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I can’t argue with him. I, who can argue with anyone, who has talked my way into a maximum-security asylum and out of three murder charges, cannot find the footing to argue with that. So I reach for the heaviest stone in the pile.

“I’m crazy.”

“Psychos,” he says, without missing a beat, “are the prettiest delicacies.”

“You’ll get bored.”

“When I can put you in every position imaginable?” His hand slides a lazy, proprietary inch along my thigh under the water, and heat licks up through the calm despite my best intentions. “I sincerely doubt it.”

“We’ll never obtain freedom,” I say, and I mean it as the trump card, the unanswerable one, the wall no amount of charm can climb. Two people like us, with our pasts and our paperwork and our body counts, do not get to be free. We get to be managed.

“And yet,” he says, unhurried, “somehow we’ve landed ourselves in a quiet little town of controlled convicts that gives us more room to breathe than two people with our histories had any right to dream of. Real beds. Real doors. A whole valley of pretty arches and the illusion of a leash long enough to forget it’s there.”

His arms tighten, and his voice drops into something low and conspiratorial and devastating.

“So tell me, Violet—if they handed us this much by accident, what makes you so sure we can’t talk our way to the heart of Monaco one day? Sipping the finest wine someone else paid for, looking out over the water, wearing new names nobody’s put a charge on yet, a confirmed pack and not a cage in sight.”

And the terrible thing—the genuinely dangerous thing—is that I can picture it.

Vividly.

The water and the wine and the new names. Me, in some sun-warmed room above a glittering harbor, belonging to a thing that doesn’t hurt. I let myself see it for exactly three seconds before I put it away, because a vision that lovely is the mostlethal weapon anyone has ever pointed at me, and he’s holding it like he doesn’t even know it’s loaded.

It’s a clever trap, whether he built it on purpose or stumbled into it.

The other men in my past leashed me with cruelty—you learn fast how to slip a cruelty, how to outwait it, how to set it on fire. No one ever thought to leash me with a future I might actually want. There’s no manual for that. No exit drilled into me for the cage that looks like a harbor at golden hour.

And the strategist in the back of the house, the one who has never lost a fight she chose, sits up and notes, with real unease, that for the first time in years she isn’t certain she’d want to escape even if she could find the door.

“Will all sides of me remain yours?” I ask.

It’s the realest question I own, the one no man has ever been offered, because no man has ever known there were sides to claim. They’ve had Vex and thought they had all of me. They’ve never even glimpsed the rest of the house.

“Every side,” he says.

And I let myself do the thing I never do. I tip my head back against his shoulder and look up at him, and he looks down to meet me, and I search that hard scarred face for the tell—the flicker, the calculation, the small dishonest thing that lives in the eyes of every person who has ever made me a promise.

It isn’t there.

There is no deceit in him at all, none, just those pale grey eyes steady and certain and fixed on mine, and I realize with a small private vertigo that this is the first time in my entire life a man has looked at me and not lied.

The rarity of it makes my heart do something undignified and skip.

“Would you die for me, Puddin?” I whisper.

The name leaves me before I can stop it, and it means more than he can possibly know—because Puddin was the one soft warm thing I ever loved without condition, a small heartbeat in a cage that asked nothing of me and never once let me down, and I buried it and built a shrine to it and swore I’d never hand that name to a living soul.

I just handed it to him.

The deepest part of me, the part that does the burying, gave him the name it keeps for the only love that never betrayed it.

“If that’s what you wish, Pretty Darling,” he says, with an utter, unflinching conviction that does not waver by a hair.

And it makes me smile.

A real one—not the bright cracked grin I wear like teeth bared, not Vex’s glittering threat, but something soft and unguarded that I haven’t felt on my own face in so long I’d forgotten the shape of it.

The walls come down.