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She beams at that, the pout vanishing like it was never there, instantly and wholly placated by the promise of dessert—this brilliant, lethal, husband-burning mastermind, lit up like a child over a milkshake—and the contradiction of her is so perfect, so impossibly delicious, that I have to press my lips together to keep from applauding all over again.

Strawberry, I’d wager, to match the sugar she already smells of. I make a note to learn her favorite by nightfall. A man should know these things about the people he intends to keep forever.

I let my gaze drift over the three of them—the planner already plotting, the killer already restless, the queen already glowing over a treat she hasn’t earned yet and absolutely will—and I feel something in my chest settle that has not been settled in a very long time.

The hunt is coming.

The husband is out there in the dark, jealous and patient and writing his pretty little threats, certain he holds the winning hand. He does not know what waits for him in this cabin.

He does not know he is the prey.

So I lean back, fold my pale hands, and let the smile spread slow across my face.

I guess we’re playing house until the stalking husband is jealous enough to come himself.

CHAPTER 19

~Vex~

“Fucking all day is not a valid way to spend the day,” I declare between kisses, which would land with considerably more authority if I weren’t saying it with my mouth still chasing his.

Riot chuckles against my lips, breaks the kiss, and delivers a sharp, proprietary slap to my bare backside that makes me yelp.

“Then change,” he says, “so we can go out.”

I huff and step back and cross my arms over my chest, standing in the middle of the sun-warmed room in nothing but the velvet ribbon at my throat and the marks he’s left scattered down my body like a map of the morning.

I gesture, with great wounded dignity, at the closet.

The very, very empty closet.

“With what?!” I demand. “I don’t even have a jumpsuit! You’ve relocated me to paradise and forgotten the small matter of dressing the prisoner.”

Riot, the absolute menace, does not appear remotely troubled by this logistical crisis. He saunters to the side chair and drops into it, all loose-limbed satisfaction, beer in one scarred hand and the other settling lazily around himself withno shame whatsoever, openly admiring the view I’m presenting like a man at a private gallery he owns. His scent fills the room—woodsmoke and warm iron gone thick and content—and the heat of his stare alone is enough to reawaken interest I genuinely do not have time for.

“I didn’t think that far,” he admits, taking a slow pull of his beer.

I laugh, sharp and helpless, and shake my head at the ceiling.

“No shit, Sherlock.” I plant my hands on my hips. “Where’s Doc? He’d be the solution to this problem. The man probably color-codes his contingency plans.”

It should alarm me, how easy this is.

The banter, the bareness, the sunlight pooling on a floor I woke up unafraid on for the second morning running. I have spent my entire adult life treating ease as the most dangerous weather a room can produce, the lull before the hand closes, and here I am bickering naked with a convict about my lack of a wardrobe as though the world isn’t hunting me, as though ten days ago I wasn’t seizing on a cafeteria floor with poison in my blood.

The spiral keeps not coming. That’s the part my mastermind can’t reconcile and my body refuses to question.

I have simply, somehow, stopped bracing for the blow.

The door opens on cue, as though summoned, and there’s the man himself—Doc, immaculate and unhurried, taking in the scene with the faint arch of a single brow. Two naked patients, one sprawled and smug with a beer, the other standing exasperated in nothing but a ribbon.

His gaze sweeps the wreckage of the morning, declines to comment on it, and settles on me, because he plainly sees no value in directing a question at Riot in his current state.

“And I’m to assume,” he says dryly, “you need me for something outside of the fuckery.”

I smirk, because I can never resist.

“You know, you could always join. Or is Doc shy?”