33. ~Vex~
~Vex~
The pack convenes a summit over breakfast and reaches a unanimous, mildly ominous verdict: I have been courted individually quite long enough.
“One on one was the appetizer,” Silas announces, buttering toast like he’s addressing a war council. “Today, our Darling gets all of us at once. The full experience. The complete catastrophe.”
“That sounds like a threat,” I observe.
“It absolutely is,” Riot confirms, cheerfully, and that is how I come to spend what will prove to be the single most chaotic day of my entire deranged life.
The festival has swallowed Arch Hollow whole.
The market square and the streets feeding into it have erupted into a riot of color and noise—striped tents and bunting strung between the old stone arches, game booths and food stalls and a wheezing carousel, a Ferris wheel turning slow against the morning sky, the whole condemned little valley transformed for a day into something that could almost pass for an ordinary town having ordinary fun.
The air is thick with it: frying oil and spun sugar, woodsmoke and crushed grass and the green ozone bite of a day that can’t decide whether to rain. Somewhere, a brass band is committing crimes against a marching tune. It is loud and bright and absurd, and I love it instantly and against my will.
We make it precisely four steps through the gate before the competition begins.
“Fifty says I out-win all of you,” Riot declares, cracking his knuckles.
“Most prizes, most games, or least public humiliation?” Lucien asks, with the precise air of a man establishing the rules of engagement before a hostile negotiation. “We should define the metrics or this descends into anarchy.”
“All three,” Silas purrs. “Separate categories. Loser of each buys the winner something grotesque from the worst food stall.”
“And what,” I ask sweetly, “does the woman who is about to humiliate all three of you receive?”
Three identical looks of delighted challenge swing toward me.
“Oh,” Lucien murmurs, eyes glinting behind his glasses, “big words, little Omega. Place your bets, gentlemen.”
It strikes me, watching the three of them shake on the terms with the gravity of men brokering an arms deal, that this is its own kind of courtship—the group version, the one they’ve apparently decided I’m owed.
They have spent weeks taking me apart gently, one at a time, learning the private architecture of me in studios and greenhouses and on open roads.
Now they want to show me the other thing: who they are together.
The pack as a unit, a chaotic four-headed creature that bickers and schemes and competes over carnival prizes like the fate of nations hangs on a ring toss. It is, I realize, an invitation. Not to be courted by three men.
To be one of four.
The strategist who spent her whole life building cages of other people’s wreckage has no defense whatsoever against being, simply, included.
The day spirals into magnificent, total madness within the hour.
I, it turns out, was built for carnival games, and for cheating at them, which I do shamelessly and constantly, because winning honestly is for people without my gifts.
I palm extra rings.
I distract the booth operators with a calculated flutter of my lashes. I memorize the weighted lean of the milk-bottle stack and exploit it ruthlessly.
Riot, my beautiful accomplice, assists my every transgression while loudly performing innocence—blocking sightlines with his enormous frame, ‘accidentally’ jostling rival players, slipping me a second dart with the sleight of a man who has palmed worse things than darts.
“That’s cheating,” a booth attendant accuses, watching me sink an impossible shot.
“That’s talent,” Riot corrects, looming, and the attendant decides to find something else to do.
“You’re supposed to be competing against me,” I point out, accepting a third consecutive prize, “not running interference for my felonies.”
“Can’t win the ‘most prizes’ category if you’re disqualified for cheating, Pretty,” he says, with the airtight logic of a man who has clearly thought about this. “So really, helping you cheat is me protecting my own investment. I’m a giver.”
“You’re an accessory.”
“Your favorite accessory.” He bumps my shoulder, scenting smug and pleased, all woodsmoke and warm iron, and I have to look away before the stupid grin gives me away.
The mastermind in me notes, with mild professional alarm, that I am having an unironically wonderful time committing petty fraud at a small-town fair, and that this should not be as joyful as it is, and that I no longer care.
Lucien, the maddening creature, doesn’t cheat at all—he doesn’t need to.
He simply weaponizes probability and psychology with the cold efficiency he brings to everything, calculating the optimal angle on the ring toss, reading the tells of the strongman-hammer rigging, talking a vendor into adjusting the odds through sheer unsettling reasonableness.
He wins contests a man his size and temperament has no business winning, and accepts each prize with the faint satisfaction of a scientist whose hypothesis has been confirmed.
“You’re not even having fun,” I accuse, watching him dismantle a rigged balloon-dart game through pure applied physics. “You’re conducting an experiment.”
“Winning is fun,” he replies, popping the final balloon with surgical precision and collecting an enormous plush dragon he immediately presents to me without ceremony, as though it were a research finding.
“And watching you carry seventeen stuffed animals is the most fun I’ve had since before I had a medical license. Hold the dragon, Vex.”
“I hate that I find that romantic.”
“You find everything we do romantic,” he says, infuriatingly correct, “because you have appalling taste in men and excellent taste in chaos. Now hold the dragon.”
Silas treats every single game like a piece of performance art. He doesn’t simply play; he stages. He turns a humble ring toss into a recital, narrating his own brilliance, bowing to imaginary crowds.
When we reach the axe-throwing lane—because naturally this town full of beautiful killers has an axe-throwing lane—he transforms it into pure theater, removing his coat with funereal ceremony, addressing the wooden target like a man delivering a eulogy, and burying the blade dead center with a flourish that draws actual applause from passing strangers who have no idea they’re cheering an undertaker who throws axes the way other men breathe.
“SHOW-OFF,” I bellow across the lane.
“JEALOUSY IS UNBECOMING, DARLING,” he bellows back, and sinks a second axe beside the first without looking.
By lunchtime, we have accumulated a quantity of stuffed animals that defies reason—a teetering, absurd menagerie of plush bears and lurid neon octopuses and one enormous unsettling frog that Riot has named, for reasons he refuses to explain,
Geoffrey.
We are forced to hire a festival worker with a wagon to ferry our winnings. I have a giant pink rabbit slung over one shoulder. Lucien is carrying a stuffed shark with the grave dignity of a man transporting evidence.
It is, by any reasonable measure, the stupidest I have ever allowed myself to look in public, and I have not stopped grinning once.
The afternoon unspools into one ridiculous wonder after another.
We brave a haunted attraction—a rickety plywood horror house staffed by bored teenagers in rubber masks—and the sheer comedy of four hardened killers being politely startled by a kid in a ghoul costume undoes me entirely.
Riot compliments the teenager’s lunge technique.
Silas critiques the corpse makeup with professional disappointment and offers, sincerely, to consult. We eat our way through the food stalls, sharing greasy paper trays of everything fried and skewered and impossible, Riot stealing bites off my plate as a matter of policy,
Lucien pretending to disapprove of the sugar and then finishing my funnel cake himself. We even pass a bake table where, to my private delight, a tray of suspiciously familiar banana-chocolate muffins is selling briskly, and I say nothing, and feel obscenely proud.
“Those are ours,” Silas whispers, scandalized and thrilled, clutching my arm. “Pretty Peony, strangers are eating our children.”
“That was the entire point of making them.”
“Yes, but I wasn’t emotionally prepared to witness it.
” He watches a man take a bite with the wounded solemnity of a parent at a graduation, and I laugh so hard I have to lean on Riot to stay upright, and the laugh is real, helpless, ugly, and entirely without strategy—the kind of laugh I have not laughed since before I learned what the world does to soft things.
Then the Ferris wheel, because Silas insists, and the four of us cram into a swaying gondola built for fewer monsters than this, and as it lifts us slow into the gold afternoon the whole valley spreads out below—the bright chaos of the festival, the mossy arches, the green hills folding away toward mountains I now know stretch on and on past the edge of everything.
From up here, Arch Hollow looks almost like a postcard.
Almost like a place people choose. Almost like home.
At the very top the wheel pauses, the way they always do, leaving us suspended in the high gold light with the whole world hushed beneath us—and for a moment none of them say anything at all.
Riot’s hand is warm on my knee. Lucien’s shoulder is pressed to mine. Silas has gone quiet and soft, watching me watch the horizon.
Four killers in a little swinging box at the top of the sky, and not one of us reaching for a weapon or an exit or a plan.
Just the wind, and the view, and each other. I have plotted in war rooms and survived in cells and danced for my supper in rooms that wanted to devour me, and I would trade every one of those memories for this single suspended minute.
I did not know peace had a texture until I felt it sixty feet up, wedged between three men who would die before they let the gondola so much as wobble.