Page 81

And I—well.

I have spent a decade making inconvenient deaths look like accidents and inconvenient men disappear into beautiful arrangements, and I am very good at it, and I do not say that lightly. The three of us together have never met the problem we couldn’t dismantle.

This woman walked into a maximum-security asylum on purpose, wore the mask of a drugged lunatic for years without a single crack, let every investigator in the country build the wrong file on her—and she did it all while running a game so long and so patient that even now, holding most of the pieces, I cannot yet see its final shape.

That is not cleverness.

Cleverness is common.

That is artistry, and I have spent my whole life starving for artistry of this caliber.

“Now say that one more time,” I tell her, leaning in, “so I can savor it properly and give some real thought to how I intend to reward you for being such a clever, psychotic peony.”

She laughs, bright and unhinged and pleased, and lifts one finger in correction.

“You forgot to add sweet to the equation.”

“An unforgivable oversight,” I agree, “and frankly an understatement—because you’ve just implied you have more than one ex, which means that sweet nectar of yours must be some addictive serum, a delicious slow poison that ruins every soul lucky enough to taste it.” I cut my gaze to Riot, lounging and smug. “Which means you, brother, are most likely next.”

Riot shrugs, supremely untroubled. “Unlike the previous applicants, I’ve no intention of graduating to ex.” He laces his scarred hands behind his head. “We can be the new Harley and Joker, if she likes. Though at this rate I’ll have to be the submissive one, on account of not being half as cunning as our Pretty Darling.”

“That,” Doc says, finally surfacing from his nose-pinch, “is the single most self-aware thing you’ve said since I met you.”

“I contain multitudes, Doc.” Riot doesn’t even open his eyes. “Mostly violence. But multitudes.”

“And if we’re assigning roles,” I offer, because I can never resist a casting call, “I’d like it formally noted that I’m the one who handles the bodies, the flowers, and the eulogies, which makes me indispensable in a way the rest of you simply aren’t. You can’t have a tragic love story without someone to arrange the funerals.”

“No one is having a funeral,” Doc says, with the air of a man who has said it before and expects to say it again.

“Not with that attitude,” I murmur, and Vex laughs so brightly it nearly knocks me off my chair.

She beams.

Openly, at the praise—and I file the detail away with the quiet thrill of a collector spotting a tell no one else has clocked. Our girl enjoys being worshiped.

Not the empty flattery the world throws at a pretty face; the real thing, the recognition of her brilliance spoken aloud by people clever enough to mean it. She drinks it like nectar herself.

I find, oddly, that I adore knowing it, because worship is the one offering I have an infinite supply of. I have spent my life adoring things that couldn’t adore me back.

Here, at last, is something that can—and does—and wants to.

She shrugs, and repeats it, that gorgeous detonation of a sentence, soft as a blade sliding home.

“Which ex are we referring to?”

Doc uncrosses his leg and leans forward over the low table, drawing a folder from the stack he’s assembled there—because naturally there’s a stack, the man builds a case file the way Riot builds a body count, compulsively and well. He flips it open, and there it is, spread between us in glossy clinical horror:her own case.

The scorched penthouse.

The black ruin of a room, the heat-warped furniture, the photographed remnants of the body they managed to recover from the ash.

“So you’re telling me,” Doc says slowly, tapping the photograph, “that this—the man you were criminally charged with murdering—is a different ex than the one we ought to be worried about.”

It isn’t quite a question.

It’s a man laying his recalculation on the table to be confirmed, and I glance at him and see he’s gone fully serious, the dry amusement burned off, every gear in that formidable head turning at once—and, alarmingly for him, the pieces are sliding into place and they fit.

“Yup.” She nods, once, crisp. “The one I cooked was the ex I dated after I left my husband.”