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In a career built on foregone conclusions, on cold stones turned in steady hands, on the small grim certainty that I will always, eventually, see the seam—I cannot, for once, predict who walks away from this the victor.

And so, for the first time in longer than I will confess to any notebook, I let myself feel the thing rising slow and bright beneath all that still, deep water.

I dare to be excited.

CHAPTER 3

~Vex~

They’ve moved me, and I want it on the record that I am taking it personally.

My oasis—my own square of regulated nothing, the one cell in this watching machine I have spent years training to feel like mine—is being scrubbed.

Not the usual contraband toss, where two bored orderlies paw through my paperbacks and pretend my dolls aren’t watching them do it. This is a detailed, surgical, on-your-knees-with-a-brush kind of clean, the sort reserved for the suspicion that a patient has been quietly assembling the end of the world out of dental floss and good intentions.

Which, to be fair, I have done before.

Twice.

But here is the splinter under the nail of it, the small wrong note that has my whole morning tilted off its axis:I did not ask for this.

I am the one who decides when my orbit gets disturbed.

I request the scrubs. I choose the upheaval, schedule the chaos, rearrange my own little universe on a whim so that the staff stay convinced they can never quite predict me.

Control is the only luxury this place permits, and I hoard it like a dragon on a very small, very tidy pile of gold.

Someone has reached into my routine and changed the music without asking.

Someone has decided my rest required inspecting.

It smells like him, the decision.

Not in the room—he’s far too elegant to leave fingerprints—but in the shape of it. The patience. The way it studies me sideways instead of head-on.

Doc.

Dr. Lucien Graves, two days into a job that has eaten better men, already rearranging the furniture of my life to see what I do when the chairs move.

Clever. Irritating.

The two have never lived this close together in anyone I’ve met before, and I have met a great many people, most of them right before they regretted it.

It does not help that I dreamed about him.

Last night, in the borrowed bed of this borrowed room, my treacherous unconscious served up the good doctor in vivid detail—me, scaling that enormous frame like a girl shimmying up a tree she’s been told not to climb, peeling those architectural glasses off that infuriatingly composed face, fisting a hand in all that copper-gold hair and discovering, in the breathless logic of dreams, whether the man kisses the way he does everything else.

Slow. Deliberate.

Like my mouth was a difficult case he intended to solve thoroughly and then write up in a private notebook no one else would ever read. I woke with my thighs pressed together and my own perfume gone embarrassingly sweet in the dark, and I lay there furious at the disloyalty of my own body, because a body, unlike a mind, has never once in its life had the sense to play the long game.

This is not, in itself, alarming.

I am an Omega with appetites and a heat I keep chained in the basement of my body on a cocktail of suppressants, in a building stuffed wall to wall with frustrated designations.

Wet dreams are practically the house wine here.

We all sip.