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The number lands like a private joke landing exactly where it was thrown, and a laugh bubbles up out of me, cracked and breathless and the first real sound I’ve made all morning, because he could not possibly know—could he?—that eight is the precise figure I once set as my immovable minimum, the bar a far lesser man failed so spectacularly to clear that I lit him on fire over it.

The universe has a sense of humor after all.

It sent me a monster who meets the standard.

“That,” I manage, my voice thready and entirely unlike my own, “is the single most romantic threat anyone has ever made me. And I’ve been threatened by professionals.”

“Wasn’t a threat.” His mouth drags along my jaw, down the line of my throat, and the calm and the heat of him war for control of my drowning nervous system, both of them winning. “It’s a promise. I keep mine.”

And there it is—the cruel, perfect hook of him, slipped in so smoothly I almost miss it: a man promising to keep his word, in the one bed in the world where a broken promise once taught me to burn. Some far, cold, sentinel part of me flags the danger of it. Files it. Warns that anchoring to this man is its own kind of free fall, that I am letting a monster become my whole horizon, that the peace and the silk and the peonies and now this—this devastating, grinning, eight-inch stability—are all just the prettiest bars of the loveliest cage anyone has ever built me.

I hear the warning. Understand it completely.

And I reach up, fist my hand in his hair, and drag his mouth back to mine anyway—because the sentinel can keep watch, and the mastermind can build her case file, and tomorrow I will go back to being the most dangerous thing in every room I enter.

Right now, with his weight pinning me to the silk and his fire pouring calm into my veins and the whole gilded afterlife of Arch Hollow waiting outside a closed door to resume the slow sweet business of dissolving me—right now I want exactly one thing, and it is the only thing in this beautiful, terrifying morning that feels like mine to choose.

I want him.

I want this.

I want, for one stolen, reckless, gloriously stupid stretch of time, to surrender the spiral and let a dangerous man hold me to the world.

If I let him keep his promise—if I let this monster have me here, in the corner where I keep what’s precious, on the silk he ordered before he’d earned the right—then for a little while, just a little while…

I can forget I’m fucking spiraling.

CHAPTER 14

~Riot~

The first inch of me breaches her and the world narrows to a single, devastating point of contact.

Tight.Fucking heavens, impossibly tight.

Vex’s heat clenches around the head of my cock like a fist wrapped in warm silk, rippling with greedy little pulses that drag a guttural curse from my throat before I can swallow it. I freeze there, buried only to the crown, every muscle in my back locked against the instinct to slam home and ruin us both.

Omegas are supposed to be loose by the time they reach a place like Blackthorn. Years of heats, suppressants that never quite work, the revolving door of Alphas the system throws at them to keep the designations from tearing each other apart. Government-mandated relief. Pack assignments handed out like candy to stop the riots. I’ve seen it, smelled it, walked through the aftermath more times than I care to count. Wet, willing, and worn open by necessity.

Vex is none of those things.

Her pussy milks me with deliberate, fluttering spasms, as though her body itself is testing whether I’m worthy of the next inch.

The scent of her blooms violently in the sunlit room—strawberries crushed under bare feet, whipped cream melting on a spoon, dark chocolate ganache left too long in the heat until it turns sinful and sticky. Underneath it all threads something sharper, almost metallic, like the edge of a blade kissed by sugar.

It floods my lungs and short-circuits every civilized thought I’ve ever pretended to own.

“Fuck,” I rasp, forehead dropping to hers.

The pink silk sheets whisper beneath us, already damp with the first sheen of sweat. Her mismatched eyes—lavender and emerald, both blown wide with the same feral hunger—are inches from mine. She looks half-mad and entirely triumphant, like she’s been waiting years for an Alpha stupid enough to try claiming what she’s kept locked away.

I lean down and kiss her brutally, teeth clashing, tongue sweeping in to taste the strawberry sweetness on her tongue. She bites back, hard enough to draw a bead of blood from my lower lip, and the copper tang only makes her scent spike hotter.

“You sinfully tight little beauty,” I growl against her mouth. “Been reserving this pretty pink cunt for the day an Alpha finally earned it, haven’t you?”

She smirks against my lips, the expression so sharp it could cut glass.

“Previous one didn’t know how to handle precious goods. Decided he wasn’t deserving of the privilege.”