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“Cooperation,” I repeat, narrowing my eyes. “That’s a generous word for letting your undertaker ruin me on a hearthrug.”

“I was referring,” he says smoothly, not rising to it in the slightest, “to your attendance record. Three weeks of pole classes, your self-defense sessions, the way you’ve stopped trying to pick the lock on the back window at two in the morning. The committee is pleased. I am… also pleased.” He rises, offers me a hand. “Get dressed. And be excited, Vex. I’ve planned this one specifically for you.”

Be excited.

As if excitement is a thing I can summon on command, a switch among my many switches. But the irritating truth is that I am—intrigued, at least, which in my fractured economy is the same currency.

He said specifically for you, and Lucien doesn’t waste specificity any more than he wastes teasing, and a gift chosen with that much intention from a man who weaponizes intention is a thing worth being curious about.

He helps me into the car with a hand at the small of my back, a small possessive courtesy, and the entire drive he refuses totell me where we’re going. I try three different angles—charm, threat, and the silent treatment—and he counters all three with the serene immovability of a man who has interrogated minds far slipperier than mine for a living.

The valley unspools past the window, then the arches, then an unfamiliar road into a neighboring town I’ve never been cleared to enter, and my pulse climbs with every mile because wherever we’re headed required permission.Real permission.The kind that takes strings and favors and, I’d wager, a generous dose of Barney leaning on someone.

I watch his hands on the wheel instead of the road—long, precise, ringless, the hands that hold a fountain pen and a scalpel of a mind—and I run the math the way I always do, hunting the angle, the catch, the cost.

Because gifts have always come with invoices, in my experience.

Every kindness I was ever shown turned out to be a down payment on something a man intended to collect later, with interest.

The ex-husband’s courtship. Dorian’s rescue.

I am constitutionally incapable of receiving a present without first checking it for a hook.

Yet the longer I sit here, the less I can find one.

Lucien wants nothing from this. He has arranged something elaborate and difficult and entirely for my pleasure, and the absence of an angle is so foreign to me that it loops all the way back around to suspicious. The cruelest trick anyone could play on a woman like me would be genuine, unconditional generosity.

I keep waiting for it to be a trick. It keeps refusing to be one.

Then he parks. And I look up.

And the breath leaves my body in one clean, gutted exhale.

It’s a studio.

An aerial arts and pole studio, tucked into a converted brick warehouse with tall arched windows and a hand-painted sign, the kind of building that hums with purpose before you’ve even stepped inside.

I can see them through the glass—the poles, gleaming chrome floor to ceiling, the silks pooled like spilled jewels from the rafters, the lyra hoops suspended in patient circles. The afternoon light pours through those high windows and turns the whole space gold.

“How,” I manage.

“I requested it,” Lucien says, watching my face with the quiet attentiveness of a man who has been waiting all morning for exactly this expression. “It sits outside our cleared radius, which made it complicated. Barney was… persuasive on our behalf. Go on.”

I don’t remember crossing the threshold.

One moment I’m in the car and the next I’m inside, and the instant my feet touch the polished sprung floor, something deep in the wreckage of me wakes up and roars.

The scent hits first, because it always does for me—the particular perfume of a place like this, chalk and grip-rosin and clean sweat, the faint rubber of crash mats and the floral ghost of a dozen women’s lotions, all of it underlaid with the warm dustiness of a building that breathes effort.

It is the smell of my old life.

The one before Blackthorn.

Before the straitjackets and the curated chaos and the years of wearing lunacy like couture.

The mirrors throw my reflection back at me from every angle, a hundred fractured Vexes, and the sound system murmurs a low bass line, and the floor is polished to a shine that begs for bare feet and chalked hands—and I am, for one vertiginous heartbeat, twenty-one again.

I remember the hustle.