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Prologue

~VEX~

“YOU PSYCHOTIC BITCH!”

The insult leaves Dorian on a spray of spit and panic, and I receive it the way a debutante receives a bouquet—with a small, gracious tilt of the chin.

“You always did know the way to a girl’s heart,” I tell him.

On the nightstand, the metronome keeps its idiot pulse.Tick. Tick. Tick.I set it swinging an hour ago, purely for the ambiance, and the brass arm sways from side to side, counting down the seconds of a man’s life with the bored patience of a thing that has somewhere better to be. It does not. Neither do I. I am exactly where I intended to be, at exactly the hour I chose, inside the bedroom where Dorian and I once played at building a home.

The home is currently on fire.

It climbs the far wall in slow, lapping ribbons, gilding the wallpaper we bickered over for three entire weekends. Smoke pools along the crown molding in a soft grey tide. The heat hasn’t reached the bed yet—that’s a matter of minutes, and minutes happen to be a currency I spend beautifully.

Dorian thrashes against the headboard. The cuffs sing a bright, metallic note. I had them custom-plated, because if a girl is going to chain her Alpha to a mattress, she ought to do it in something that photographs well.

“Vex.” He gulps a lungful of thickening air. “Vex, sweetheart, take these off.”

“Mm.” I dangle the little key from one finger and let it spin, catching the light of his burning fortune. “I’m mulling it over.”

The smoke ought to taste of ash and ruin. Instead the room reeks, obscenely, ofme—strawberries gone warm and pliant, whipped cream, a low purr of dark chocolate ganache, the whole confection thickening as the temperature rises. Stress is meant to sour an Omega’s perfume, twist it sharp with fear. Mine never bothered to read the instructions. I’m not afraid. I’m having the finest evening I’ve enjoyed in years, and my glands know it, pumping out something like a Valentine’s parlor at midnight while the ceiling chars overhead.

Dorian’s nostrils flare anyway.Even now.The Alpha in him strains toward me like a houseplant tilting at a window, helpless and slow and stupid. Pathetic. A little beautiful. Mostly pathetic.

“We can fix this,” he pants. “Whatever you think happened?—”

“Oh, don’t spoil it.” I cross my legs at the ankle and settle deeper into the velvet chair I dragged to the foot of the bed, the one good piece in this gauche penthouse. “You were doing such lovely cardio.”

He laughs—a nervous, airless thing—and tries the smile next. The playboy smile, the one that has emptied the panties of half this city’s most expensive women. It tugs at the corner of his mouth like a fishhook. “C’mon, darling. You and me, we play games. That’s our thing.”

“That was our thing.”

“You thought I was your—” He fumbles, eyes wet and wide. “You were my Harley. I was your Joker. You said me playing the lunatic turned you on.”

Did I?

I tip my head, considering the man who genuinely believed we were the great tragic romance of his generation, and I let him watch the mask slide off. Not a performance of calm. The real article. Unbothered down to the marrow.

“Sweetheart.” My voice goes soft, almost tender, the way you’d speak to a child who has wet himself in front of guests. “You playing the lunatic turns me on the way watching paint dry turns me on. You had the costume. You never had the conviction.”

“Then what the hell do you want?”

“I get wet for men who are obsessed withme.Not the other way around.” I examine my nails, painted a pretty arterial red. “You were always far too obsessed with yourself to spare any for me. There simply wasn’t room in the bed for three.”

A beam splits somewhere behind the wall with a sound like a tree falling. He flinches. I don’t.

“You never should’ve found out,” he blurts, because guilt always surfaces last, bobbing up like a body. “About Celine. You weren’t supposed to?—”

“Obviously.” I wave a hand through the haze. “But you’re a man, Dorian. Men are catastrophic at the basics of covering their tracks. You lost before the game began—lost it in the womb, really, the whole gender did. Sad, but that’s the simple arithmetic between an Alpha and a crazed, delusional, psychotic little Omega like myself.”

“She forced it on me.”

I sigh, genuinely disappointed in the quality of his excuses. “I forced you to eat me out for two days straight during my last heat, and you wept with gratitude. Twice. So I doubt someborrowed pussy was the once-in-a-lifetime revelation you’re selling.”

The curtains catch.

They go up gloriously, the cheap gold lamé he chose against my advice curling into a sheet of flame that throws his shadow huge across the ceiling. I watch them burn with something close to fondness. They are, after all, my alibi. When the fire marshal stands in this wreckage and asks what could possibly have started it, I will weep prettily and confess the truth: the curtains were hideous. Hideous things invite their own destruction. Ask anyone.