21. ~Vex~ #2
“Let me give you all the only advice worth a damn,” he says.
“This place? It’s a stepping stone. For every soul they send here.
Don’t you swallow a word of whatever pretty story the CEO fed you on your way in.
” He shakes his head, slow and disgusted.
“In the end, that man needs his business running more than he needs anybody breathing. He’d sooner keep his wards full of living dummies, warm and counted and profitable, than spend one red cent saving a single Omega—especially an Omega worth this much to some other Alpha.
One willing to butcher his way through a building to get back what he figures he’s owed. ”
It lands like a key turning in a lock I’d already half-picked myself.
That’s the part the CEO’s pretty clemency story always skated past, the rot underneath the polished marble: I was never the patient they were trying to protect.
I was the liability they were trying to relocate. A body that kept turning up adjacent to other bodies, a public-relations grenade with the pin half out, an asset valuable enough that some unnamed Alpha would torch an entire institution’s reputation to reclaim it.
They didn’t move me to Arch Hollow to save my life. They moved me to make me someone else’s problem, somewhere the cameras wouldn’t catch the splatter.
This old man in his oil-stained coveralls just said aloud the thing every credentialed liar at Blackthorn took great pains not to. I could kiss his walnut face for the honesty of it.
We share a look between the four of us, that silent pack arithmetic I’m still learning the language of, and the owner reads it and nods like we’ve confirmed something he already suspected.
“So play house,” he says. “Enjoy the quiet while it lasts. But watch the signs.” He levels a calloused finger.
“Every artist starts making mistakes the moment he feels his grip on his diamond finally slipping. Gets sloppy. Gets loud. Lets the mask crack just enough to show his hand. When a man like that realizes the thing he’s sure he owns is walking around free and happy and somebody else’s—he won’t stay patient.
He’ll come. And when he does, he’ll come making errors. ”
It’s good advice.
Better than good—it’s precisely the read I’d arrived at myself, which means this old mechanic with the walnut face is sharper than nine-tenths of the investigators who’ve ever had a crack at me.
The artist. The diamond.
His hold slipping. He’s described my husband in three sentences without ever hearing the man’s name.
Then the owner smiles at me, warm and a little wicked.
“And you, sweetheart—take some self-defense classes while you’re here. Never hurts.”
I smile back, slow, and let it widen until my teeth show.
“Daggers,” I tell him sweetly, “are my weapon of choice.”
It isn’t a boast. It’s a résumé.
I learned blades the way I learned the pole and the barre—with my whole body, obsessively, in the years when the only thing standing between me and the men who thought they owned me was how fast my hands could move.
A dagger suits me the way a scalpel suits Silas and a plan suits Doc: it’s intimate, it’s precise, it requires you to be close enough to smell your problem’s fear before you solve it. Guns are for people who want distance from their consequences.
I have never once wanted distance from mine. I want to watch them understand.
He arches a bushy eyebrow, holds my gaze for a beat—and then barks out a delighted laugh, nodding his approval like I’ve passed some test I didn’t know I was taking.
“Course they are. Then you go see the blacksmith—right beside the artistic institute, you can’t miss it.
That’s where they run all the dance classes of an evening, the pole and the heels and whatnot, weeknights after dark.
Fella named Barney keeps a forge there. Loves nothing more than teaching Omegas the proper handling of a blade.
” He winks. “Just bring one of your men with you. House rules.”
“Silas will go with you,” Doc says at once, settling it before I can, and I find I don’t mind the deciding—there’s a poetry to it, the undertaker escorting me to learn the blade.
And something in me sharpens pleasantly at the prospect.
A forge. A blacksmith named Barney who arms Omegas after dark. A standing reason to keep a length of honed steel close to my body in a town where my husband’s shadow is already learning the streets.
The trinity has wrapped me in collars and accounts and bodyguards, and I love them the more for it—but a woman who has survived as many men as I have does not feel truly safe until the safety is sitting in her own hand, weighing right, sharp enough to settle an argument permanently.
Let them guard me.
I intend to be the last and worst surprise anyone hunting me ever finds.
“Thanks,” I tell the owner, and mean it. “Our new friend.”
“Anytime.” He gives a hearty, rolling laugh that fills the whole oil-scented bay.
“Just don’t go forgetting about me when you lot move on to wherever you’re really headed.
” He winks again, and there’s a knowing in it that confirms he understands far more than he’s said.
Doc inclines his head. Riot claps the man’s shoulder in thanks, and we step back out into the sun.
“You’re leaving the bike?” I ask, because Riot has already materialized at my free side, sliding his hand into the one not occupied by Doc and pressing a warm kiss to my temple as we walk.
“For now.” His thumb strokes the back of my hand. “I’ll come back and test her out properly. I’m not putting you anywhere near that machine until I know she’s a hundred percent safe to ride with you on the back, Pretty. Not taking that chance tonight.”
And there it is again—the casual, total protectiveness, the way every single one of his calculations now routes through my safety like water finding the sea.
I should find it suffocating. The old me, the one who burned her way free of exactly this kind of attention, would have.
Instead I lean a fraction into the kiss and let myself be held between the two of them, flanked by a doctor’s calm and a killer’s warmth, and I scan the lane for the third point of our strange compass.
“Where’s our Crowe?”
“Hereeee,” comes the sing-song reply, and Silas rounds the corner practically gift-wrapped in his own purchases—juggling an absurd architecture of bags and bolts and paper-wrapped parcels, somehow graceful even buried under all of it, a smear of joy where a man should be.
Doc sighs through his nose.
“You know they would have delivered all of that. I watched you decline the delivery.”
“They fold wrong,” Silas whines, genuinely aggrieved, hugging his haul closer. “They crease the fabric along the grain and ruin the drape and they have no idea, none, what they’re handling. Some things a man simply has to carry himself.”
“Perfectionist,” Riot says, flat and fond, the single word a whole diagnosis.
“The word you’re reaching for is artist,” Silas sniffs, redistributing his teetering tower of parcels with the wounded dignity of a man defending his life’s work.
“And one day, when our Darling is wearing something I’ve made that stops an entire street, you’ll all eat those words with a very small, very ironic fork. ”
He shoots me a conspiratorial look over the bolts.
“They have no vision, Sweet Peony. None. I’m building you a wardrobe that announces precisely what you are before you’ve said a word, and these philistines think it’s about keeping fabric from creasing.”
“It was about the creasing,” Doc notes.
“It was about the creasing,” Silas concedes without a flicker of shame, “and also about the vision. A man can hold two truths.”
Silas ignores him entirely and beams at me over the top of a bolt of pink-and-something fabric. “Did our Darling have fun?”
I consider the morning—the flyer, the stores, the burgers, the held hands, the quiet in my own head, the old man who saw straight through to the marrow of my situation and chose to arm me anyway. And I nod.
“It was a glimpse,” I say, and the honesty of it surprises me on the way out. “Of normalcy. What it might be like.”
“Good,” Silas declares, and there’s nothing performed in it for once, just a soft fierce gladness. “We need more of it. A great deal more. We’ll build you a proper routine—classes and breakfasts and ordinary boring beautiful days, as many as you can stand.”
I smile, and it feels different than my usual smiles—none of the teeth, none of the performance, none of the bright manic armor I bolt over my face when I need a room to underestimate me.
Just… ease.
Real and unguarded and faintly terrifying in its sincerity. And they tug me gently along between them, the three of them, toward the looping road that leads back to the temporary house we’re pretending is a home, laden with food and fabric and the promise of a blade-smith named Barney.
I am not a fool.
I know exactly what this is. I know the bubble has a countdown stitched into it, that somewhere out past the mossy arches my husband is sharpening his patience into something that will eventually come for all of us, that this golden lull is borrowed time on a clock I can hear ticking even now beneath the birdsong.
The artist’s grip is slipping. He will come. The owner is right, and I am right, and the peace will burst the way every peace I’ve ever known has burst.
But the bubble hasn’t burst yet.
For once in my splintered, hunted, exquisitely complicated life, I let myself stand inside it and simply feel the warmth—the hand in mine, the kiss still tingling at my temple, the madman singing about fabric grain, the quiet in my own head where the storm usually lives.
I realize, walking home flanked by three monsters who would raze the world before they let it touch me, is what it might actually be to belong to a pack that wants you whole.
Not a pack that wants to own you.
Not one that wants to display you, or use you, or keep you pretty and dependent and afraid. A pack that actually yearns to see you proper.
Who wants to see you win… and survive.