35. ~Vex~ #2
“You delayed me three years with your psychotic little performance. Impressive, in its way. But this is the end of that stream of insanity, my love. You will always be my pretty fucking pet. My property. My possession. Nothing more, nothing less. You’ll unlock that generous fortune, and I’ll keep you right here, on this lovely island I paid so handsomely to maintain, while I return to the life I built so beautifully in your absence. ”
He says it all with such relish, such total faith, that I almost feel a flicker of something like pity. He believes every word.
He believes he is the Joker of this story—the agent of chaos, the man pulling every string, the architect grinning over the board.
The truly delicious thing, the thing I am holding under my tongue like a sweet, is that he has cast himself in exactly the wrong role and doesn’t know it yet.
He thinks he is delivering a villain’s monologue. He has no idea he is reading the part written for the fool, the mark, the body in the third act. Every gloating syllable is a man narrating his own undoing and mistaking it for victory. I let him have it.
I let him empty the whole poisoned cup, because a reveal is only worth three years of waiting if you let the condemned man finish congratulating himself first.
I arch a single eyebrow.
It is the only motion I permit myself, and it is enough to make his eyes gleam with the joy of finally provoking a reaction.
He leans in until his lips nearly brush mine, the intimacy of it a violation all its own.
“What,” he breathes, “did you imagine I waited? Three years, faithful, pining? That divorce of yours was temporary propaganda and we both know it—but a man has needs, and I couldn’t go three years without warming my bed.
She’s waiting for me now, obedient as a girl ought to be.
And your father’s money will finance the rise of our family while she carries my heir to term.
A son.” His grin spreads, cruel and certain.
“That is what your kind is for, in the end. Breeding and warming sheets. Omegas don’t have personalities, or dreams, or ambitions.
They don’t get to believe they deserve to be loved. ”
He laughs softly, the sound curling through the cold air, and gives my throat a final little squeeze.
“Now be a good girl and walk yourself to your cag?—”
There it is.
The thesis of him, the whole rotten creed laid bare: that I am a thing for breeding and warming and nothing else, that the wanting and the dreaming and the deserving were never mine to claim.
It is the exact lie he carved into me on a wedding night a lifetime ago, the lie I wore like a wound for years until three impossible men taught me, night after night, that it was never true.
So I let him say it one final time, this man who murdered my family to prove I was property—because I want it to be the last thing out of his mouth before the floor of his certainty drops out from under him.
I want the lie still warm on his tongue when the truth arrives.
There is a poetry to timing, and I have always, always had impeccable timing.
He never finishes the word.
He jerks backward with a strangled hiss, snatching his hand away from my throat—and when he holds it up between us, the skin of his palm is sizzling, a thin curl of smoke rising from the place where his flesh met the red metal heart.
His eyes snap to mine, wide and furious and, for the very first time, uncertain.
“Did you just—” he sputters, “did you just fucking electrocute me?”
I shrug, slow and serene.
“Probably the collar.” I have to fight very hard to keep the smile off my face. “I don’t think my pack appreciates other men touching what’s theirs.”
“Your pack doesn’t own you,” he snarls, cradling his ruined hand. “And why didn’t that shock drop you too? You’re wearing the damned thing.”
My smirk finally slips its leash.
“I had coffee this morning. Made by a man who loves me very much. And I’m fairly confident he laced it with precisely the right dose of my medication for a day like today—the kind that gives a girl an obscene tolerance for pain and a rather generous surge of energy.
” I tilt my head. “It’s how I waltzed through your fifty bodyguards without breaking stride.
The blood, in case you were wondering. You assumed I’d let them deliver me here gift-wrapped.
You should have wondered why I arrived looking like a slaughterhouse instead. ”
You called him a fraud playing doctor.
That fraud calculated a dose to the milligram—enough to dull the agony of fifty men, sharpen my reflexes to a razor’s edge, and leave my mind perfectly, lethally clear—and sealed it in a coffee cup with a note, because he knows my mornings unravel without one certain thing to hold.
He didn’t just love me through this.
He medicated me through it, armed me through it, planned the chemistry of my survival down to the last decimal. The man you dismissed kept me alive across an island of corpses with nothing but a careful brew and a folded note.
You should have feared my fraud most of all.
He frowns, huffs, and stamps toward me—and then his stride hitches. He stops. He sways. He blinks down at his own hands as though they belong to a stranger, the fury draining from his face into something far more satisfying.
“What the—” He staggers. “Wait. What did you do?”
“Maybe,” I sigh, examining my nails, “you should sit down and save your questions for when the wine finishes kicking in.”
He lurches backward, trying to put distance between us, and his legs simply quit.
He drops to his knees on the cold concrete, gripping his skull, a thread of panic finally fraying his voice.
“What did you do? Did you—did you drug me? The wine?—”
I walk toward him at last, taking my time, savoring every unhurried step, and I tilt my head down at the sight of him brought low.
“I do love a man who finds his way onto his knees for me,” I admit. Then I crouch, gripping his chin, forcing his swimming gaze up to mine. “Did you truly think,” I murmur, “I would ever submit… to you?”
And then I laugh.
The sound spills out of me bright and giddy, a symphony of triumph three years in the composing, and I shake my head at the beautiful, oblivious ruin of him.
“Oh, my love. The grand scheme has finally come to its grand reveal.”
“I don’t—” he slurs, “I don’t understand.”
“No,” I agree gently. “You never did.” So I decide, as a parting gift, to let him understand it all at the very end.
I tell him about the night my father died—the night you murdered him, I do not say, because we both already know—and how everything since that night has been preparation. Patient, surgical, three-years-deep preparation.
I tell him that Dorian was never a love story; Dorian was a catalyst, a deliberately chosen door, the necessary first move to free me from one cage so I could build a better trap from the ruins.
That once I was free, I went hunting.
Far and wide, through the worst rooms in the worst corners of this world, until I had gathered exactly what I needed.
I watch the words land through the fog of the sedative, watch his swimming eyes struggle to assemble them into a shape he can survive.
The insanity defense.
The voluntary commitment.
The straitjacket, the spiraling, the screaming fits, the diagnosed delusions—every performance I gave inside those reinforced walls, every doctor I let believe I had shattered.
He thought it was a woman losing her mind. It was a woman choosing the one fortress in the country he could not buy his way into, and then making certain the world would never let her leave it without a pack strong enough to walk her out.
He spent three years smug that I’d gone mad hiding from him. I spent three years building the instrument of his death inside the one room he’d never think to look.
The asylum was never my breakdown.
It was my workshop.
“My own Holy Trinity,” I tell him, grinning.
“A doctor brilliant enough to certify my madness while quietly safeguarding my mind—the perfect architect for a woman who needed the world to believe she’d lost it.
A criminal with a record black enough to make the underworld itself flinch, planted exactly where he could shield me from within.
And—last, my favorite—a mortician. A man who speaks so prettily of endings, when he knew all along that mine was a beginning about to bloom.
” I lower myself to a crouch, eye to swimming eye with him.
“It was all a plot. Every piece of it…and the one true pawn on this chessboard, my dear husband—” I pat his cheek, “—was always you.”
Do you understand it now?
Each one chosen for exactly what he could do, and then—this is the part that undid my own careful plan, the part I never saw coming—each one impossible not to love.
I went looking for tools and found a home. I assembled a defense and accidentally assembled a family.
You sent a man to kill me, did you know that? My beautiful Riot. You hired the blade meant for my throat, and he laid it down and chose me instead, because even the killer you bought could see in one look what you spent a marriage failing to: that I was never a possession.
I was a person.
With a personality, and dreams, and ambitions, and every right in this world to be loved. Three men proved your entire creed a lie simply by adoring me.
Then they helped me bury you for it.
“Ex-husband,” I correct myself, sweetly.
“The one who’ll be found dead in a few quiet weeks…
after my honeymoon. After I celebrate my freedom with my new pack, all of us masked strangers in a world made safe by some very lovely connections.
Did you know, for instance, that Barney…
our humble little blacksmith, serving his quiet time in Arch Hollow, is in truth the founder and chief executive of Blackthorn itself?
Disguised as one of the condemned, when he’s really the cunning hand sheltering every Omega who walks through his doors craving the revenge she’s owed. ”