32. ~Vex~
~Vex~
“I’M NOT OVERSTIMULATED!”
I declare this at full volume to a kitchen that begs to differ. The evidence stands against me on every surface. There is flour—flour everywhere, a fine white catastrophe dusting the counters, the floor, the front of my dress, one improbable smear across my own cheekbone.
There are bowls in various states of failure, eggshell drowning in something that was supposed to be batter and isn’t, a banana mashed with such unhinged violence it has become a crime scene.
The muffins I intended to produce—the simple, ordinary, festival-bound muffins—are nowhere remotely near a state fit for an oven, and I am standing in the wreckage of my own ambition with absolutely no idea where to even begin the salvage.
My three madmen stand in the doorway, observing the disaster with varying degrees of unhelpfulness.
In my defense, I am building quite a robust one in the panicked back rooms of my skull, I was supposed to be good at this.
That’s the part that’s short-circuiting me.
I am a woman who learned bladework with my entire body, who memorized the choreography of a dozen impossible aerial routines off grainy footage, who can read a room of killers in a single breath and engineer an institution’s collapse from inside a padded cell.
Precision is my native language.
Following exact sequences to produce exact outcomes is the entire architecture of my mind. So a recipe—a list, a set of ordered instructions promising a guaranteed result—should have been child’s play.
Instead the butter betrayed me, the chemistry rebelled, and somewhere around the third step the whole thing slipped its leash, and the mastermind who plans murders does not, it turns out, handle losing control of a muffin with anything resembling grace.
“She’s totally overstimulated,” Doc notes, calm and clinical, the traitor.
“Who would have thought,” Silas muses, with a low whistle of pure delight, “that our Darling, who dismantled an institution from inside a straitjacket, who throws a dagger like the hand of God, would be brought to her knees by a quick bread.”
“She’s hot,” Riot observes, leaning in the frame with his arms crossed and a grin spreading slow across his scarred face.
“That is not—” I round on him, brandishing a spatula caked in failure, “—a helpful observation, you absolute caveman.”
“Wasn’t trying to help. Just stating facts for the record.” He tips his head, entirely unbothered by the spatula. “Flour on your face, fire in your eyes, threatening kitchenware like it personally wronged you. It’s a whole look, Pretty. I’m invested.”
“AH!”
The sound that tears out of me is pure, undignified frustration, and to my absolute horror I feel my eyes go hot and prickling even as I pout, caught in the mortifying overlap of furious and tearful that I have not permitted myself since I was small.
I, who have stared down killers and federal agents without a flicker.
Undone by muffins.
The shame of it only makes the threatened tears worse.
The teasing dies the instant the wet sheen hits my eyes.
They are monsters, but they are my monsters, and not one of them can bear it.
Doc moves first. He crosses the flour-strewn kitchen in three unhurried strides and folds himself around me from behind, his arms wrapping over mine, his chest a solid wall against my back, and the sheer steady mass of him is its own sedative.
“Breathe,” he murmurs against my temple, that even unflappable voice doing what it always does to my fractured wiring—dropping the noise, slowing the spiral. “Calm down. It’s flour and bananas, Vex. We can fix this.”
It should infuriate me, how easily he does it.
One pair of arms, one low even voice, and the screaming static in my head drops by half.
I have spent my whole life as the most dangerous mind in every room, vigilant to the point of exhaustion, never once able to fully power down—and this man has learned the exact frequency that quiets me, and deploys it without effort, as though soothing a feral creature mid-panic is simply a thing he was built to do.
The mastermind notes, even now, that this is a vulnerability.
That a man who can calm me this completely could, in theory, control me. But I have stopped flinching from the thought, because I have watched Lucien Graves use his every power in only one direction: toward keeping me whole.
He doesn’t calm me to manage me.
He calms me because he cannot stand to watch me suffer, and there is a universe of difference between the two, and I have finally learned to feel it.
“It can’t be fixed,” I whine, and then the dam breaks and it all comes pouring out—the whole catalogue of my failure, delivered at a manic clip.
“I added the wet to the dry instead of the dry to the wet, which overdevelops the gluten, so even if I salvage it the texture’s ruined.
The butter was too cold so it didn’t cream properly.
I think I doubled the baking soda. And the recipe says cream the sugar first, then the egg, then the banana, then alternate the flour and the milk in three additions, and if it’s not done in that exact order the whole chemistry collapses…
it has to be that order, it has to be precise, and I broke the sequence in four different places and now the entire concoction is?—”
“It isn’t,” Doc says, gently, into the side of my neck.
And then he presses a kiss there, slow, warm, deliberate, right at the place where my pulse hammers, and the spiraling litany simply stops, hijacked by the heat that blooms down my spine.
His scent wraps around me, blood orange and old books and amber, threading calm directly into my overloaded nervous system the way only he can.
“Baking is more forgiving than you think,” he says against my skin. “It isn’t a bomb that detonates if the wires go in wrong. It’s a process. And here is what I propose.”
He turns me gently in his arms until I have no choice but to look at him, steel-blue and certain.
“We scrap this batch. We start from scratch, all four of us, together. And if it ever feels like too much…too loud, too fast, too many variables at once, we slow down. We go at whatever pace lets you actually see how each step is done. No spiral. No solo. Yes?”
I pull in one steady breath.
Then another.
And I nod.
So we begin again, the four of us, in a kitchen that looks like a snowstorm had a tantrum in it—and the first order of business, naturally, is cleaning up my disaster, which the three of them undertake with a running commentary so vicious and affectionate I forget to stay anxious.
“Riot, you’re smearing it, not wiping it,” Silas sniffs, gliding past with a damp cloth held like a scalpel. “Have you never cleaned a surface in your life?”
“I clean blood off concrete, Mary Poppins, not flour off marble. Different skill set.”
“It is genuinely the same motion.”
“Doc,” Riot calls, ignoring him, “why does the undertaker know how to wipe a counter better than both of us combined?”
“Because Silas has spent his life making messes presentable,” Doc says, measuring flour with surgical precision into a clean bowl. “It’s practically his vocation. Stop bickering and preheat the oven. Three hundred fifty.”
“He insulted me and you’re scolding me?”
“I’m scolding both of you. I contain enough disappointment for the entire household.”
I watch all of it from my perch on the counter, a fresh banana in hand, and something in my chest unknots one careful loop at a time.
This is the part the recipe never accounted for.
Doc runs the operation like a field surgeon, calm and exact, talking me through each step before he does it so I can see the why of it, the chemistry made gentle.
Riot is brute strength and zero finesse, assigned the mashing and the stirring, flexing absurdly every time he creams butter as if it’s a feat of strength, which makes me laugh against my will.
Silas approaches a muffin tin the way he approaches everything, like a piece of art, lining the cups with the fussy devotion of a man who believes presentation is a moral position.
“Wet into dry or dry into wet?” Riot asks, holding two bowls and looking genuinely lost.
“Dry into wet,” I say, before I can stop myself, and Doc glances at me with the faint approving curve I’ve come to crave. “And gently. You overmix it, you get hockey pucks.”
“I like hockey pucks,” Riot says, stirring with the controlled aggression of a man defusing ordnance.
“You like anything you can fit in your mouth in one motion,” Silas murmurs, not looking up from his muffin liners.
“Say that again, undertaker.”
“Gentlemen,” Doc says, in the long-suffering tone of a man refereeing a kindergarten, “there is a child present.” He nods at me. “She is impressionable.”
“I am twenty-four and I have personally killed people,” I object.
“And yet,” Doc says serenely, cracking an egg one-handed, “you are the most fragile thing in this kitchen, and we all know it, and we are all helplessly devoted to it. Fold your chips.”
“She’s back,” Silas declares, beaming. “Our little baking general. I knew she was in there somewhere under the flour and the existential collapse.”
The strange, dawning truth of it is that he’s right—because the moment I’m contributing instead of drowning, the moment I’m a voice in the operation rather than its sole point of failure, the anxiety loosens its grip entirely.
I fold the chocolate chips in myself, gently, the way I just instructed Riot, and no one rushes me, and no one takes the bowl, and no one makes me feel like the broken variable in an equation I can’t solve alone.
It is its own quiet revelation, watching how they fit—how four jagged, dangerous people slot together into something that actually functions.
Doc directs without dominating, ceding each task to whoever’s suited and stepping back the instant he’s not needed.
Riot does the heavy thoughtless work and pretends to resent it while clearly loving being useful to me.