31. ~Vex~
~Vex~
Riot will not tell me where we’re going.
He just tosses me a helmet, grins like a man who’s already decided to be a problem, and jerks his chin toward one of his custom motorcycles where it crouches in the morning light like something half-tamed and entirely his.
“Absolutely not,” Lucien says from the doorway, arms folded, every inch the disapproving planner. “The machine isn’t cleared. The route isn’t logged. If anything happens beyond the radius?—”
“Then it’ll happen fast and we’ll look incredible doing it,” Riot says cheerfully, swinging a leg over the bike.
“Riot.”
“Doc.” He mimics the exact disapproving cadence, and I have to bite down on a laugh. “She’s spent three years behind reinforced glass. The woman deserves a day where the only thing watching her is the sky. We’ll be back before your blood pressure finishes its complaint.”
Every warning Lucien levels gets cheerfully, surgically ignored, and I love it—love watching the immovable doctor lose ground to the immovable convict, two of my madmen colliding over my safety while I stand here holding a helmet and grinning like the lunatic they all insist I am.
I tug it on before Lucien can mount a real argument. He pinches the bridge of his nose in the universal gesture of a man who has accepted defeat and intends to be vindicated later, and I blow him a kiss, and then I climb on behind Riot and wrap myself around the broad warm wall of his back.
“Hold tight, Pretty,” he rumbles, and the engine roars to life beneath us, and we’re gone.
“IF SHE COMES BACK WITH SO MUCH AS A SCRATCH—” Lucien’s voice chases us down the drive and loses the race badly, swallowed by the engine and the wind and my own delighted cackle.
I twist to throw the doctor a wave over my shoulder, catching one last glimpse of him standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jaw tight and his eyes—beneath all that exasperation—soft with a worry that is its own kind of love.
He’ll fuss the entire time we’re gone. He’ll have a medical kit and a contingency plan and a lecture prepared for our return. And he let us go anyway, because he knows, the way I’m only just learning, that a cage doesn’t stop being a cage just because the bars are made of concern.
Even his.
We tear out past the last of Arch Hollow’s mossy arches and onto the open winding roads beyond its reach, and the further we travel, the lighter I become.
It happens by degrees, the lifting.
Mile by mile, something I’ve carried so long I forgot its weight begins to peel away.
Because there are no cameras out here. No locked doors.
No patient files cataloguing my every fluctuation, no staff logging my movements on a clipboard, no surveilled little town of beautiful killers all watching each other perform a rehabilitated normalcy nobody believes.
There is only road—endless ribbon of it, unspooling ahead through green hills and under an enormous unguarded sky—and the wind, and the thunder of the engine, and the solid heat of Riot between my thighs.
His scent wraps around me, amplified by the speed and the open air—woodsmoke and warm iron, worn leather and gun-oil and the faint smoke of whiskey, all of it streaming back over me like a banner I get to wear.
I press my cheek between his shoulder blades and breathe him in and feel the last of the watched-thing tension drain out of my spine.
For three years and more I have been a specimen under glass, a problem to be managed, a body whose every twitch was data.
Out here, hurtling through nowhere with my arms locked around a killer who’d die before he let me fall, I am nobody’s case file.
I am just a woman on a bike in the wind, and the freedom of it is so enormous it borders on holy.
And the Omega in me is not unaware of the rest of it, either—the way the machine purrs its low filthy rhythm up through both of us, the heat of him solid between my thighs, the flex of muscle under my hands every time he leans us into a curve.
There is a reason they say a woman never forgets her first ride, and I am beginning to understand that the saying has very little to do with motorcycles.
Every time he banks the bike and I have to tighten my grip, every time the engine’s growl vibrates straight through my bones, a slow spark of want curls low in my belly and refuses to be reasoned with.
He knows it, too.
I can tell by the way his hand drops to squeeze my knee at a red light, the way his scent thickens with smug satisfaction. The menace planned this. The menace knew exactly what putting me on the back of his bike would do.
The day becomes one long adventure with no destination at all, which is the entire point of it.
Riot takes me everywhere and nowhere—through tiny one-stoplight towns where old men wave from porches, past hidden scenic overlooks he seems to know by instinct, to a roadside diner with cracked vinyl booths where we demolish a stack of pancakes and he steals the bacon off my plate and I threaten his life with a fork.
We stop whenever anything catches us, beholden to no schedule, no plan, no committee. A waterfall tucked deep in the woods, roaring silver over black rock, where the mist beads in my hair and Riot watches me laugh with an expression I can’t quite name.
An antique bookshop where I lose an hour and he loses his patience and then loses it again, contentedly, leaning in a doorway watching me hoard old volumes on weaponry and folklore.
A field gone riotous with wildflowers. A lake so glass-still it holds the whole sky inside it, a perfect doubled world.
It is the most ordinary day imaginable, and that is precisely what makes it extraordinary.
I have lived a life of extremes—penthouses and prison cells, wedding nights and funerals, stages and straitjackets, every moment of it cranked to some terrible operatic pitch.
I have never once had this. The small, unglamorous, perfect nothing of a day spent wandering with someone for no reason but the wandering.
No stakes. No performance. No body count by sundown.
Just pancakes and waterfalls and a man stealing my bacon, and somewhere in the sheer mundane beauty of it I understand that this—not the drama, danger, not the grand gothic romance of monsters—this quiet ordinary happiness is the thing I was truly robbed of.
And it’s the thing he’s handing back to me, one roadside diner at a time, like it costs him nothing, like I was always meant to have it.
And the whole time, he photographs me.
I don’t notice at first—he’s subtle for such a blunt instrument of a man—but somewhere around the wildflower field I catch him at it, his phone angled my way, and I realize he’s been doing it all day.
Filling his camera with candid stolen moments I never knew he was taking.
Not posed. Not curated. Just… me. Me laughing at the diner with syrup on my chin. Me reaching up into the waterfall’s spray. Me cross-legged in the wildflowers with a stupid grin, me silhouetted against the mirror-lake, me caught mid-word and mid-motion in a hundred small unguarded instants.
Every laugh. Every smile.
Every single moment where I look, apparently, genuinely free.
“You’re a creep,” I inform him, without any heat at all.
“Wildly,” he agrees, unrepentant, thumbing to the next shot. “Got a whole gallery of evidence that you’re secretly a soft, happy little thing under all the knives. Blackmail material. I’ll auction it to the highest-bidding monster.”
“The only monsters bidding would be you, Doc, and Silas, and you’d just spend all the money on me anyway,” I point out. “It’s a closed economy. Terrible business model.”
“See, this is why I keep you,” he says, delighted. “Ruthless market analysis. You’d run a cartel beautifully.”
“I ran an asylum from inside a straitjacket. A cartel would bore me.”
“God, you’re hot when you’re smug.” He says it so plainly, so matter-of-fact, that it knocks the next quip clean out of my head and leaves me flushing in the wildflowers like an idiot, and his answering grin tells me he did it precisely to watch the mastermind short-circuit.
“Delete those immediately,” I manage, recovering.
“Over my dead body, Pretty,” he says, and tucks the phone away with a grin, and does not delete a single one.
There’s a tenderness in it that the gruffness can’t quite hide, and I’m mastermind enough to read what it means.
Riot doesn’t photograph things. He’s not sentimental in any way the world would recognize—he’s a creature of the immediate, of engines and violence and the next mile of road. He’s not the type to fill a phone with anything.
Except, apparently, me.
Every unguarded second of me being happy, hoarded and saved and guarded as fiercely as he guards my life.
He spent the whole day documenting my joy the way a man documents something he’s afraid of losing, building himself a gallery of proof that he made me laugh, that he gave me a good day, that for a handful of hours the woman the world calls a psycho got to just be a girl on a bike in the sun.
The devotion of it is staggering, and so quiet he’d deny it under torture. He didn’t take those photos for me. He took them for himself.
That he’ll always have proof that this happened.
The strange thing—the thing that catches in my chest and won’t let go—is that I don’t actually want him to.
I am coming to realize, with the slow startled wonder of a woman discovering a new room in a house she thought she’d mapped, that I like this.
Taking photos.
Being in them.
The whole quiet miracle of pinning a moment to a page before it can slip away forever—because that’s the thing about moments, the cruel arithmetic I’ve always known too well: you only ever get each one once, and then it’s gone, dissolved into the great indifferent current of time, never to be felt again exactly as it was.