love.
I know exactly what a collar means. I have worn worse around my neck than leather, and every one of them was a leash dressed as a gift. By rights this thing should make my skin crawl, should send the strategist in me clawing for the exits.
Instead, I stand here cradling it like something fragile and holy, and I cannot work out why the difference, until I let myself feel it: those collars were given to take. This one was made to keep.
And no one, in all my catalogued and ruined history, has ever once tried to keep me.
They only ever tried to own the keeping.
“I’ve been working on it since the day we were introduced,” Silas says, softer now, the theater drained out of his voice.
“The collar itself had to come from abroad—they’re shockingly difficult to source, the ones designed to actually mean ownership rather than decoration.
It has a tracker rooted into the band. And a chip, of a sort, so that if anyone ever questions whether you belong to a pack, the answer is already filed in the database where it counts.
I made the request last night. A dear acquaintance was good enough to fulfill it by this morning. ”
I blink at the collar.
Then I lift my head and look directly into Silas’s warm amber eyes, searching for the seam, the tell, the small dishonest flicker I’ve spent my whole life learning to find in the faces of men bearing gifts.
It isn’t there. He’s not lying.
“You’ve filed official documents,” I say slowly, “claiming I’m your—your pack’s—new Omega.”
Are they out of their minds? They have to be. No. I know they are; I’ve catalogued the precise flavor of each man’s particular madness over weeks of close study.
The trouble is that I am every bit as unwell as the three of them, and right now, holding a heart that says THEIRS in my two hands, I am rendered utterly, uncharacteristically speechless—because I will admit, in the privacy of my own splintered skull, that this is the single most romantic thing anyone has ever given me.
“Yes.”
It’s Doc who answers, and I turn to him slowly, and find that he’s taken his glasses off—just for a moment, pinched between two fingers as he regards me—and good lord.
I finally understand how an entire planet failed to tell a bespectacled reporter from a man in a cape, because without the glass between us this man is devastating, all clean hard lines and steel-blue gravity, and I cannot fathom why he gatekeeps a face like that behind a prop.
My traitor heart skips, then skips again, just to be thorough.