26. ~Vex~ #2
“Oh, I like her,” he says—to Lucien, I realize, who is standing just behind me with an expression I can’t quite read. “She’s got the disease. The good kind. The kind you can’t cure.”
It’s a strange and dizzying thing, meeting a god.
I have spent so long being the most dangerous, most studied, most watched thing in every room that I’d forgotten what it feels like to be the one doing the worshipping—to stand in front of someone whose work shaped you and have nothing to offer but gratitude.
There’s a vulnerability in it I would normally never permit, the fan’s open-throated reverence, and yet here it pours out of me uncensored, because the part of me that loved this art was never the part that learned to lie.
She predates all my masks.
She is, perhaps, the oldest honest thing I own, and she has been starving in the dark for years, and the sight of those chrome poles has set her loose to feast.
It’s only then, with the fan-fever ebbing enough to let the strategist crawl back into her chair, that the obvious question surfaces and I blurt it without a shred of tact.
“Wait. What did you do?” He arches a brow, and I gesture at the whole improbable building, the studio in a town like this.
“You’re here. In a place built for people like me.
Which means you did something. Something criminal, or something that got you labeled the kind of insane they file away and forget.
A man doesn’t go from world stages to a clemency town without a body in the story somewhere. ”
Lucien makes a small sound that might be a sigh.
The owner only grins wider, entirely unoffended—charmed, even.
“Sharp little thing,” he says. “And not wrong.” He doesn’t flinch from it, doesn’t hedge, and I respect him instantly for the lack of theater.
He tells me how he came to be here—the broad strokes, the way you tell a story you’ve made peace with, an old wound worn smooth into anecdote—and the details aren’t mine to keep, but they confirm what I already knew the moment I saw the steel under all that grace.
We are the same species, he and I. The kind that survives by becoming dangerous.
“Difference is,” he finishes, with a glint, “I’ve got clemency in my back pocket.
Earned it, banked it. I’m just… waiting.
For the right moment to spend it.” His grin turns sly.
“And the right Omega foolish enough to wrap themselves around a heart as cold as mine. Haven’t met them yet.
But I’m patient.” He winks at me, and I decide on the spot that I adore him.
“You two clearly know each other,” I say, glancing between them, because the ease in the air has a history baked into it that a single introduction can’t explain.
“We go back,” the owner agrees, and there’s a wicked little curl to it. “Oh, you didn’t tell her?”
“It hasn’t come up,” Lucien says, in the flat tone of a man hoping a subject will have the decency to die where it stands.
It does not have the decency to die. The owner’s grin becomes the grin of a man about to enjoy himself enormously.
“Hasn’t come up. He says, about the years we spent on the same circuit.
” He turns to me, conspiratorial, savoring it.
“Your doctor here, sweetheart—before the degrees, before the bestsellers with his name embossed on the cover, before he had a single letter after his name—your doctor was one of the finest pole and aerial performers I ever shared a stage with.”
The studio goes very quiet, or maybe that’s just the roaring in my ears.
“What,” I say.
And here is the thing that guts me, the thing that genuinely robs me of speech: I didn’t know.
I, who researched this man down to the marrow. I, who pulled every paper he ever published, read his books cover to cover twice, traced his credentials and his history and the shape of his career until I was certain I understood the architecture of Lucien better than he understood it himself.
I am the woman who knows things.
It is my entire stock in trade, the thing that kept me alive when nothing else could—and somehow, in all that excavation, I never found this.
He buried it that thoroughly.
He scrubbed a whole life clean from the record.
“You performed,” I breathe, rounding on him. “Professionally. You—the suits, the fountain pen, the locked notebook, the man who feels nothing on purpose—you flew.”
The mastermind in me is scrambling to re-draw the entire map of him, because this single fact rewrites everything.
The control I read as innate is discipline forged on a stage where one missed grip means the floor. The way he watches me move through a room, clocking my balance and my weight and the mechanics of my body—I’d filed it as a clinician’s habit, the doctor assessing the patient. It was never that.
It was a performer recognizing a performer. He has been reading me like an audience reads a routine this whole time, knowing exactly what it costs to make difficulty look like ease, and I never once caught it because I was too busy being certain I’d already solved him.
The arrogance of it makes me want to laugh.
I, who pride myself on missing nothing, missed the entire foundation the man was built on.
He didn’t just hide a hobby. He hid a self—the original self, the one all the others were poured over—and he hid it from the one person alive who might have recognized it on sight.
Lucien removes his glasses.
Slowly.
Cleans them on the hem of his shirt in a gesture I’ve come to recognize as his version of bracing, and when he answers his voice is quieter than I’ve ever heard it, stripped of its clinical armor.
“It funded everything,” he says. “The degrees. The psychiatry. The years of studying the architecture of the human mind so I could become what I am now. The respectable career was built entirely on the back of the one the respectable world sneered at. Every credential I own, every paper, every letter after my name—paid for, dollar by dollar, by a body that knew how to defy gravity for an audience that paid to watch.” He slides the glasses back on, and something flickers behind them, old and complicated. “So no. It hasn’t come up.”
“Oh, come on,” the owner says, pushing off the desk. “She’s a devotee, Lucien. You can’t drop that on the girl and then stand there in your nice trousers like a tax accountant. Show her. One sequence. For old times’ sake, and for the prettiest fan you’re ever going to get.”
“No.”
“Lucien.”
“I’m not dressed for it. It’s been years. I’ll tear something and you’ll enjoy it.”
“You’ll be insufferable about how you haven’t lost it,” the owner counters. “Which you haven’t. I can see it in how you’re standing. Muscle memory doesn’t forget a first language.”
I say nothing.
I just look at him—Doc, my Doc, the immovable planner, the man who has spent every moment of our acquaintance behind a wall of glass and clinical distance—and I let him see, plainly, how much I want this.
Whatever he reads in my face does what no amount of cajoling could, because he exhales through his nose, mutters something that sounds like a curse against his own better judgment, and begins, with grim resignation, to unbutton his shirt.
He strips down to a fitted base layer, chalks his hands at the bowl by the desk with the unthinking ritual of a man whose body remembers a language his mouth forgot, and crosses to the nearest pole. He grips it.
Tests it with a small economical pull, listening to the chrome the way Riot listens to an engine.
And then?—
Then he leaves the ground, and I forget how to breathe.
It should not be possible.
He is a powerlifter’s frame, all dense muscle and contained mass, a big man built like a vault—and yet he moves through the air with a grace that makes a mockery of his own physics, climbing in slow controlled spirals, inverting without a flicker of strain, holding an extension at the apex that defies every law of leverage I thought I understood.
He transitions into a deadlift so smooth it looks edited, so effortless it borders on insolent, his whole body a single fluid line of intention. There is no jerk, no scramble, no visible cost. Just the impossible, made to look like breathing.
Heaven help me…
It is obscene how much I want him like this. The base layer clings to the working muscles of his back, sweat darkening the fabric in a slow bloom, the cords of his forearms standing in stark relief as he holds his own weight on a single grip.
His blood-orange-and-amber scent has gone thick and warm with exertion, rolling off him in waves that hit the Omega in me square in the chest and pull a low spike of heat straight down through my belly.
I have wanted all three of my madmen in a hundred ways by now—Riot’s feral heat, Silas’s patient worship—but this is a new and specific hunger, the want of watching a beautiful controlled creature lose his control to something he loves, watching the doctor dissolve into the dancer.
My mouth has gone dry. Somewhere very far away, the strategist clears her throat and reminds me we are in public.
I tell her to mind her own business.
The thing that undoes me—that truly takes me apart where I stand—isn’t the skill, staggering as it is.
It’s his face.
For the first time since the day I met him, there is no doctor in it.
No observer. No man cataloguing my pupils and my pulse and my tells from behind a clipboard, no strategist three moves deep, no fortress of clinical remove.
The wall of glass is simply… gone.
What’s left, suspended in the gold light with his eyes half-closed and his mouth soft and his whole body singing a song it learned before the suits and the degrees and the careful armored life—what’s left is just Lucien.
The man underneath.
The one Blackthorn never touched because this part of him existed long before Blackthorn was ever a word in either of our mouths.