32. ~Vex~ #2
Silas makes every small thing beautiful and narrates his own genius until someone threatens him.
As for me, I am not the patient, prize, or the problem at the center of their orbit.
I am simply one of four, a member of a thing larger than myself, contributing my piece to a whole that none of us could make alone.
I have led people.
Used people.
Have collected and managed and outmaneuvered people my entire life.
I have never once, until this flour-dusted afternoon, simply belonged to a group of them. The novelty of it is almost too much to hold.
We spoon the batter into the tins together—my precise measurements, Riot’s steady hands, Silas’s insistence on wiping every drip from the rims ‘for the aesthetic of the bake’—and Doc slides the trays into the oven with a quiet satisfaction, and then we wait.
And slowly, the kitchen transforms.
The smell comes first, curling out of the oven in warm golden ribbons—banana and melting chocolate and toasting batter, sweet and rich and impossibly homey, mingling with the four scents already braided through the room: Doc’s amber and old books, Riot’s woodsmoke and iron, Silas’s cedar and candied violet, and my own strawberry-sugar threaded through it all.
It is, I think, the single best smell I have ever stood inside of.
Through the oven glass I watch the muffins rise, domes lifting golden and proud where minutes ago there was only my ruin, and the small ordinary miracle of it does something embarrassing to my throat.
I have a sharp nose, sharper than most—it’s how I read the world, the first sense I trust and the last to lie to me.
And I have catalogued some extraordinary scents in my time: the specific perfume of my own fear, the copper of blood, the woodsmoke of a penthouse going up with a cheating man inside it.
My nose has mostly been an instrument of survival, an early-warning system for danger. Yet, this warm braided smell of four people and a shared small triumph, of banana and chocolate and the men I have somehow been given—my nose has no danger to flag in it at all.
It simply registers, for once, safety.
The smell of a place where nothing is about to hurt me.
I did not know a room could smell like that. I am not certain I have ever, in my whole splintered life, stood in one that did.
“You’re staring at the oven like it owes you money,” Riot observes, hooking his chin over my shoulder.
“I’m supervising the chemistry.”
“You’re emotional about muffins.”
“I will end you,” I inform him sweetly, and he kisses my flour-dusted cheek and does not stop grinning.
The timer goes off, shrill and triumphant, and Doc pulls the trays from the oven with a folded towel, and the four of us hover over them like surgeons over a successful patient while they cool just enough not to scald.
Then we each take one.
We break them open, the steam rising sweet, the chocolate gone molten in the warm crumb, and we blow on them with absurd synchronized care before the first careful bite.
I taste it.
And beam in delight.
“It’s—it’s actually good. It’s really good.”
“Moist,” Silas pronounces with grave approval, then catches my expression. “I will use the word and you will simply have to endure it.”
“Better than good,” Riot mumbles around an entire muffin he has not bothered to break open. “Gonna eat all ninety-something of these. Festival gets none.”
“The banana-to-chocolate ratio is correct,” Doc assesses, which from him is a standing ovation. “You did that. The ratio was your call.”
He says it pointedly, holding my gaze, making sure I hear the part underneath—that the good thing in our hands has my fingerprints on it, that I am not a passenger to my own success.
It is a small, deliberate kindness, the kind he specializes in, and it lands somewhere deep.
I made something today. Something good, something whole, something people will eat and enjoy and never know was forged out of a panic attack and three insulting men.
I have spent my life destroying things with great precision.
I had forgotten I could also build.
I glance at the single perfect tray of a dozen, then at the recipe still calling for the full festival haul, and I let out a slightly hysterical laugh. “Only ninety-four more to go.”
Riot groans. Silas claps his hands in genuine delight. Doc reaches for the flour with the grim resolve of a man committing to a long campaign.
I sit on the counter in the warm, sweet, flour-dusted chaos of it, watching my three impossible men roll up their sleeves to make ninety-four more muffins simply because I wanted to bring something to a town festival.
The realization settles over me soft, total, and undeniable.
I was never really anxious about the muffins.
I understand that now. I was anxious because I wanted it perfect—because perfection has always been the only control I trusted, the armor I built after a lifetime of having every imperfect thing used against me.
If I could just get the sequence exactly right, hold every variable in my own two hands, then nothing could go wrong, then no one could hurt me through the cracks. Control was never about muffins.
It was about survival.
But they didn’t take the control away to fix me, and they didn’t let me drown in it either. They simply stepped in beside me and shared the weight—handed the control back in pieces I could actually hold, showed me that a thing doesn’t have to be done perfectly or alone to come out beautiful.
That teamwork isn’t surrender.
That needing help isn’t the same as being weak, or owned, or about to be betrayed. No one in my entire life has ever taught me that. It took a kitchen full of flour and three lunatics insulting each other over a muffin tin.
Every other person who ever offered to help me wanted something in exchange—a debt, a leverage, a hand on the leash.
My father helped me and asked for an alliance.
The husband helped me and took my whole family as payment.
Dorian helped me and made me believe I was free right up until the helping became another set of bars.
Help, in my experience, was simply ownership with better manners; the price was always hidden in the fine print, and I always paid it in blood.
So I learned to do everything myself, to need no one, to keep my two hands wrapped white-knuckled around every variable, because the moment you let someone else hold a piece of your life is the moment they own the power to drop it.
These three reckless, ridiculous men just spent an entire afternoon holding pieces of my life with the greatest care, asking nothing, wanting nothing, returning every scrap of control to my own hands the instant I could carry it again.
There was no fine print.
There was no bill.
There was only flour, and patience, and a love that for once did not arrive disguised as a cage.
As I sit there in the golden warm heart of it—the laughter, the bickering, the sweet drifting smell, the four of us braided together in a chaos that for once is joyful instead of dangerous—I let myself think the thought I have been circling for weeks, the one too enormous and too terrifying to ever say aloud.
This pack.
These ridiculous, devoted, lethal, beloved monsters of mine.
This may just be my forever place—the one I dare, at last, to call home.