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That teamwork isn’t surrender.

That needing help isn’t the same as being weak, or owned, or about to be betrayed. No one in my entire life has ever taught me that. It took a kitchen full of flour and three lunatics insulting each other over a muffin tin.

Every other person who ever offered to help me wanted something in exchange—a debt, a leverage, a hand on the leash.

My father helped me and asked for an alliance.

The husband helped me and took my whole family as payment.

Dorian helped me and made me believe I was free right up until the helping became another set of bars.

Help, in my experience, was simply ownership with better manners;the price was always hidden in the fine print, and I always paid it in blood.

So I learned to do everything myself, to need no one, to keep my two hands wrapped white-knuckled around every variable,because the moment you let someone else hold a piece of your life is the moment they own the power to drop it.

These three reckless, ridiculous men just spent an entire afternoon holding pieces of my life with the greatest care, asking nothing, wanting nothing, returning every scrap of control to my own hands the instant I could carry it again.

There was no fine print.

There was no bill.

There was only flour, and patience, and a love that for once did not arrive disguised as a cage.

As I sit there in the golden warm heart of it—the laughter, the bickering, the sweet drifting smell, the four of us braided together in a chaos that for once is joyful instead of dangerous—I let myself think the thought I have been circling for weeks, the one too enormous and too terrifying to ever say aloud.

This pack.

These ridiculous, devoted, lethal, beloved monsters of mine.

This may just be my forever place—the one I dare, at last, to call home.

CHAPTER 33

~Vex~

The pack convenes a summit over breakfast and reaches a unanimous, mildly ominous verdict: I have been courted individually quite long enough.

“One on one was the appetizer,” Silas announces, buttering toast like he’s addressing a war council. “Today, our Darling gets all of us at once. The full experience. The complete catastrophe.”

“That sounds like a threat,” I observe.

“It absolutely is,” Riot confirms, cheerfully, and that is how I come to spend what will prove to be the single most chaotic day of my entire deranged life.

The festival has swallowed Arch Hollow whole.

The market square and the streets feeding into it have erupted into a riot of color and noise—striped tents and bunting strung between the old stone arches, game booths and food stalls and a wheezing carousel, a Ferris wheel turning slow against the morning sky, the whole condemned little valley transformed for a day into something that could almost pass for an ordinary town having ordinary fun.

The air is thick with it: frying oil and spun sugar, woodsmoke and crushed grass and the green ozone bite of a day that can’tdecide whether to rain. Somewhere, a brass band is committing crimes against a marching tune. It is loud and bright and absurd, and I love it instantly and against my will.

We make it precisely four steps through the gate before the competition begins.

“Fifty says I out-win all of you,” Riot declares, cracking his knuckles.

“Most prizes, most games, or least public humiliation?” Lucien asks, with the precise air of a man establishing the rules of engagement before a hostile negotiation. “We should define the metrics or this descends into anarchy.”

“All three,” Silas purrs. “Separate categories. Loser of each buys the winner something grotesque from the worst food stall.”

“And what,” I ask sweetly, “does the woman who is about to humiliate all three of you receive?”