Page 104

I reach down and take her chin between my fingers, gentle but unyielding, and force it up until she has no choice but to meet my gaze and let me hold hers there.

“Your heart still beats,” I tell her, low and absolute. “After all of it…every hand that tried to stop it…it still beats. And no matter how desperately the world wants to label you, to fileyou away as some Pretty Darling Psycho and be done with the inconvenience of you…guess what.”

I reach for the collar at her throat. I flick the red metal heart that rests against the hollow of it, the one that reads THEIRS in bold defiant letters, our three names engraved small and permanent on the reverse.

“You’re Our Pretty Darling Psycho. Ours—and we are the ones who will never ruin you. You could be our end, sweet thing. Our undoing. Our demise.” I let the words fall slow and certain into the firelit dark. “And you would still be our favorite obsession.”

I mean every word, and the meaning of it frightens even me a little.

Obsession is not a word I use loosely; I have built my entire life around the careful management of my appetites, the discipline of wanting at arm’s length. But there is no arm’s length left where she is concerned.

She has become the fixed point my whole compass swings toward, the one beautiful problem I will never tire of solving, and I have stopped pretending otherwise even to myself. Let the ex-husband keep his ownership and his deeds and his transactions.

We don’t want to own her.

We want to be ruined by her, gladly, completely, and call the ruin a privilege.

She smiles at that, and her eyes go glassy and bright, because she knows—reads it in me the way she reads everything, that flawless instrument of a mind that catches every lie ever told and finds none in me.

Not one.

I understand, watching the truth land in her, that this is the thing she has hungered for since the very first betrayal carvedher open:since the man who stole her father from her, the one person in all her life who never once felt the need to lie to her.

That is the wound beneath every other wound. Not the cage, not the cruelty, not the scars. The loss of the only honesty she ever trusted.

So we will give it back to her.

The honesty, and the vengeance both. We will hunt down the artist who composed her ruin and we will collect every debt owed to our Little Omega, slow and thorough and merciless—and if the collecting leads us all to our end, then so be it. I made my peace with a beautiful death long before I ever met her.

I simply never had anything worth dying for until now.

“Ours,” I assure her, leaning down to seal it against her mouth.

“Yours,” she whispers right back, and seals it with a kiss.

CHAPTER 24

~Vex~

The firelight catches the edges of him like a secret half-told, gilding the sharp lines of Silas’s jaw and the elegant slope of his shoulders as he sets the knitting aside with deliberate care.

Yarn and needles pool on the rug like forgotten offerings, and the hush between us thickens, charged with the kind of anticipation that makes the strategist in my skull tilt her head and catalogue every variable.

I should be mapping exits.

Instead, I am mapping the slow bloom of heat low in my belly, the way his cedar-and-lilies scent curls around me like grave ivy claiming new soil—sweet violets threaded beneath, a candied promise that both soothes and unsettles.

Making love to Silas unfolds nothing like the frenzied claims I have catalogued in darker chapters.

No bruising urgency, no desperate race against the inevitable dawn. When his lips claim mine, it is an act of reverence, soft as moonlight on still water. He tastes of beeswax and winter roses, cool and deliberate, each press a quiet validation that sinks beneath my skin and rearranges the architecture of my defenses.

My mastermind notes the precision—the exact angle at which he tilts his head to deepen the kiss, the feather-light trace of his thumb along my jaw as if I were a sculpture he has waited lifetimes to finish.

Yet the fractured parts of me, the ones that wear Vex like battle armor and Velvet like silk temptation, simply surrender to the tenderness.

It terrifies me more than any blade ever could.

“You’re thinking too loudly, Pretty Peony,” he murmurs against my mouth, the words laced with that theatrical lilt he deploys like a scalpel, yet softened now by genuine amusement. “Shall I file a complaint with the management of that magnificent mind of yours?”