35. ~Vex~
~Vex~
“Here comes the bride,” croons a voice I have not heard in three long years, “all dressed in white.”
To hear that particular tone again, that lazy musical cruelty, is a blessing and a curse poured into the same cup.
It crawls down my spine like a remembered fever.
I am still catching my breath as I step into the cavernous space, lungs heaving, my flowing dark masterpiece of an outfit cloaked in splotches of blood—none of it mine.
I have come through, by my best count, somewhere near fifty men to reach this room. Bodyguards. Hired muscle. Big confident creatures who took one look at the crazed little psycho they’d been paid to capture and assumed it would be simple.
Containable.
A vulnerable pest to be netted and caged on an island built for exactly that—for keeping pack-less Omegas penned like livestock, beautiful and disposable and waiting to be claimed.
A shame, truly, that not one of them paused to ask who was going to make the winning move.
The blood is already drying on me, tacky and copper-sharp, clashing in the strangest way with my own scent—strawberries and whipped cream and dark chocolate ganache, sweetness gone faintly metallic, a candy shop with a knife hidden in the till. My pigtails have half come loose.
My knuckles ache pleasantly.
Somewhere in the corridors behind me, fifty men are learning the hard way that a high enough pain tolerance and a body trained like a blade make for a very poor thing to underestimate.
I should be exhausted. The medication singing through my veins says otherwise; it has scrubbed the fear clean out of me and left only a bright, humming clarity, the particular euphoria of a plan three years deep finally arriving at its final page.
I have never felt more awake in my life. I have never felt more like myself.
I climb the short flight of stairs and look out over the warehouse he has dressed up into some grotesque parody of an oasis.
There, rising from the center of the cold concrete cathedral, is a platform—three shallow steps leading up to what he clearly intends me to read as a throne. The seat is black, lacquered and gleaming, adorned along its edges in twin streaks of vivid neon: acid green and hot pink.
I have to smirk, because those were our colors.
The colors of the only mythology my husband ever bothered to understand about us—Harley and her Joker, the madwoman and the man who made her mad, a love story for people who think devotion and damage are the same thing.
Privately, I always thought Bonnie and Clyde suited our particular unraveling far better: two outlaws, equally lethal, equally complicit, going down together in a hail of their own making.
Yet, that comparison requires a certain symmetry of intellect to appreciate, and my dear husband has never once credited me with being his equal. He cannot decipher the subtleties.
He never could.
It is, as it unravels in real time, the single most expensive failure of his life.
He lounges on the black throne like it was poured around him, twirling a glass of red by the stem, chuckling low at the sight of my un-amusement as he lifts the wine to his lips and drinks.
Even now, even drunk on his own theater, he is beautiful.
That was always the cruelest joke of him—that the man who razed my entire world wears the face of a fallen prince, that monstrousness can come so handsomely wrapped. Once, that beauty made me feel chosen.
The girl I was on our wedding night would have melted to see him sprawled on a throne calling for her.
But I am not that girl. I burned her down to the studs and built something far more dangerous in her place, and when I look at him now I feel no flutter, no fear, no lingering ache—only the clean cold focus of a player three years into a game, watching her opponent reach, at last, for exactly the piece she left out for him to take.
“Did you have fun,” he asks, “with your little runaway stunt?”
His scent reaches me across the room, the same as it ever was—bergamot cologne laid over that cold mineral nothing, the smell of a man who has never in his life been refused.
“It was clever, I’ll grant you that much.
Killing that little distraction of yours made my life considerably easier, so thank you for the housekeeping.
But getting yourself committed to the tightest-security institution in the country?
Blackthorn?” He clicks his tongue, disappointed.
“That was excessive. Playing at insanity…three years of it…all to keep yourself out of my reach. Are you truly so frightened of being held by me, little diamond? When we both know I already own you, body and inheritance and breath?”
I say nothing.
I have learned the power of saying nothing; it is a blade with no handle, dangerous only to the one who grabs for it.
He chuckles at my silence and lets his gaze drift across the space he has built—and it is a space built for one purpose.
Cages line the far wall. A pole gleams under a hanging light.
An entire rack of implements I recognize from a lifetime of studying the history of cruel and beautiful things waits along the shadows, every one of them chosen, I have no doubt, with me in mind.
No one would come for me here.
That is the entire architecture of the room: my isolation, rendered in steel.
He installed a pole.
That is the detail that nearly makes me laugh aloud, here in the held breath before everything tips.
He remembers the night he stripped me of my worth and made me dance for an audience of his cruelty, the night the first fracture ran through me, and he has built it lovingly into the centerpiece of my intended prison—a monument to the moment he believes he broke me.
He has no idea that I took that humiliation and turned it into power.
That the pole became mine, an art I mastered, a thing my doctor and I have since made beautiful and defiant and entirely my own. Everything this man ever used as a weapon against me, I sharpened and turned back into the room.
He just never lived long enough to learn it.
“How much,” I muse, mostly to myself, “did you have to spend to secure all this?”
The way he laughs tells me he’s delighted I’m clever enough to ask—that I understand, as he does, that money talks and everything else simply listens.
He rises, drains the last of the wine in one long swallow, sighs at the taste of it like a man savoring his own success, and begins a slow descent toward me, unhurried, certain, a predator who believes the hunt is already finished.
“I had all the time in the world to make money,” he says, taking the steps one at a time. “Particularly once the assets of a certain Omega’s empire happened to fall into my fingertips.”
I ignore the sting of it.
The empire my father built. The fortune my husband married me to bleed. I keep my face smooth and empty as a frozen lake, and I let him come.
He stops before me, close enough that I can see the contempt living in the fine lines of his handsome, hateful face, and he reaches out to flick a finger against the red metal heart at my throat.
“And this,” he huffs, lip curling in disgust, “is the very first thing that comes off your tainted skin. A collar. As though anyone else could possibly own you—least of all men so cynically deranged.” He says the word like it tastes foul.
“A fraud playing doctor. A criminal who belongs in a hole. A mortician who fondles corpses for a living. That’s the company you chose over me? ”
He shakes his head, slow and pitying.
“You should crave a man of intellect, darling. A man with the patience and the cunning to let you scurry through your little games for three whole years, simply because he knew you’d be delivered back to him in the end. Not that menagerie of broken things.”
I say nothing, even as his hand leaves the collar and closes around my throat instead, even as his fingers tighten and his thumb presses to my pulse and he leans in until his breath fans hot and sour-sweet across my face.
He calls them broken.
A fraud, a criminal, a man who fondles corpses.
And the only thing that keeps the smile from my face is the knowledge of how spectacularly, how fatally wrong he has it.
My doctor is not a fraud; he is the most disciplined mind I have ever met, a man who taught himself to feel by design and chose, freely, to spend that hard-won feeling on me.
My criminal is not a hole-dweller; he is the most loyal heart ever poured into a scarred body, a man who vowed to die for me and meant it to the marrow.
My mortician does not fondle the dead—he honors them, he understands endings the way poets understand grief, and he looked at the most discarded thing in the world and called it a flower worth keeping.
My ex-husband sees three monsters.
He cannot conceive that monsters were precisely what I went looking for, or that the right monsters, loved correctly, make the safest home a hunted woman ever built. His contempt is just one more thing he got backwards.
He has built an entire life out of getting me backwards.
“You really believed it,” he growls. “That you’d earned your happy ending.
That you could outmaneuver me by collecting three strays to claim you, filing your sweet little pack paperwork, pretending you had connections enough to make it stick.
So let me remind you, since you’ve clearly forgotten, exactly who the real Joker is in your life. ”
His grip flexes.
“Me. I rule everything that orbits you. I own your father’s assets, his land, his name, his empire.
All of it mine—with you as the perfect little pawn that unlocks the vault.
You thought because he left it in both our names you’d somehow prosper.
But I own you, and ownership grants me everything I require.
Today, you open that inheritance for me, and I catapult myself into a tier of this world you cannot even imagine. ”
He chuckles, low and intimate, his thumb stroking obscenely along the surface of the collar.