26. ~Vex~
~Vex~
The town has rules, and the cruelest of them is the one about idleness.
You’re not permitted to simply exist in Arch Hollow, to molder gently in a pretty house behind mossy arches while the world decides what to do with you.
No—the condemned are required to prove they’re rehabilitating, which is the polite institutional word for performing wellness.
We have to be seen pursuing hobbies, cultivating interests, demonstrating to whatever unseen committee tabulates such things that we are productive little reclaimed citizens and not merely killers in a holding pen with better landscaping.
So when Lucien tells me, over his black tea and the morning paper, that there’s an outing arranged for today, I assume the worst. Pottery, perhaps.
A guided nature walk. Some excruciating exercise in supervised normalcy designed to convince a clipboard that my soul is being buffed back to a socially acceptable shine.
“You’ve earned a privilege,” he says instead, folding the paper with that maddening precision of his, every crease a decision. “A special one. For your recent… cooperation.”
The pause before cooperation is deliberate, and so is the glint behind his glasses, and the strategist in me sits up at once because Lucien Graves does not tease without a reason.
Teasing is an inefficiency, and the man does not traffic in inefficiencies unless he’s enjoying himself, which means he’s planned something he’s certain will land.
The blood-orange and old-books warmth of his scent has a thread of anticipation woven through it this morning, faint as a fingerprint, and I catalogue it with rising suspicion.
“Cooperation,” I repeat, narrowing my eyes. “That’s a generous word for letting your undertaker ruin me on a hearthrug.”
“I was referring,” he says smoothly, not rising to it in the slightest, “to your attendance record. Three weeks of pole classes, your self-defense sessions, the way you’ve stopped trying to pick the lock on the back window at two in the morning.
The committee is pleased. I am… also pleased.
” He rises, offers me a hand. “Get dressed. And be excited, Vex. I’ve planned this one specifically for you. ”
Be excited.
As if excitement is a thing I can summon on command, a switch among my many switches. But the irritating truth is that I am—intrigued, at least, which in my fractured economy is the same currency.
He said specifically for you, and Lucien doesn’t waste specificity any more than he wastes teasing, and a gift chosen with that much intention from a man who weaponizes intention is a thing worth being curious about.
He helps me into the car with a hand at the small of my back, a small possessive courtesy, and the entire drive he refuses to tell me where we’re going.
I try three different angles—charm, threat, and the silent treatment—and he counters all three with the serene immovability of a man who has interrogated minds far slipperier than mine for a living.
The valley unspools past the window, then the arches, then an unfamiliar road into a neighboring town I’ve never been cleared to enter, and my pulse climbs with every mile because wherever we’re headed required permission.
Real permission. The kind that takes strings and favors and, I’d wager, a generous dose of Barney leaning on someone.
I watch his hands on the wheel instead of the road—long, precise, ringless, the hands that hold a fountain pen and a scalpel of a mind—and I run the math the way I always do, hunting the angle, the catch, the cost.
Because gifts have always come with invoices, in my experience.
Every kindness I was ever shown turned out to be a down payment on something a man intended to collect later, with interest.
The husband’s courtship. Dorian’s rescue.
I am constitutionally incapable of receiving a present without first checking it for a hook.
Yet the longer I sit here, the less I can find one.
Lucien wants nothing from this. He has arranged something elaborate and difficult and entirely for my pleasure, and the absence of an angle is so foreign to me that it loops all the way back around to suspicious.
The cruelest trick anyone could play on a woman like me would be genuine, unconditional generosity.
I keep waiting for it to be a trick. It keeps refusing to be one.
Then he parks. And I look up.
And the breath leaves my body in one clean, gutted exhale.
It’s a studio.
An aerial arts and pole studio, tucked into a converted brick warehouse with tall arched windows and a hand-painted sign, the kind of building that hums with purpose before you’ve even stepped inside.
I can see them through the glass—the poles, gleaming chrome floor to ceiling, the silks pooled like spilled jewels from the rafters, the lyra hoops suspended in patient circles. The afternoon light pours through those high windows and turns the whole space gold.
“How,” I manage.
“I requested it,” Lucien says, watching my face with the quiet attentiveness of a man who has been waiting all morning for exactly this expression. “It sits outside our cleared radius, which made it complicated. Barney was… persuasive on our behalf. Go on.”
I don’t remember crossing the threshold.
One moment I’m in the car and the next I’m inside, and the instant my feet touch the polished sprung floor, something deep in the wreckage of me wakes up and roars.
The scent hits first, because it always does for me—the particular perfume of a place like this, chalk and grip-rosin and clean sweat, the faint rubber of crash mats and the floral ghost of a dozen women’s lotions, all of it underlaid with the warm dustiness of a building that breathes effort.
It is the smell of my old life.
The one before Blackthorn.
Before the straitjackets and the curated chaos and the years of wearing lunacy like couture.
The mirrors throw my reflection back at me from every angle, a hundred fractured Vexes, and the sound system murmurs a low bass line, and the floor is polished to a shine that begs for bare feet and chalked hands—and I am, for one vertiginous heartbeat, twenty-one again.
I remember the hustle.
The Friday nights that bled into Saturday mornings, the lights and the noise and the bills folded into my waistband until I could barely move.
The worship. The praise. The intoxicating power of a room full of people who came to watch me defy gravity and went home having seen something holy.
It wasn’t the pole my husband left me to, the auction-block desperation of a woman with no other way to eat—this was the other thing, the thing underneath the survival.
The art.
The reason I climbed that first time and felt, despite everything, like a goddess instead of a commodity. The pole gave me back to myself in pieces even as the world tried to spend me, and standing here now, in the gold light, I feel those pieces stir and reach for the ceiling.
My eyes sting.
I blink it furiously away, because Vex does not weep at the smell of chalk, and there are witnesses.
But the memories come anyway, unbidden and vivid, the way scent always drags the past up by the collar. I remember the first studio that took me in, back when I had nothing—no name worth using, no money, no family left aboveground, just a dancer’s body and a fury that needed somewhere to go.
Remember the calluses splitting and healing tougher.
I remember the night I held my first proper invert and felt, for the span of three seconds upside down in the dark, like I had clawed back a single inch of myself from everyone who’d ever taken pieces.
The pole was the one thing nobody gave me and nobody could un-give.
They could pay to watch. They could never own the watching. And in a life defined by being owned—wife, asset, patient, prize—that distinction was the closest thing to sovereignty I ever held. No wonder my whole nervous system is lighting up like a switchboard.
I’m standing in the ruins of my own cathedral, and someone has lit the candles again.
“Well,” drawls a voice from across the studio, rich and amused. “I know that look. That’s the look of someone who’s flown before.”
I turn—and my brain stops working entirely.
Because I know that face.
I have studied that face.
Leaning against the front desk with the loose, catlike ease of a man who owns every room he’s ever stood in is a living legend, a retired competition champion whose performances I dissected frame by frame in the small hours of a hundred sleepless nights, rewinding grainy footage until I could trace the exact mechanics of a move that shouldn’t be physically possible.
He taught me half of what I know without ever knowing I existed.
He is, to the strange church of my obsession, something close to a saint.
And the mastermind, the strategist, the psychotic queen who dismantled an institution from inside a padded cell—she evaporates completely, and what’s left is a starstruck girl with no composure whatsoever.
“You—” I point at him, undignified. “You’re—oh my god.
The Meridian routine. The two-thousand-and-fourteen worlds, the one with the blind drop into the Ayesha catch that the judges said was impossible until you landed it three times in a row—I have that memorized.
I taught myself the entry off your footage.
I rewound the dismount so many times I wore out the file.
” The words tumble out faster than I can dam them, a flood of routines and timestamps and reverent specificity, and somewhere in the back of my skull a small horrified voice notes that I am gushing, that I have not gushed at anything since I was a child, and that I appear to be entirely unable to stop.
“The inverted layout in your final season. The way you held the deadlift for a full eight counts. Do you know what that did to me? Do you know how many tendons I sacrificed trying to replicate it?”
He laughs, delighted and unhurried, and the sound is warm as honey.