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Monsters, I know how to survive.

Love is the only cage I have never once escaped alive.

Every other time I let myself love, it ended in fire or graves.

My father, who loved me and died for the empire he built. The ex-husband, who I mistook for safety and who slaughtered everyone I came from the morning after I gave him my trust. Dorian, who I let close enough to free me and who I had to burn alive for the betrayal.

Love, in my experience, is not tenderness.

It is a detonator.

It is the precise mechanism by which the world has always reached the soft center of me and torn it out.

Here I sit, in a graveyard full of impossible flowers, having handed that soft center to three more men without firing a single one of my defenses—and the most insane part, the part that proves I belong in a glass house full of beautiful ruined things, is that I am not reaching for the exits.

I am leaning into the kiss.

I am…staying.

After a lifetime of running, I am, against every instinct that ever kept me breathing, choosing to stay.

May the universe help us all.

CHAPTER 31

~Vex~

Riot will not tell me where we’re going.

He just tosses me a helmet, grins like a man who’s already decided to be a problem, and jerks his chin toward one of his custom motorcycles where it crouches in the morning light like something half-tamed and entirely his.

“Absolutely not,” Lucien says from the doorway, arms folded, every inch the disapproving planner. “The machine isn’t cleared. The route isn’t logged. If anything happens beyond the radius?—”

“Then it’ll happen fast and we’ll look incredible doing it,” Riot says cheerfully, swinging a leg over the bike.

“Riot.”

“Doc.” He mimics the exact disapproving cadence, and I have to bite down on a laugh. “She’s spent three years behind reinforced glass. The woman deserves a day where the only thing watching her is the sky. We’ll be back before your blood pressure finishes its complaint.”

Every warning Lucien levels gets cheerfully, surgically ignored, and I love it—love watching the immovable doctor lose ground to the immovable convict, two of my madmen collidingover my safety while I stand here holding a helmet and grinning like the lunatic they all insist I am.

I tug it on before Lucien can mount a real argument. He pinches the bridge of his nose in the universal gesture of a man who has accepted defeat and intends to be vindicated later, and I blow him a kiss, and then I climb on behind Riot and wrap myself around the broad warm wall of his back.

“Hold tight, Pretty,” he rumbles, and the engine roars to life beneath us, and we’re gone.

“IF SHE COMES BACK WITH SO MUCH AS A SCRATCH—” Lucien’s voice chases us down the drive and loses the race badly, swallowed by the engine and the wind and my own delighted cackle.

I twist to throw the doctor a wave over my shoulder, catching one last glimpse of him standing in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jaw tight and his eyes—beneath all that exasperation—soft with a worry that is its own kind of love.

He’ll fuss the entire time we’re gone. He’ll have a medical kit and a contingency plan and a lecture prepared for our return. And he let us go anyway, because he knows, the way I’m only just learning, that a cage doesn’t stop being a cage just because the bars are made of concern.

Even his.

We tear out past the last of Arch Hollow’s mossy arches and onto the open winding roads beyond its reach, and the further we travel, the lighter I become.

It happens by degrees, the lifting.

Mile by mile, something I’ve carried so long I forgot its weight begins to peel away. Because there are no cameras out here. No locked doors. No patient files cataloguing my every fluctuation, no staff logging my movements on a clipboard, no surveilled little town of beautiful killers all watching each other perform a rehabilitated normalcy nobody believes. There is onlyroad—endless ribbon of it, unspooling ahead through green hills and under an enormous unguarded sky—and the wind, and the thunder of the engine, and the solid heat of Riot between my thighs.