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“Play with me next time,” I tell him, and turn to go. “And if you ignore me again, I’ll give you a concussion and tell them it was my alter-ego. Jezebel. Nasty piece of work, that one. Terrible with names.”

I’m three steps gone when his voice rolls after me, dry as ash.

“Probably not even her real fucking name.”

I stop.

Something shifts.

I feel it move through me like a draft through an opened door—the sugar draining out, the playground music cutting off mid-note, the bright manic surface of me going abruptly, glassily still.

When I look back over my shoulder, I already know the grin I’m wearing has changed into something with no warmth in it at all.

“Violet,” I say.

Just the one word.

But my voice has gone entirely wrong—lower, older, scraped clean of the performance—and he notices.He would.This one notices the way the Doc notices, with that same predator’s attention to the smallest tell.

I watch the involuntary tick at the corner of his eye, the flicker of a man who has just heard a true thing slip out from behind a hundred false ones and understood, instantly and entirely, that it was real.

That it cost me something to say.

We hold the look.

It pulses between us, taut and dark, carrying a great deal more than a taunt—recognition, maybe, the awful intimacy of being seen by something that hunts the way you hunt. For one suspended heartbeat I am not performing for anyone:not the cameras, not the room, not even myself.

Then I blink, and she folds back down into her box, and I am Vex again—sugar and skip and ungovernable grin, the goddess restored to her plinth.

“Bye, Riot.” I beam at him, light as spun candy. “Nice playing with you.”

I skip away humming, and I feel both their gazes ride me the whole length of the hall—the cynical pale grey at my back, the cold steel-blue ahead—two obsessions taking my measure from opposite ends of a room that emptied itself in fear of one of them and forgot to be afraid of me, which has always been their mistake.

The Doc gives Riot a long look as I approach, a wordless thing that passes between the two big men over the top of my head, territorial in a register too quiet for the guards to hear.

Then he uncrosses his arms, nudges his glasses once more, and turns on his heel—assuming, with that maddening certainty of his, that I’ll fall into step behind him.

I do.

Not because he expects it.

Because ever since the good doctor walked through Blackthorn’s doors with his fountain pen, library scent, and his habit of changing my orbit without asking, this dull and tidy little asylum of mine has become dangerously, deliciously interesting.

And a goddess never could resist a game with stakes worth the playing.

CHAPTER 4

~Riot~

Ishould’ve killed her when I had the chance.

It’s the only sensible thought left in my skull, and I keep turning it over like a coin worn smooth, because the rest of my thoughts have all gone somewhere warm and pink and dangerous, and the coin is the only cold thing in here that isn’t the water.

The water is everywhere.

It comes down from somewhere in the dark above me, a thin relentless flow gone glacial by the time it finds my shoulders, sheeting over my bare back, pooling around my knees where I’m made to kneel on stone that stopped having a temperature hours ago.

I’m naked.