19. ~Vex~ #2
“You’re logged as single in the system,” he explains, in that measured voice that turns even sentiment into something structurally sound.
“Which, even out here, even in a place this gentle, would be a disservice to you. An unpacked Omega cannot move independently in Arch Hollow. You’d be confined, supervised, your every step chaperoned.
The town has no packs that aren’t already bound in temporary alliance or permanent bond.
There is a separate sector for unattached Omegas—but it sits on a detached island, deliberately, and I rather suspect the CEO neglected to mention it to us on the off chance you went conveniently ‘missing’ and turned up there, beyond our reach and inside someone else’s. ”
He lets that sink in—the quiet machinery of the trap they pulled me out of—before he goes on.
“So we made an executive decision. You’re ours.
Partly because once Riot commits to a thing, the rest of us lose the luxury of debate or he sulks the walls down—” a flat glance at Riot, who toasts the accusation with his beer, unrepentant and nude, “—but more importantly, because you deserve to be protected properly. Comprehensively. By people who will not blink.”
He pauses.
And before he slides the glasses back into place, we share a look—a real one, unguarded on both ends, the kind I don’t hand out and clearly neither does he.
“You deserve to be loved,” he says, low and certain, “in a way you can actually hold in your hands and understand is real, Genevieve. So consider this the founding document of a new legacy—the one that proves that even a pretty little psycho like you gets to be loved and cherished, after everything.”
“You literally just insulted her,” Silas mutters.
“She likes the truth,” Doc replies, but as he settles the glasses back onto his nose, his expression shifts, the calm cracking into a small sharp frown.
Silas catches it, confused, and follows the line of Doc’s gaze back to me, and whatever he sees makes him go wide-eyed and slightly frantic in a way I’ve never witnessed from the unflappable undertaker.
“Oh—oh shit. Pretty Peony, don’t cry.”
I have to blink several times, because I genuinely had not noticed.
The tears are already falling. They’ve arrived without my permission, without the customary warning, sliding hot down my cheeks while my hands cling white-knuckled to a collar that says I belong to someone who chose me.
“Uh,” I manage, which is not a word so much as a small structural failure.
I blink again, clutching the heart, and the truth comes loose from somewhere I keep locked.
“The only other time,” I whisper, “I ever felt claimed—truly claimed, chosen, kept—was on my wedding night.”
I have never said this aloud.
Not to a therapist, not to an assessor, not to the dark of a single cell in three years.
The three of them go very still.
“And the next morning,” I continue, because the seal is broken now and the rest is pouring out whether I will it or not, “my husband announced to a room full of his men that I had only ever been a tool. A signature. A way to secure a transaction with my father. And then he killed him. My father. And the rest of my family along with him.”
I still remember the way he said it.
Not cruelly—that’s the part that lives under my skin like a splinter that never worked its way out.
He said it kindly, almost gently, the way you’d explain something obvious to a slow child, while I sat in the bed we’d shared the night before still wearing the marks of a claim I’d been fool enough to believe.
He thanked me, even.
Thanked me for being so beautifully, conveniently obedient.
And while I was still piecing together the shape of the betrayal, while the words were rearranging the entire architecture of my life into rubble, he was already giving the order that would erase everyone who had ever loved me.
I didn’t cry then.
That’s the thing I never tell anyone. I sat in that ruined bed bone-dry and watched my whole world end, and something in me decided, in that exact moment, that I would never again let a man witness the precise instant he broke me.
Silence.
Absolute, breath-held silence, three dangerous men gone statue-still around me as I swallow the stone lodged in my throat.
“I’m the trajectory of my family’s end,” I say to my own bare feet, the tears coming faster now, unstoppable.
“I’m the door he walked through to reach them.
And I did everything right. That’s the part no one ever believes.
I followed every rule. I honored my father’s wish to the letter—the alliance, the marriage, the empire he spent his whole life building, all of it riding on my obedience.
I knew the world he moved in was dark. I knew the risks.
But he kept the dark off me as long as he drew breath.
I got to dance. Ballet. The one thing on this earth I have ever loved without it costing me—right up until the day they buried him. ”
They don’t know what my father built, and I don’t tell them the half of it—the reach of it, the names that answered to his, the empire that was supposed to outlive us all.
It doesn’t matter now.
What matters is that he loved me the way a man loves the one soft thing he’s allowed himself in a brutal life, and he protected me from the machinery of it with a ferocity I didn’t understand until it was gone.
I was the princess kept in the one tower the violence never touched. He let me have my barre and my pointe shoes and my small bright world of disciplined beauty, and in exchange I gave him the only thing he ever asked of me: yes.
Yes to the alliance.
Yes to the man he chose.
Yes, because I trusted that my father, who had never once steered me wrong, knew what he was doing when he placed my hand in a stranger’s.
I was wrong to trust it.
He was wrong to ask.
And the price of both our errors was every life that carried our blood.
My voice frays, and I let it.
“And then I had to strip. Because the moment my father was gone, my husband decided I was worthless—gave me no money, no standing, no scrap of power of my own—and a girl has to eat, so I climbed a pole instead of a barre and learned a whole new use for the discipline of my body. I saw things in those rooms. I did things. And somewhere in there, I think, is where the cracks started—where the girl I was began splitting into the women I had to become to survive her.” I lift one hand and drag it across my wet cheek.
“Leaving him was the only sane choice left. And when Dorian pulled me out of that wreckage, I genuinely believed it—that freedom was bliss, that I’d finally gotten out—until I understood he was simply a different shade of the same color.
A prettier cage. A gentler owner. Same walls. ”
I wipe at my face with both hands and try to smile, the old reflex, the mask reaching for its hinges—and when I look up I find Riot is no longer in his chair.
He’s standing directly in front of me, beer abandoned, that hard scarred face doing something I don’t have a name for, and the sight of him there makes my eyes well over all over again.
I keep my head up anyway.
I refuse, even now, even crying, to lower it for the next part.
“I don’t regret killing Dorian,” I tell them, steady through the tears.
“I won’t pretend I do. And if I’m ever given the chance to kill my ex-husband—the man who slaughtered everyone I came from—I’ll carry no regret over that either.
None.” I pull in a shaking breath. “But I’d regret losing you.
You lot of beautiful crazies. So… um.” My composure wobbles, cracks, gives. “Maybe don’t die for me, kay?”
Riot says nothing.
And that silence tells me everything, because I know—down in the root of me, in the place that reads people the way other people read the weather—that this man cannot make that promise.
Won’t.
He doesn’t go back on his word, ever, and he gave me his word in a bathtub with the whole of his terrible conviction, and a vow like that doesn’t come with an exception clause for the asking.
He would die for me.
He has already decided it. And there is nothing I can say that will unmake the decision, because I am the one thing on earth he has chosen to be immovable about.
A whimper escapes me.
The sob I’ve been holding behind my teeth for longer than I can measure rises up to follow it?—
And his arms are around me in a heartbeat.
He pulls me into his chest, into the woodsmoke and the warmth and the steady thunder of him, and then there are more arms—Silas’s long cool ones, Doc’s solid certain ones—folding in around the both of us until I’m enclosed entirely, held on every side, caged at last by the only kind of cage I have ever wanted: one built out of people who would burn the world before they let it have me.
And I cry.
Not the pretty, performed weeping I’ve deployed in courtrooms to soften juries, not Vex’s theatrical sniffles or Velvet’s sultry glistening.
This is ugly. This is the real thing, dredged up from a depth I keep sealed under three years of concrete and a lifetime of necessary lies—great heaving graceless sobs that shake my whole frame and ruin my breathing and leave me gasping into the warm wall of Riot’s chest. I cry for my father and his impossible faith in me.
I cry for the family I never got to mourn because I was too busy surviving the man who took them.
Cry for the girl at the barre and the woman on the pole and every self I had to split into to outlast them all.
Underneath the grief, threaded through every wracking breath of it, is the thing I have no defense against at all—the relief.
The terrible, dizzying relief of finally setting it down.
Of being held while I do.
Truly, helplessly, the way I have not allowed myself in years—the grief and the rage and the impossible, terrifying relief of being held by something that won’t let go, all of it breaking loose at once and soaking into the chest of a killer who chose me.
It’s the first time I’ve truly cried since my Papa’s funeral.