31. ~Vex~ #2
I spent years finding that thought unbearable, which is precisely why I stopped documenting anything.
You don’t photograph a life you’re only trying to survive.
But suddenly the idea of catching these moments, of keeping them, of being able to hold this exact happiness in my hands long after it’s passed—suddenly that doesn’t feel like grief waiting to happen. It feels like wealth.
Since the photograph in the field with Silas, something in me has cracked open and started to want.
I want photos with Riot, all this wind-blown wreckage of a perfect day.
I want them with Lucien too—something quiet, the two of us, his rare unguarded face caught once and kept forever.
I find myself daring, hardly able to believe my own thoughts, to imagine an album.
An actual album, the kind ordinary people keep, full of our slow stolen days in this controlled little oasis—and then, further, more dangerous still, full of the days after. The future ones.
The ones where I’m finally deemed free and the four of us are somewhere the cameras can’t reach, and there’s a whole life worth photographing because it’s finally, actually mine.
It frightens me, how badly I want it.
An album is a thing you keep for the future—it’s a quiet bet that there will be one, that the moments are worth saving because you’ll be around to look back on them.
For years I made no such bet. A woman planning her own survival day to day doesn’t collect keepsakes; she travels light, owns nothing she can’t abandon, leaves no trail and keeps no proof, because proof is just evidence and the future is just the next ambush.
To want an album is to believe, in some traitorous reckless corner of myself, that I have a future worth documenting.
That I’ll live long enough to grow old looking at these pictures.
That there will be a someday warm and safe enough to hold a book of yesterdays.
The strategist screams that it’s a vulnerability, a hostage handed to fate.
And for once, gloriously, I tell her to be quiet.
I am going to make the album. I have decided. The husband can pry the want for a future out of my cold dead hands.
It sneaks up on me slowly, the realization, the way the best and most dangerous truths always do.
We’re back on the bike, the afternoon gone gold and long, and I’m watching distant mountains roll past the edge of the world—blue and enormous and ancient—when it simply arrives, quiet and complete, and lands in the center of me like a struck bell.
For the first time in years, I am not surviving.
I am living.
There is a difference, and I had forgotten there was. Surviving is what I did at Blackthorn, for three years and more—the constant calculation, the perpetual bracing, the grim animal arithmetic of staying alive one more day inside carefully controlled walls. It is vigilance with no horizon.
But this—the wind and the road and the mountains and the man—this is the other thing.
This is the thing surviving was always supposed to be in service of, the reason you bother to stay alive at all, and I had been at war for so long I forgot it existed.
The world is so impossibly large out here.
So much vaster than the reinforced glass and the locked wards that were my entire universe for three lost years.
I had shrunk to fit my cage without noticing.
And now, hurtling through a landscape that doesn’t end, I feel myself unfold.
The cruel, clarifying truth riding shotgun with the joy is this: they almost took it from me for good.
The husband, the institution, the system that filed me under irredeemable—they nearly succeeded in convincing me that surviving was all I would ever get, that a cell and a sedative and a life measured in incident reports was the most a creature like me could hope for. I had started to believe it.
That’s the part that frightens me now, looking back from the open road: how close I came to accepting the box.
How nearly they shrank my entire concept of a possible life down to the dimensions of a ward.
One day on the back of a motorcycle has shattered that, shown me the lie of it in a single afternoon of mountains, and I will never again let anyone—husband or warden or well-meaning doctor—tell me that surviving is enough.
I have tasted living.
I want the whole feast.
As the sun begins to sink, painting the sky in long ribbons of amber and rose, Riot pulls off at a lookout perched high over miles of untouched wilderness, and we dismount, and I walk to the very edge.
I stand at the lip of the cliff and stare at the horizon, and the scale of it nearly undoes me—forest rolling unbroken to the foot of those blue mountains, a whole world going on and on past the limit of my sight, ancient and indifferent and breathtaking.
And I am overwhelmed, suddenly, achingly, by how much of it I have never seen.
How much of everything was stolen from me while I was busy surviving. An entire planet of wonders, and I spent my best years in a box, and the want of it rises in me sharp and enormous.
Riot comes to stand beside me at the edge, close enough that his warmth bleeds into my side, his woodsmoke scent steady against the cooling air, and he doesn’t say anything for a while.
He just looks out at the same impossible distance with me, two monsters at the rim of a world that spent its whole effort trying to make us small, and lets the silence hold the weight of it.
Understands without being told. He always has, in his blunt feral way—the cage, the hunger for the horizon, the particular grief of a creature built for open spaces and kept in a concrete room.
Of all of them, Riot knows best what it is to be wild and confined.
It’s why the road was his gift to give.
He didn’t bring me sightseeing.
He brought me proof that the walls aren’t the world.
“If we ever get out,” I say quietly, not looking at him, my eyes fixed on the dying light over the mountains.
“Of this. The tamed little cycle they’ve got us running.
If we actually get free…” I have to breathe before I can finish, because saying a wish out loud has always felt like handing the universe a target.
“I want somewhere warm. Somewhere the sun doesn’t apologize for itself.
I want us to be able to go anywhere—the whole world, all of it—under names that can’t be traced and faces no one’s hunting, free to just…
live. The lives we actually deserve. Not the ones the world handed us for our crimes and our cracks and our imperfections.
The ones we’d have built if anyone had ever let us. ”
It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever said aloud, more dangerous than any threat, because it’s a hope, and hope is the one thing I’ve never been able to afford.
Every other future I ever let myself want was taken from me—the empire, the marriage, the freedom Dorian promised—torn out by the root the moment I dared to plant it. I learned to stop wanting things that could be stolen, which is to say I learned to stop wanting anything at all.
Here I am at the edge of a cliff describing a life so vivid I can almost smell the salt of it, the warm sea, the unhunted mornings, the four of us somewhere no file can follow—and the wanting doesn’t feel like grief pre-loading this time. It feels like a map.
Like something we could actually walk toward, if we survive the man circling our borders.
A thing worth living through the danger to reach.
Riot is quiet for a moment, his knife-grey eyes on the same horizon, and when he speaks his voice is rough in that way it gets when he means something all the way down.
“Guess we gotta make it a promise, then.”
And he holds out his pinky.
His pinky.
This enormous tattooed convict, this feral creature carved out of violence and scar tissue, this man who has ended lives with the same hands he’s offering me now, is holding out one crooked little finger like a schoolchild on a playground, utterly serious, and the sheer absurdity of it cracks me wide open.
I burst out laughing.
“A pinky promise. You’re sealing the great escape of the Holy Trinity and their psychotic queen—with a pinky promise.”
“Most legally binding contract there is,” he says solemnly. “Ironclad. Recognized in every court that matters.”
“Name one court that matters.”
“The playground, Pretty. Highest authority in the land. Don’t you know anything?” He waggles the finger at me, unimpressed by my mockery. “You gonna leave me hanging? Real cold, breaking a man’s heart at a scenic overlook. Very on-brand for you, but cold.”
“You’re an idiot,” I tell him, still laughing, my chest aching with something that is the exact opposite of grief.
“Your idiot,” he corrects, and waggles the pinky again. “C’mon. Hook it.”
So I do. I reach out and I curl my little finger around his, this ridiculous, sacred, childish vow between two creatures the world wrote off as monsters, and the warmth of it settles somewhere deep and permanent in my chest.
And I know—the way I know everything, in the cold sure place beneath all the laughter—that Riot does not break his word.
He couldn’t if he tried; it isn’t in the architecture of him.
The man vowed in a bathtub that he’d die for me and meant it down to the marrow, and now he’s wrapped a promise of a warm and unhunted future around my smallest finger with the same total conviction. To him there is no difference in weight between a blood oath and a pinky swear.
A promise is a promise, and Riot keeps his or dies in the attempt, every single time.
Which means this absurd little gesture at the edge of a cliff is, in truth, the most binding contract I have ever entered—more binding than my marriage, more binding than any document Lucien ever filed.
The husband bound me with a ring and a lie.
Riot binds me with a crooked finger and the whole of his savage, unbreakable heart.
I know which one I trust.
“It’s a promise then,” I whisper.