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“Vex.” Panic strips the smooth playboy down to the boy underneath. “Vex, we can work this out. I can give you anything. Money. The Beauregard seat on the board—it’s yours. Every Dior bag they make. I’ll buy you a hundred hamsters.”

The word lands like a slap I didn’t see coming, and for half a heartbeat the warmth goes out of me, replaced by something glacial and old.

“You can’t buy back my Puddin.”

“I—” He scrambles. “I’ll buy you a new Puddin. A better one. White, just like?—”

“There is no better one.” I stand.

Smoothing the front of my suit, I cross to the bed. The suit is matte black and fits like a second skin, fire-rated to four hundred degrees for the next twenty minutes—plenty, by my calculations, and my calculations are rarely wrong. I crouch at the bedside so we’re eye to eye, my lavender gaze and my emerald one both fixed on him, the way they unsettle everyone the moment they realize the colors don’t match.

“You truly believed we’d be the sadistic little fairy tale,” I murmur. “The Joker and his girl. And in the end you’re just a coward in good shoes with a small dick.”

“I’m six inches!” he snaps, wounded vanity briefly outpacing his terror.

“My minimum is eight.”

“Eight— who the hell is blessed with eight?”

“The right men.” I pat his cheek. “If it isn’t practically signing a lease on my womb with every thrust, frankly, I’d rather read.”

He makes a sound that is no longer language.

I rise, retrieve the mask from where it waited on the dresser, and fit it over the lower half of my face. The seal closes with a small, satisfying hiss, and the world narrows to the soft mechanical rhythm of my own breath. The room is brilliant now, gold and red and roaring, the heat pressing against my suit like a lover who can’t take a hint.

“It’s a genuine shame,” I say, raising my voice over the inferno, “that you’re my best route in. Arson against a beloved philanthropist, an Omega clearly off her medication—they’ll have no choice but to send me somewhere very special. The most dangerous house in the country for psychotic little things like me.” I tap the key against my palm. “I do love a challenge, and you, darling, are simply the doorbell.”

“The—what? What house? Vex?—”

“I’ll see you in hell in a few short years, presuming I haven’t found something better to do.” I drop the key into the breast pocket of my suit, where it will be recovered, scorched but legible, exactly where the evidence ought to be. “If I’m lucky, I’ll go out by the hand of a man with bigger balls and a flair for flowers at the funeral. Until then—burn for me, would you? Just a little. As a treat.”

I turn on the ball of my foot, the old ballet habit, weight rolling clean through the arch, and I walk into the blaze.

Behind me his screaming climbs a register, then loses its shape, swallowed by the greater voice of the fire. I don’t look back. Looking back is for women with regrets, and I traded minein years ago for something with a sharper edge. The heat parts around my suit. The smoke curls against my mask and finds no way through. Somewhere below, the alarms will be shrieking, the sprinklers in the hall hissing uselessly against a blaze I engineered to outrun them.

At the threshold I pause, just once, and smile beneath the mask where no camera will catch it.

Blackthorn Institute. Here I come.

Knock knock.

CHAPTER 1

~Vex~

Three years, seven months, and thirteen profoundly tedious days later, I have perfected the art of being a model patient.

This is, naturally, the most dangerous thing I have ever done.

Blackthorn doesn’t look like a place where they cage monsters.

That’s the first lie the building tells, and it tells it with confidence.

From the outside, perched on its private cliff a long, cold drive from anywhere that matters, it wears the face of an old-money sanatorium—pale limestone, arched windows, ivy permitted to climb in tasteful amounts so the brochures photograph well for the families who pay to forget us.

Money built the bones of this place a century ago, when the wealthy still had the decency to lock their embarrassments somewhere with good architecture.

The cruelty is all in the renovations.