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Two words, flat as a closed ledger, and I file the weather of them away, because the day Silas Crowe scents what I scented in that playpen is a day I’d pay good money to witness.

The man speaks about death like it’s a courtship.

I can only imagine what he’ll make of a woman who walks toward it humming.

“Don’t do that shit again,” Doc says—the neck, the bottle, the spectacle—and pushes off the frame to go.

He’s a stride away, half-turned into the corridor, when I call after him.

“What do I have to do to get a bed in that playpen?”

He pauses.

Looks back over his shoulder, two fingers rising to nudge the glasses up his nose, the gesture he hides behind the way I hide behind a grin.

“You’re not going back into the playpen.”

“You and I both know I am,” I tell him pleasantly, “so skip to the part where you answer the question.”

“You’re not getting a bed.”

“She wants a bed.”

That lands.

He holds the look a beat longer than he means to—I see it, the half-second of recalculation, the same flicker I caught in her when I said the wrong true thing—and then he turns his face away from me, which is the closest a man that controlled comes to flinching.

“I think she’d like pink silk sheets,” I add, helpful as anything.

He doesn’t answer.

He just walks, those measured unhurried strides carrying him off down the corridor, swallowing him into the building’s white throat, and the camouflaged stone begins to grind its slow way shut between us.

I tip my head back into the freezing flow and laugh—really laugh, the manic, full-bodied kind that bounces off four stone corners and comes back at me distorted, the laugh that empties the wing around me the way her presence empties a room around her.

Because I know exactly what just happened.

He’s going to leave me to five more minutes of chilled insanity.

A small, petty, doctorly punishment for the spectacle, dealt out with an eyeroll and a sigh. Fine. I’ll kneel here grinning in the cold and the dark-adjacent and take it like a gift.

Because I also know, sure as the blood under my skin, sure as the scent that won’t wash off, sure as the hook she set in me without even trying?—

That dangerous queen of ours is getting her silky pink bed in that playpen.

And I’m the one who’s going to lay her down in it.

CHAPTER 5

~Vex~

There’s an old saying—some tired little proverb about how, if a man could, he would—and I am pleased to report that it has been proven true in the deepest, dampest dungeon of this enchained madhouse, with one delicious amendment.

This particular man is a sexy, four-eyed genius.

And he could…so he did.

He has spoiled me with my very first gift inside seventy-two hours of meeting me, which is faster than any Alpha has ever managed to put something shiny in my hands, and the men who tried before him had the advantage of not being separated from me by a court order and a wall of reinforced glass.