Page 123

I want to hand her something far rarer—a place to be entirely, dangerously herself, with no audience left to perform sanity for.

So I drive us out past the arches, past the cleared radius, deep into rolling countryside where the roads turn to gravel and the hedgerows close in green and secretive.

The collector’s estate sits at the end of a long private lane, an unremarkable stone manor hiding something marvelous in its converted outbuildings—a man who owes me a tidy stack of favors from a delicate matter involving a cousin, a misplaced inheritance, and a body that needed to stay misplaced.

He was glad to settle a portion of the debt with an afternoon’s private access. Eccentrics are always more generous than the merely rich; they understand that some currencies matter more than money.

“Where are you taking me, Silas?” Vex asks, suspicion threading through her amusement, her mismatched gaze cataloguing the unfamiliar landscape with that ceaseless tactical attention. “If this is a remote field and a shovel, I’ll be flattered, but I do require dinner first.”

“Patience, Darling.” I park, and step out, and open her door with a small bow that’s only half theatrical. “Though I’ll note for future reference that the offer of a shovel is the most romantic thing you’ve ever said to me.”

In truth I agonized over this outing more than I would confess under torture.

The others gave her grand things—Lucien his sky, Riot his engines and his unflinching violence—and the showman in me wanted to compete, to dazzle, to mount some unforgettable spectacle.

But Silas knew better.

Silas understood that the rarest gift I could offer a woman who has been performed at, managed, and admired her entire life was not another performance. It was permission. A place where she could be sharp and strange and lethal and gleeful all at once, with no clipboard tallying her sanity and no audience to keep off balance.

I did not want to take her breath away. I wanted to give her somewhere to finally breathe.

I lead her around the side of the manor to the long, low building the collector keeps for his finest pieces, and I open the door, and I watch her face the way a man watches the first frost take a window—for the precise moment the pattern blooms.

It blooms.

Because inside, lit by high clerestory windows and arranged with reverent care, is a private dagger and throwing range. Lanes stretch the length of the room toward weathered targets; the walls are hung floor to ceiling with blades—hundreds of them, antique and modern, ceremonial and brutal, every one a small museum of edged intention.

The air smells of oiled steel and old leather and beeswax polish, cool and metallic and clean, a scent that threads beneath my own graveyard-cedar like a duet written for the two of us.

Vex makes a sound I have never heard her make.

Something between a gasp and a prayer.

And then she is simply—gone, uncontainable, all that lethal composure dissolving into pure unfiltered delight as she crosses to the nearest wall and stops just short of touching, her hands hovering reverent over a display of throwing knives.

“Silas.” My name comes out hushed, awed. “Silas, do you know what these are?”

“I was rather hoping you’d tell me.”

And she does.

The floodgates open and out it all pours—years of it, the secret passion she’s carried like contraband through cages and wards and a life that never once gave it room to breathe.

She collected knives, she tells me, before everything; studied weapon history obsessively, sketched her own blade designs in notebooks long since lost to the fire and the institution. She knows the steel, the forging, the lineage of every shape on that wall, and the knowledge comes tumbling out of her with the breathless joy of a starved thing finally permitted to feast.

I have seen her brilliant. I have seen her lethal.

I have never, until this moment, seen her purely, helplessly happy, and the sight of it does something to my chest I will need to examine later in private.

It reframes her for me, this passion, the way every new fact about her reframes the whole. Because the world looked at a woman fascinated by blades and saw only the threat—the dangerous madwoman, the killer-in-waiting, the patient to be sedated and filed.

No one ever paused to see what I see now, watching her cradle a centuries-old dagger like a sacred text:that she loves them as objects of craft and history and terrible beauty, the way a scholar loves a dead language or a curator loves a fragile painting.

Her obsession was never with killing. It was with the thing itself—the engineering, the artistry, the long human story of how we taught metal to hold an edge. They pathologized a love of beauty because the beauty happened to be sharp. And she let them, because letting the world misread you is its own kind of armor. I refuse to misread her.

I see exactly what she is; an artist who was never once permitted a studio.

“Then by all means,” I murmur, plucking a balanced throwing dagger from its hook and offering it to her hilt-first across my open palm. “Show me what the wall has been waiting for.”