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I have never wanted anything the way I want a woman who could out-think me.

The men who came before us looked at her and saw only the surfaces—a beautiful asset, a useful signature, a body to own and a mind to manage. They never once saw the player behind the piece. It is, I think, the single greatest miscalculation any of them made, and the ex-husband chief among them:to mistake the most dangerous mind in the room for the prize sitting prettily at its center.

They built their whole strategies around containing her. None of them grasped that she had already read the board, had been reading it since before they sat down, and was simply waiting, patient as a held breath, for the rest of us to make our moves.

I refuse to make that error.

I will adore the player. I will worship the strategist.

And I will hand her the scalpel and step back to watch what only a true artist can do with it.

I have her beneath me in a heartbeat, the slow theatrical restraint I usually pride myself on abandoned at the altar of her mouth.

My own clothes come away between kisses—the antique layers I sew so carefully shed without a thought—and the single dress I made to hug the lines of her body slips off as easily as it was always meant to, a thing designed by my hands to come undone for them.

She doesn’t know how I admire her.

The strength sketched into her frame, the dancer’s discipline, the lean evidence of a woman who insists on keeping pace with her own fierce hobbies—it undoes something in me, the proof of her vitality, her refusal to be soft and ornamental and still.

I crave lust the way Riot does, the hunger a constant low hum in the blood of us both—but where Riot can dive headlong into any heat and simply take, I am a devotee of the slow build.

The inviting ascent.

The exquisite torment of a fulfillment drawn out until it begs. I am, I’ve come to understand, the balance point of the three of us: Lucien with his patient scholar’s need to learn every secret of a woman before he permits himself to want her, Riot with his immediate consuming fire, and me suspended in the middle—the slow unveiling of identity that ripens, layer by layer, into something molten.

So I take my time with her.

I worship the slow way, the way that lets the fire dance higher between us before it consumes, until we’re both lost to the heat of it and the world beyond the hearth ceases, mercifully, to exist.

We’re breathless when we finally surface, tangled and warm, and the firelight plays along the scarred landscape of her body in a way that steals what little composure I have left.

Every mark a chapter.

Every old wound a sentence in a story the world wrote on her without consent, and somehow she has made even that beautiful, the way a cracked vase glazed in gold becomes worth more than the unbroken one.

“I feel like Peonies are too pure for someone like me,” she confesses, so quietly the flames nearly swallow it.

And when I meet her eyes, there she is.

Not Vex, not Violet, not any of the bright armored selves—Genevieve, the truest and most carefully buried layer of her, looking out at me unguarded in the firelight the way I am looking back, both of us stripped to the rawest version we own.

So I tell her the truth, because that is the only currency this moment will accept.

I tell her what the Peony means. I break it down to its sacred cores—that it is the bloom of honor and of healing, of compassion and of a life lived richly despite the odds; that in the old languages of flowers it signified a beauty so serene, socomplete, that it drew envy the way honey draws the blade of a knife.

“You are a Peony,” I murmur against her temple, “because you are a serene thing the world could not bear to leave unspoiled. So pure in your core that it made the cruel and the small desperate to ruin you, simply because they could not have you, could not be you, could not fathom you.”

She smiles, small and aching.

“But it did,” she whispers. “Ruin me.”

She looks down the length of herself then, at the map of scars, as if every mark is a verdict—as if her own flesh stands as evidence against her, proof of the unworthiness the world spent a lifetime insisting upon.

I follow her gaze, and I do not flinch from a single mark, because flinching would be its own kind of lie. I have spent a decade reading bodies—the dead tell me their endings in the language of their wounds, every bruise a sentence, every scar a confession.

And hers tell me a story I would carve into stone if I could:not a story of ruin, but of refusal.

Each one is a place the world tried to close a door on her and failed. Each one is proof she was still breathing when whatever made it walked away. Ruined things don’t fight back. Ruined things lie down and let the dark have them. She is covered head to foot in the evidence of every time she chose, instead, to survive—and there is nothing on this earth I find more achingly, terribly beautiful than that.