Page 17

He drinks, eyes never leaving me, and the silence stretches long enough that I expect it to be permanent. Good. I respect a man who understands that the cheapest thing he owns is his own answer.

So when a full minute crawls past and he still hasn’t given me a syllable, my grin only widens.

“Vex,” I offer, since one of us should have manners. “For now.” I rise out of my crouch in a single uncoiling motion, brush invisible dust from my pink knees, and flash him my sweetest, most ungovernable smile. “Enjoy play time.”

I spin on my heel and skip away, leaving him with his terrible beer and the warmth of my fingerprints on the glass.

I let myself drift again as I go, sliding back into the pleasant fog where I do my best thinking, turning the Doc over and over—what he wants, what he’s hiding, whether the half-built man at the wall is a coincidence or a card someone dealt onto my board on purpose—when the air at my back changes.

Closeness. Heat.

The smoke-and-iron weather of him, suddenly directly behind me, where a cuffed man pinned to a wall by forty frightened gazes has absolutely no business being.

I don’t startle.

Startling is for prey.

I simply tip my head back and let my eyes climb to his, which are even more arresting at this distance, even more cynical, even more dangerously, beautifully made.

“First Pretty Doc,” I muse, delighted. “Now Pretty Inmate.” I pout up at him. “A new move’s about to be played on the chess board.” I hum the last of it, pleased with the symmetry, two glittering pieces sliding onto my squares in the space of two days.

Somewhere to my left, a guard finds his voice.

“V-Valentine. You need to—you need to return to your number. Now…please.”

The please is what tells me how bad it is.

I drag my gaze off the Alpha to glance at the guard, and the poor man freezes mid-breath, eyes going wide and white over my shoulder—and that’s my only warning before an arm like a cabled tree branch wraps my front and I’m hauled backward into a chest that is all heat and granite, a broad hand spanning the column of my throat, holding me precisely, perfectly still.

Steel sings out of holsters across the hall.

Commands erupt—drop her, hands where we can see them, on the ground, on the ground—every blunt and pointed thing the institute permits suddenly leveled at the man wearing me like a coat.

I never felt him break the bottle.

Only register the result of it: the jagged green crescent of the bottle’s neck pressed to the soft skin under my jaw, the points of it kissing my pulse, his grip on my throat firm enoughto be a statement and gentle enough to be something far more unsettling than a threat.

So this is what passes for a hostage situation.

If you’d call it that.

I’m not sure I would.

The hall is a wall of noise—shouting, the scrape of boots, somebody’s panic button shrilling, the orderlies bellowing protocol numbers at each other like the numbers might help—and I let it crash over me for exactly as long as it amuses me, which is not long, because all of it, every frantic decibel, is so deeply, hilariously unnecessary.

I start to giggle.

It bubbles up from somewhere genuine, and once it starts I can’t be bothered to stop it, and it tips over into a laugh, full and bright and entirely the wrong sound for a woman with broken glass at her throat.

The hall goes silent in stages, the way a room does when the thing happening in it stops following the script. Every eye swings to me. The shouting dies.

And I laugh harder, hard enough that the body caging mine shifts in what I can only interpret as bafflement, the hand at my neck loosening a degree, the glass easing back a breath from my skin.

I sigh, pure relief, and tilt my face up to look at him properly.

He’s upside-down from this angle and somehow even more handsome for it, which strikes me as genuinely unfair.

“Talentedly dangerous and hands-on?” I beam. “Absolute turn-on.”