Page 82

“Husband?”

All three of us say it at the same time, in three different registers of disbelief, and she snickers at the chorus like we’ve performed it for her amusement.

“You think a woman of my caliber couldn’t get wifed up early?”

And—point taken, frankly.

A genuinely excellent point. We were introduced to her in a place of regulation jumpsuits and chemical fog, filed under dangerous and forgotten, but that is the packaging, not the contents.

The contents are a multitalented marvel who could walk into any room on the planet and walk out owning the richest man in it.

A millionaire. A billionaire, if she were so inclined.

Though the curious thing—the thing I keep turning over—is that she doesn’t seem inclined toward money at all. Doesn’t seem to need it, or want it, which is its own kind of power, the kind that can’t be bought because it isn’t for sale.

Then again, how would I know? I’ve only ever watched her in cages.

I’ve never once seen her move through the world as a free creature.

It reframes the whole architecture of her, this revelation.

A husband, young. A bad marriage that broke something in a girl who was already a prodigy at surviving. I think of the feveredthings she said in her overdose, the fragments the orderlies logged and dismissed as delusion—a stage, a pole, a man with a deed to her body—and I begin, with the cold pleasure of a puzzle solving itself, to assemble the real chronology.

The ballet first, surely, all that discipline and grace.

Then the fall into rooms that paid for the grace and took the dignity. Then a husband who must have looked, for a moment, like rescue, and turned out to be the most expensive cage of all. And then the boyfriend who burned.

She has been someone’s property more times than any of us have been free, and she has carved her way out of every single ownership with her teeth, and called the carving madness so the world would stop watching her sharpen the knife.

I could weep.

Instead, I simply adore her, which is the response that comes more naturally to me.

Which is a deprivation I intend to remedy. The thought arrives fully formed and entirely delicious:taking our Pretty Peony into the town.

A proper outing.

Watching her pick over a market stall, choosing her something extravagant she’d never choose for herself, spoiling the psychotic darling the way she has plainly never once been spoiled by anyone whose spoiling didn’t come with a leash attached. The giddiness of it nearly undoes my composure.

She’s ours.

We get to keep her.

We get to keep, learn, and watch her bloom out of the dark we found her in.

I have no real notion what Doc or Riot are thinking, but Riot is the easier read.

The man is reclined and loose and radiating a contentment that says, plainly, that this woman could confess to slaughteringhis entire bloodline and he would simply ask her how she’d like the bodies arranged.

He is not letting go.

That ship has not only sailed, it has burned to the waterline in a penthouse fire. Doc, on the other hand—Doc is quietly losing his mind. And here is the delicious part: it has nothing to do with what she’s done.

The murders don’t trouble him in the slightest. What’s eating the man alive is the dawning, intolerable certainty that she is smarter than he is, and there is no creature on earth Lucien Graves resents like the one who out-thinks him.

“So,” Doc says slowly, leaning back, settling his glasses with two fingers as he fixes that steel-blue stare directly on her. “This husband.”

“Is alive and well,” she finishes for him, sweet as arsenic.