Page 39

Skips, over a body, through a forensic unit, past three armed guards, and arrives directly before me to plant herself with the proud, expectant posture of a girl awaiting a prize, those impossible eyes—lavender and emerald, the disagreement of them a small private vertigo—locked fast on mine.

“What do I need to do?” she asks.

I lift my hand between us, extend a single long finger, and smirk.

“Suck my finger.”

The silence that drops over the room is loud enough to deafen.

I can feel every soul present recalculating my sanity in real time—the techs frozen mid-task, the guards openly appalled, Hale’s jaw doing something complicated.

I have never in my life been the most comfortable presence in a room and I gave up apologizing for it before most of them were born.

Vex squeals.

Pure, gleeful delight, and then she leans in and takes the offered finger into the wet heat of her mouth, and the world contracts to that single point of contact.

She doesn’t do it quickly. She does it slow, deliberate, obscene—cheeks hollowing, tongue dragging the length of my finger like it’s a lollipop she intends to make last, and the entire time her mismatched gaze never once leaves mine, bright and challenging and entirely, gloriously aware of precisely what she’s doing to the temperature of the room.

Does my cock twitch?

It does. How could it not?

The simple animal fact of her hot mouth working my finger has already sent my imagination galloping somewhere it has no business being—somewhere that involves those same sinful lips wrapped around a far less clinical part of me, sucking just as dangerously, slicking it with saliva like a good and greedy Omega earning her keep. I keep my face a polite, pleasant mask.

Inside it, I am briefly, comprehensively undone.

When my finger plops free of her lips, the sound rings out scandalous and wet in the cathedral hush, and I miss the warmth of her mouth the very instant it’s gone.

And here is the thing I will examine later, alone, in the cold private quiet of my workroom where I do my honest thinking:she knew.

She knew the test was real, knew her saliva was the proof that would clear her, and she could have offered it in a dozen clinical, sexless ways.

She chose that one. Slow, obscene, and eye-locked, performed for me and aimed at me and calibrated, I’d stake myreputation on it, to learn precisely how much it would cost my composure.

It cost a great deal, and the look she gave me as my finger left her mouth said she’d read every coin of it.

I have spent a decade being the most unreadable man in any room. She unstitched me with a parlor trick and a smile, and the worst part, the part that has me hopelessly far gone already, is that I want to let her do it again.

Then I am all efficiency, because that’s how I hide my appetites.

I produce a small kit from my coat with my free hand, swab the glistening finger along a treated patch, and seal it.

Without waiting for the room to find its voice, I sanitize, glove, and crouch to the body, drawing the slender tools I need to take a matched sample from the dead woman’s slack and waiting mouth.

“What the hell,” Hale finally manages, “are you doing?”

“Chemistry,” I say, almost tenderly, working. “The most honest language there is. It never flatters, lies, or develops feelings that ruin the third act.”

I draw the two swabs together over the little reagent card, and I already know—I knew the moment I caught the faint bitter-almond wrongness layered under the bleach—what the card is about to confess.

“Watch the colors.”

The reagent blooms. Two patches. Two different colors—one a flat, innocent grey, the other a deep and damning violet that has no business existing in a healthy mouth.

I let the room stare.

Vex does not stare. Vex crosses her arms beneath her breasts, tilts her head with the lazy curiosity of a cat watching a slower animal work, and speaks.