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I despise how badly I want to answer it.

She has been in my orbit three days and she is already prising at that nailed-shut door with the same idle confidence she brings to everything. I shut off the part of me that wants to let her.

I remind myself, with effort I haven’t had to spend in years, that I am working—that there is a body in the east wing, that the most useful thing I can be to her right now is the coldest version of myself. It doesn’t entirely take. It takes enough.

“Get dressed,” Hale says to her, crisp with borrowed command. “You’re coming with us.”

Vex brightens like a child told the day trip is back on.

“Ooh. Should I wear a different jumpsuit?” She’s already half-bouncing on the balls of her feet, lit up as though we’ve announced a scavenger hunt rather than an interrogation at a corpse. “I have opinions about the occasion.”

Hale’s glare could strip paint.

The guards exchange a look of pure bewildered male helplessness, the expression of men who trained for violence and find themselves disarmed by glee. None of them know what to do with her, and that ignorance is the whole reason she’s run rings around this place for years.

So I speak, because someone fluent ought to.

“Leave the pink.” My voice lands flat and certain into the room’s confusion. “Wear something more serious. The occasion calls for it.”

She beams at me and claps her hands together once, delighted.

Our Omega clearly loves to be led…

“Ah. Normal, right? Read the room, dress for the funeral, that sort of thing. Okay.” She’s already reaching for the folded standard-issue at the foot of the bunk. “I’ll be good and wear the boring orange. Blend right in with the scenery. Since apparently”—she shakes the jumpsuit out with a flourish—“we’re filming a very special episode of How to Get Away with Murder. Puddin Edition.”

It costs me everything I have to keep my face a closed door.

Because I’m the only soul in this room who catches it.

Puddin—the hamster, the dead one, the small white grief she still keeps a shrine to behind the lunacy, the single creature she’s ever publicly admitted to loving.

She’s named her own murder trial after her dead pet.

It is gallows humor of a rarefied, lethal vintage, a joke pitched so far over the heads of the armed men around her that it may as well be in another language, and the fact that she lobbed it into the air knowing only I would catch it—the fact that she made it for me—lands somewhere I keep carefully unguarded and detonates.

She dresses fast, swallowing all that mapped and maddening skin back into shapeless orange, and I regret it the way you regret a candle pinched out too soon.

For now, I tell the regret.

We’re moving before the regret has finished settling—down the white corridors, through three sets of mag-locks that thunk shut behind us like the building swallowing, into the east wing and the hush that hangs over a place where something has recently been emptied of life.

A forensic unit has already arrived and begun its grim choreography, gloved hands and numbered markers and the low murmur of people who do this for a living.

The scent reaches me before the sight does—the flat penny tang of blood gone tacky, the sour note of a body three hours past its tenancy, all of it laid over the institutional bleach in a way the bleach was never built to win against.

And every eye in the room lifts and swings and fastens onto Vex the instant she crosses the threshold, hungry to watch the monster meet her handiwork.

One look at her and I have my confirmation, the last bolt driven home in a certainty that was already welded.

Boredom.

Absolute, unperformed, faintly put-upon boredom.

If the small downturn of her mouth weren’t confirmation enough—the expression of a woman who would dearly love to be back in her cell being the singular acrobat she is, rather than standing in a draughty corridor being shown a corpse she has no relationship to—then it’s written plainly in her body.

No spike. No freeze. None of the micro-tells a guilty animal can’t suppress when confronted with its kill. Just the loose-limbed heaviness of someone running on empty, her shoulders low, her weight settling, a fatigue that has nothing to do with guilt and everything to do with five hours of exertion on no food.

I read it off her without trying, fluent in her already, and that fluency is the most dangerous thing in this room, because it loosens my tongue before my judgment can catch the latch.