21. ~Vex~
~Vex~
Ileave the diner with my hand in Doc’s and two grease-spotted to-go bags swinging from the other, because apparently we don’t abandon our maniacs to fend for themselves at mealtimes—a sentence I never imagined applying to my life and find, alarmingly, that I enjoy.
“Silas has been hunting fabric all morning,” Doc says as we step into the bright cobbled lane, answering a question I hadn’t asked but had clearly telegraphed by glancing at the boutique he’d vanished into. “Bolts of it. Notions. Whatever caught his eye.”
“Why would a mortician need fabric?” I muse, and Doc gives me a sidelong look that suggests I’m about to learn something.
“He designs,” Doc says simply. “Clothing. He makes nearly everything he wears—every one of those impeccable antique coats, the waistcoats, all of it cut and sewn by his own hands. The dress he gave you this morning was the first thing he’s made for anyone but himself in years.”
I stop walking for half a step, recalibrating.
A man who arranges the dead with the same hands he uses to draft a bodice; who studies the drape of grave-flowers and the fall of a hemline with equal devotion. It shouldn’t fit, and yet it fits him perfectly, the morbid and the beautiful threaded through the same needle.
I file the detail away in the growing dossier I keep on each of them, the one labeled things they didn’t mean to let me learn, and feel a small private thrill at how thick it’s gotten.
“Huh,” I say, which is the most articulate response I can manage to the discovery that the man planning my funeral has also, somewhere in there, been quietly making me beautiful. “And Riot? Where does Doc keep his convict when he wanders off?”
“There’s exactly one place he’ll be,” Doc says, with the weary certainty of a man who has located this particular needle in this particular haystack many times. “Come on.”
We walk, and I let myself notice how strange it is to simply walk.
No restraints. No orderly trailing three steps back. No camera tracking the precise geometry of my movements through a reinforced corridor.
Just cobblestones warm through the soles of borrowed shoes, and a hand in mine, and a town that smells of bread and woodsmoke and somebody’s late roses, going about the unbothered business of an ordinary morning.
I keep waiting for the wrongness of it to announce itself, for the trapdoor I know is somewhere underfoot. It doesn’t.
The morning just… continues, generous and golden and entirely undeserved, and I clutch my greasy bags of food and let it be.
The garage sits at the foot of the lane, the main one in a town this size, and I hear it before I see it—the throaty, sudden roar of an engine catching, ragged and then smoothing into a low contented growl.
The scent of the place reaches me next, and it’s a whole symphony: motor oil and hot metal and old rubber, grease and gasoline and sun-warmed steel, an industrial perfume that has no business smelling as good as it does until I realize why.
It’s the closest thing in this gentle valley to him. To woodsmoke and warm iron. The garage smells like Riot turned inside out, and my body responds to it before my mind catches up, something low and warm uncurling at the recognition.
And there he is.
Crouched over a motorcycle that, judging by the awe of the older man hovering nearby, was a corpse an hour ago and is now very much alive, purring under Riot’s scarred hand like it’s grateful to him.
He listens to it the way Silas listens to a body, the way Doc listens to a problem—with total, absorbed attention—and then he nods once, satisfied, to no one but the machine.
“I’ll take it.”
The older gentleman, all grease-stained coveralls and a face like a walnut, whistles low and long.
“Son, the fact that you brought that fossil back to life in under an hour is flat-out unheard of. I had her written off for scrap.” He jabs a thumb at the rows of half-restored vehicles crowding the bays behind him.
“You ought to come work alongside me. Help me bring the rest of these old beauties back. I’ve got vintage specs in here that haven’t turned over since before you were born. ”
Riot smirks, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Tempting. I could. But then I’d have no time left for my Omega.” He says it easily, casually, like it’s the most settled fact in the universe. “And that wouldn’t do at all.”
Then he notices us, and his whole face changes.
It changes in a way I haven’t seen before—a real, unguarded smile breaking across that hard scarred mouth, crinkling the corners of his pale eyes until they actually twinkle, and the sight of it does something embarrassing to my chest.
Because this isn’t the feral grin he bares at threats or the smug satisfaction he wears after sex. This is joy. Pure, boyish, uncomplicated joy, the kind that makes a grown man look eight years old for half a second, and I understand with sudden clarity that I’ve found one of his soft spots.
Engines. Machines.
The honest mechanical puzzle of bringing a dead thing back to running, no body count required. It’s the look of a kid who got to be a kid, briefly, in a life that didn’t allow much of it.
He crosses to us, leaning in to press a quick kiss to my hairline before he speaks.
“Sorry. Got distracted.” He glances back at the bike with something almost wistful.
“That one’s a vintage antique. Same model my older brother used to ride—he loved that machine more than people, half the time.
I saw it sitting in the corner like roadkill and I just…
wanted to see if it could be saved. Turns out it could.
Few fixes and she runs perfect.” He shrugs, but the wistfulness doesn’t quite leave his eyes.
“I’ll have to test-drive her before I commit. But she’s a keeper.”
An older brother.
A new thread in the ruined tapestry of him, and I tuck it away gently, because the way he said it—the loved it more than people, half the time—carries a past-tense weight I recognize, the particular grammar of grief worn smooth.
I don’t prod it.
We all keep our dead in our own drawers, and I of all people know better than to pull one open uninvited.
But I look at him differently for a moment, this man the world built into a weapon.
I’ve catalogued his violence, his devotion, the trauma stacked behind those pale eyes like cordwood. I hadn’t catalogued this—the boy who must have watched an older brother ride off down some long road and wanted, more than anything, to be trusted with the machine.
The gentleness of the want unsettles me more than any of his savagery ever has. It’s easy to love a monster for his teeth. It’s the soft parts that are dangerous, the parts that make you forget to keep one eye on the door.
Here I am, in a garage that smells like him, forgetting to watch the door, charmed half to ruin by the sight of a killer made briefly, brilliantly young by a dead man’s motorcycle.
The mastermind in me logs a quiet warning.
The rest of me ignores it entirely.
“This is the owner,” Riot says, nodding at the walnut-faced man. “Runs the place.”
The man wipes a palm on his coveralls and gives us a once-over that’s shrewder than his easy manner lets on.
“Good to meet some new faces,” he says. “Though something tells me y’all won’t be sticking around here long.”
Doc tilts his head a precise degree, and I glance between the two men, and Riot just chuckles low in his chest.
“He’s a good in-source,” Riot tells us, by way of translation. “Seems a few folks in this town already know where we came from. And a few of them have got their eyes peeled for the one who’d very much like our darling planted six feet under.”
Doc nods, slow and grave, his hand never once loosening around mine.
Here is the thing I keep noticing, the thing that should unsettle me far more than it does: I stay calm.
Through the casual mention of a man who wants me dead, through the open acknowledgment that the hunt has followers and watchers in this very town, I remain oddly, impossibly settled—and it isn’t bravery, or numbness, or the manic detachment I usually run on.
It’s his hand. Doc’s hand around mine, warm and certain, and the steady library-and-amber scent of him threading through the garage fumes.
Since he took my hand outside the diner, the noise in my head has… quieted.
My mind, which ordinarily juggles fifteen billion contingencies at once, a permanent storm of calculation I’ve simply learned to live inside, has gone unfamiliarly still.
Single-threaded. Present. I’ve read about it—the way a pack bond can regulate a fractured Omega’s nervous system, settle the static, drop the noise floor—but reading a thing and feeling your own ceaseless mind go quiet for the first time in years are two entirely different countries.
I don’t fully trust it.
But I don’t let go of his hand either.
It frightens me, if I’m honest in the privacy of my own skull.
The quiet. Because the storm has been my whole survival—the fifteen billion threads are what keep me three moves ahead of every man who’s ever tried to end me, and a woman who lets her vigilance go soft is a woman who wakes up owned, or dead, or both.
I built the noise on purpose. I taught myself never to set it down. Now this calm, unhurried man has wrapped his hand around mine and switched the storm to a murmur without so much as asking, and the terrifying part is not that he can do it.
The terrifying part is how badly some exhausted, buried piece of me wants to let him keep doing it.
Wants to set the vigilance down, just once, and trust that someone else is finally watching the door.
The owner lowers his voice, and the easy mechanic falls away to reveal something sharper underneath.