Page 77

It strikes me, somewhere underneath the giggling, how strange a household I’ve fallen into.

A planner who builds candlelit perfection and watches everything through hidden glass.

A killer who runs my bath and guards my sleep and asks before he takes.

A mortician who courts me with the same blooms he lays on the dead.

Three obsessions, three flavors of devotion sharp enough to cut, and somehow not one of them aimed at the part of me theycould profit from—all of them, impossibly, aimed at the part of me nobody was ever supposed to find. I have spent my whole life being wanted by men who wanted what I could do for them.

These three frighten me precisely because they seem to want the doing of nothing at all.

They just want me here.

Breathing.

Theirs.

“So,” I say, when the giggling subsides into something soft and drowsy, “can I nap a bit more before we get on with planning world domination?”

“Yes,” he assures me, and his arms gather me closer, his chin coming to rest atop my damp hair like he was built to hold exactly this. “Sleep some more. You’re not used to comfort, huh?”

I consider lying. It’s reflexive, the lie, the way breathing is reflexive. But the water is warm and his heart is steady and somewhere in the house a perfectionist is waiting and somewhere in the valley a madman is gathering blooms, and the truth slips out before Vex can stop it.

“Not really,” I admit. “No.”

“Then embrace it, Darling.” His voice is low, certain, a vow disguised as a lullaby. “We’ll handle everything else.”

The odd thing about it, the truly impossible thing, is that I actually believe him.

CHAPTER 17

~Vex~

“So. Before I was whisked away to this—oasis,” I say, gesturing at the absurd, sun-drenched cabin around us, “another body turned up at Blackthorn?”

“Three,” Doc says.

I arch an eyebrow, and I let it stay arched, because I am, honestly, impressed.

Three more in the time it took my poisoned body to crawl back from the edge. Whoever is doing this works fast and works clean, and a small professional corner of me admires the productivity even as the rest of me files the implications.

“Let me guess,” I muse. “The working theory is that I sleepwalked out of a guarded medical bay, murdered three people in three separate wings, and tucked myself back into a coma before anyone noticed. The criminal mastermind strikes again, comatose.”

None of them deny it.

I cross my arms and sink deeper into the enormous floor cushion that has apparently become my throne—a ridiculous, cloudlike thing the size of a small car, swallowing me to the ribs in buttery softness.

I have no idea whether it came with the cabin’s deliberate, cozy, woodsmoke-and-cedar charm or whether one of my three keepers acquired it specifically because they suspected I’d like it.

I suspect the latter.

I have, irritatingly, no complaints.

The whole place is like this—warm wood and soft light and the faint resinous perfume of a hearth that’s always just been used—and so far, against every instinct I own, I like it here.

They’ve given me the essentials, if not the tour.

Arch Hollow is a small town tucked into the throat of the valley, wrapped in its own private grid—a closed, surveilled, cleverly engineered system that not even our collected intellects have managed to find the seams of.