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He couldn’t if he tried;it isn’t in the architecture of him.

The man vowed in a bathtub that he’d die for me and meant it down to the marrow, and now he’s wrapped a promise of a warm and unhunted future around my smallest finger with the same total conviction. To him there is no difference in weight between a blood oath and a pinky swear.

A promise is a promise, and Riot keeps his or dies in the attempt, every single time.

Which means this absurd little gesture at the edge of a cliff is, in truth, the most binding contract I have ever entered—more binding than my marriage, more binding than any document Lucien ever filed.

The husband bound me with a ring and a lie.

Riot binds me with a crooked finger and the whole of his savage, unbreakable heart.

I know which one I trust.

“It’s a promise then,” I whisper.

CHAPTER 32

~Vex~

“I’M NOT OVERSTIMULATED!”

I declare this at full volume to a kitchen that begs to differ. The evidence stands against me on every surface. There is flour—flour everywhere, a fine white catastrophe dusting the counters, the floor, the front of my dress, one improbable smear across my own cheekbone.

There are bowls in various states of failure, eggshell drowning in something that was supposed to be batter and isn’t, a banana mashed with such unhinged violence it has become a crime scene.

The muffins I intended to produce—the simple, ordinary, festival-bound muffins—are nowhere remotely near a state fit for an oven, and I am standing in the wreckage of my own ambition with absolutely no idea where to even begin the salvage.

My three madmen stand in the doorway, observing the disaster with varying degrees of unhelpfulness.

In my defense,I am building quite a robust one in the panicked back rooms of my skull,I was supposed to be good at this.

That’s the part that’s short-circuiting me.

I am a woman who learned bladework with my entire body, who memorized the choreography of a dozen impossible aerial routines off grainy footage, who can read a room of killers in a single breath and engineer an institution’s collapse from inside a padded cell.

Precision is my native language.

Following exact sequences to produce exact outcomes is the entire architecture of my mind. So a recipe—a list, a set of ordered instructions promising a guaranteed result—should have been child’s play.

Instead the butter betrayed me, the chemistry rebelled, and somewhere around the third step the whole thing slipped its leash, and the mastermind who plans murders does not, it turns out, handle losing control of a muffin with anything resembling grace.

“She’s totally overstimulated,” Doc notes, calm and clinical, the traitor.

“Who would have thought,” Silas muses, with a low whistle of pure delight, “that our Darling, who dismantled an institution from inside a straitjacket, who throws a dagger like the hand of God, would be brought to her knees by a quick bread.”

“She’s hot,” Riot observes, leaning in the frame with his arms crossed and a grin spreading slow across his scarred face.

“That is not—” I round on him, brandishing a spatula caked in failure, “—a helpful observation, you absolute caveman.”

“Wasn’t trying to help. Just stating facts for the record.” He tips his head, entirely unbothered by the spatula. “Flour on your face, fire in your eyes, threatening kitchenware like it personally wronged you. It’s a whole look, Pretty. I’m invested.”

“AH!”

The sound that tears out of me is pure, undignified frustration, and to my absolute horror I feel my eyes go hotand prickling even as I pout, caught in the mortifying overlap of furious and tearful that I have not permitted myself since I was small.

I, who have stared down killers and federal agents without a flicker.

Undone by muffins.