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The hunters became the haunted, and the prey grew teeth and a heart and a terror of being left, and somewhere in the swap I stopped being able to tell who was keeping whom.

And the wanting is the part that undoes me, sitting here with my pulse still loud from his mouth.

I know desire as a weapon—I learned it on a stage, learned to wield it and to fear it and to recognize it as the leash men reached for first.

What I didn’t know, until these three, was desire that doesn’t want to take anything from me. Silas kisses me like he has all the time in the world and no agenda inside it, like my mouth is something to be savored rather than spent, and the slow heat of it pools low and patient in my belly without a single alarm bell ringing behind it.

That’s the thing that frightens me more than the husband, more than the deadline, more than the island. Not that they might hurt me.

That I might let them close enough to.

“Doc isn’t the only one who can read you, Darling,” Silas whispers, and the truth of that sits between us, naked. “We can be your new Puddin—all three of us, the soft warm thing that never once turns on you, the love that doesn’t come with a blade hidden in it. But you have to be ready to go all in. No half-measures. No keeping one foot out the door for the day we disappoint you, because we won’t, and the waiting for it will only cost you the joy you’re owed in the meantime. All of you, for all of us. That’s the only deal we’re offering, and it’s the only one worth taking.”

He pulls back, then, and returns to his knitting, as if he hasn’t just rearranged the furniture of my entire interior.

The needles take up their patient click. And I sit there in the firelight, undone and quiet, watching a man who dresses the dead make something warm with his hands, and I let the silence stretch long and unhurried between us.

Go all in.

I turn the phrase over the way I turn everything over, looking for the trap in it, the hook beneath the bait, the fine print that every other all-in I’ve ever signed has hidden.

I don’t find one. That’s the part that keeps short-circuiting my careful, suspicious mind—there’s no clause here that takes. They are not asking to own me.

They are asking me to stop hedging against their love, to quit keeping the emergency exit greased and the daggers counted, to risk the one thing I swore after Dorian I would never risk again: believing a good thing might be allowed to stay good.

It’s the most dangerous proposition anyone has ever put to me.

The truly mad part, the part that proves I belong in a house of monsters, is how much of me has already decided to take it.

Then, softly—more to himself than to me, his gaze on the yarn moving through his fingers—he answers the question I asked an hour and a lifetime ago.

“I don’t think,” he murmurs, “I’d be able to choose a worthy enough color for your flowers.”

The needles slow.

The fire gilds the sharp serene lines of his face, and when he goes on, his voice is the gentlest I have ever heard it, and somehow the most terrible.

“Cause I’d hope we leave first, and never after—to ensure such a tragedy as beautiful and serene as your ascension without us, Pretty Peony...never transpires in this lifetime…or the next.”

CHAPTER 23

~Silas~

“Cause I’d hope we leave first, and never after—to ensure such a tragedy as beautiful and serene as your ascension without us, Pretty Peony,” I murmur to the fire, and then I let the rest of it loose, the part I have never once said aloud to a living soul. “Never transpires. Not in this lifetime… nor the next.”

Honesty has never been my strong suit. It’s a costume I wear poorly, a fabric that never sits right on my frame, and no one has ever been permitted to see me without the gilding—no one but Lucien and Riot, who learned the shape of this stripped-down thing slowly and at great cost.

This.

The vulnerable sculpture underneath, the skeleton beneath the flesh, the quiet petal that lives where the showman stands.

The real me, buried in the foundations beneath the louder me built to survive a world that never had any use for the original.

I couldn’t tell you when it started, the splitting.

Why it truly began.

The slow de-coupling of one self from another so that the first wouldn’t have to stand in the confrontations, wouldn’t have to feel the precise weight of never measuring up to the standards the world swung like a cudgel. Somewhere in the long childhood of being walked over, shoved, ridiculed, made the mule for other people’s cruelty, I began constructing a personality that couldn’t be trampled—brighter, sharper, theatrical enough that the blows landed on the costume and not the boy inside it.