22. ~Vex~ #2
I cross the room on silent feet and lower myself onto the rug beside him, close enough to share his warmth and the cedar-sweet cloud of him, and I tuck my knees up and say nothing at all.
He returns to his knitting without a word, the needles resuming their patient rhythm, and I find I’m absurdly grateful for it—for a man who doesn’t rush to fill a silence, who lets me simply exist in the quiet beside him without demanding I perform my presence.
So few people have ever let me just be in a room.
The ones who did are mostly dead.
We sit like that for a long while, and I watch his hands work—those long pale clever hands that have closed the eyes of murdered men and cut a bodice to flatter my exact frame and, apparently, can coax soft warmth out of nothing but wool and patience.
There’s a hypnosis to the rhythm of it, the loop and pull and slide, and I feel the strategist in my skull finally begin to slow, the frantic pacing easing to something almost like rest.
It strikes me that this is a kind of intimacy I have no vocabulary for. Not the heat Riot gives me, not the certainty Doc provides. Something stiller.
The intimacy of being permitted to sit in silence beside someone and not be afraid. I have been touched in a thousand ways by a hundred people and I am not certain I have ever, before these three, simply been kept company.
“Have you decided,” I ask eventually, my voice low so it doesn’t crack the hush, “what flowers I’ll wear on my end day?”
It’s the kind of question that usually sends him spiraling into delighted morbidity—ranunculus and anemone and hellebore, a whole rhapsody on petals and meaning.
I brace for the performance.
It doesn’t come.
The needles still. He turns his head and looks at me, and the glee isn’t there—none of it, not the bright unhinged sparkle, not the funereal theater.
What’s there instead is calm. Genuine, quiet, bottomless calm, a stillness in those amber eyes I’ve never once been shown, and the sight of it makes something click into place in my chest with the force of recognition.
Because I know that look. I wear its cousin. It’s the face under the face.
Does he have a switch too?
“Crowe,” I whisper, testing it.
He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t so much as flicker. And the non-response is the answer—because Crowe is the one who would have answered, the showman, the morbid darling who performs death like a cabaret. Crowe isn’t here right now.
I nod, slow, the understanding settling deep and certain.
“So you’re Silas,” I breathe, like I’ve finally cracked a cipher I didn’t know I’d been reading for weeks.
And there it is—the genuine uplift at the corner of his mouth, small and real and warmer than any grin Crowe has ever flashed me.
“You understand exactly how alike we are, don’t you,” he murmurs. He lets it sit, then adds, softer still, “But you knew that already. You knew the first time I called you Sweet Peony and meant it.”
I say nothing, which is its own confession, and his smile spreads by a fraction as he turns back to the fire and lets us both stare into it.
Two performers.
Two splintered, costumed creatures who learned to build a louder self to keep the world from touching the quiet one underneath.
He has a Crowe the way I have a Vex—the bright dangerous mask that walks point so the true thing can hide behind it. We recognized each other across a corpse weeks ago and have been circling the recognition ever since. It should frighten me, being this transparent to anyone.
With him, it feels instead like being read in a language I thought no one else alive could speak.
And there’s a comfort in it that goes bone-deep, because the others love me too—I don’t doubt that anymore, can’t, not after collars and accounts and a killer who’d die before he broke his word—but they love me from the outside of this particular thing.
Riot would tear apart anyone who threatened my pieces.
Doc would build me a fortress and hand me the only key.
But neither of them has lived inside a self that splits, has felt the lurch of surfacing in a room with no memory of how the body got there, has had to perform a person so the realer one could survive.
Silas has.
Silas knows the exact texture of it, the loneliness of being several and letting the world meet only the loudest. He isn’t soothing a wound he’s read about in a file.
He’s showing me his own matching scar in the firelight and telling me, without a trace of pity, that I’m not the only monster in the house wearing more than one face.
“Why can’t you sleep, Darling?” he asks, gentle, the needles resuming their soft rhythm.
I know why. The why is sitting on my chest like a stone, has been all night, and it frightens me precisely because naming it makes the approaching reality real—the deadline, the husband, the inevitable burst of this golden bubble. But Silas doesn’t lie to me, so I find I don’t want to lie to him.
“I’m coming to realize,” I admit, the words quiet and raw, “that I don’t want to lose any of you.”
There it is.
The thing I’ve been turning from for two weeks, said out loud into a sleeping house. I look at him when I say it, and he meets my gaze without a flicker of doubt, steady as bedrock.
“And what,” he says, with quiet, lethal confidence, “makes you think we’re the type to lose, in the game of life?”
I can’t answer that.
I have no counter. He reaches over, then, and lightly strokes my cheek with the backs of two long fingers—and it’s the touch that makes me realize a tear has slipped loose and tracked down my face without my permission.
I hadn’t felt it fall. I never do, anymore; the crying happens to me now like weather, without my consent.
“Hired to sacrifice,” he muses, brushing the wet track away with his thumb, his voice a low velvet thing in the firelight, “only to find, somewhere along the way, that you might actually like the very people sent to collect you. It’s a disorienting thing, isn’t it, when the weapon turns out to have a heartbeat.
” His amber eyes hold mine, and there’s nothing of the showman left in them.
“Which raises the question you’ve been lying awake chewing on.
The one you won’t say. Who has the bigger obsession, in the end. Us?—”
He leans in.
Slow, deliberate, giving me every chance to pull away that I have no intention of taking, and brushes his lips against mine—once, light as a question—before he presses in and gives me a firm, certain kiss, his hand cradling my jaw, the cedar-and-candied-violet of him flooding my senses until the whole dark house narrows to the warm point where we meet.
“—or you?” he finishes, against my mouth.
We share a look, heated and unhurried, the fire popping somewhere beside us, and I have to swallow against the lump rising in my throat—because he’s right, the infuriating, beautiful creature, and the truth of it is the thing I came down the stairs trying to outrun.
I am as obsessed with them as they are with me.
More, maybe.
The hunters became the haunted, and the prey grew teeth and a heart and a terror of being left, and somewhere in the swap I stopped being able to tell who was keeping whom.
And the wanting is the part that undoes me, sitting here with my pulse still loud from his mouth.
I know desire as a weapon—I learned it on a stage, learned to wield it and to fear it and to recognize it as the leash men reached for first.
What I didn’t know, until these three, was desire that doesn’t want to take anything from me.
Silas kisses me like he has all the time in the world and no agenda inside it, like my mouth is something to be savored rather than spent, and the slow heat of it pools low and patient in my belly without a single alarm bell ringing behind it.
That’s the thing that frightens me more than the husband, more than the deadline, more than the island. Not that they might hurt me.
That I might let them close enough to.
“Doc isn’t the only one who can read you, Darling,” Silas whispers, and the truth of that sits between us, naked.
“We can be your new Puddin—all three of us, the soft warm thing that never once turns on you, the love that doesn’t come with a blade hidden in it.
But you have to be ready to go all in. No half-measures.
No keeping one foot out the door for the day we disappoint you, because we won’t, and the waiting for it will only cost you the joy you’re owed in the meantime.
All of you, for all of us. That’s the only deal we’re offering, and it’s the only one worth taking. ”
He pulls back, then, and returns to his knitting, as if he hasn’t just rearranged the furniture of my entire interior.
The needles take up their patient click. And I sit there in the firelight, undone and quiet, watching a man who dresses the dead make something warm with his hands, and I let the silence stretch long and unhurried between us.
Go all in.
I turn the phrase over the way I turn everything over, looking for the trap in it, the hook beneath the bait, the fine print that every other all-in I’ve ever signed has hidden.
I don’t find one. That’s the part that keeps short-circuiting my careful, suspicious mind—there’s no clause here that takes. They are not asking to own me.
They are asking me to stop hedging against their love, to quit keeping the emergency exit greased and the daggers counted, to risk the one thing I swore after Dorian I would never risk again: believing a good thing might be allowed to stay good.
It’s the most dangerous proposition anyone has ever put to me.
The truly mad part, the part that proves I belong in a house of monsters, is how much of me has already decided to take it.
Then, softly—more to himself than to me, his gaze on the yarn moving through his fingers—he answers the question I asked an hour and a lifetime ago.
“I don’t think,” he murmurs, “I’d be able to choose a worthy enough color for your flowers.”
The needles slow.
The fire gilds the sharp serene lines of his face, and when he goes on, his voice is the gentlest I have ever heard it, and somehow the most terrible.
“Cause I’d hope we leave first, and never after—to ensure such a tragedy as beautiful and serene as your ascension without us, Pretty Peony...never transpires in this lifetime…or the next.”