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Won’t.

He doesn’t go back on his word, ever, and he gave me his word in a bathtub with the whole of his terrible conviction, and a vow like that doesn’t come with an exception clause for the asking.

He would die for me.

He has already decided it. And there is nothing I can say that will unmake the decision, because I am the one thing on earth he has chosen to be immovable about.

A whimper escapes me.

The sob I’ve been holding behind my teeth for longer than I can measure rises up to follow it?—

And his arms are around me in a heartbeat.

He pulls me into his chest, into the woodsmoke and the warmth and the steady thunder of him, and then there are more arms—Silas’s long cool ones, Doc’s solid certain ones—folding in around the both of us until I’m enclosed entirely, held on every side, caged at last by the only kind of cage I have ever wanted: one built out of people who would burn the world before they let it have me.

And I cry.

Not the pretty, performed weeping I’ve deployed in courtrooms to soften juries, not Vex’s theatrical sniffles or Velvet’s sultry glistening.

This is ugly. This is the real thing, dredged up from a depth I keep sealed under three years of concrete and a lifetime of necessary lies—great heaving graceless sobs that shake my whole frame and ruin my breathing and leave me gasping into the warm wall of Riot’s chest. I cry for my father and his impossible faith in me.

I cry for the family I never got to mourn because I was too busy surviving the man who took them. Cry for the girl at the barre and the woman on the pole and every self I had to split into to outlast them all. Underneath the grief, threaded through every wracking breath of it, is the thing I have no defense against at all—the relief.

The terrible, dizzying relief of finally setting it down.

Of being held while I do.

Truly, helplessly, the way I have not allowed myself in years—the grief and the rage and the impossible, terrifying relief of being held by something that won’t let go, all of it breaking loose at once and soaking into the chest of a killer who chose me.

It’s the first time I’ve truly cried since my Papa’s funeral.

CHAPTER 20

~Lucien~

“THERE ARE POLE CLASSES!”

She announces it to the entire market square, to the morning, to God, with the unfiltered triumph of a woman who has just located the single most important fixture in Arch Hollow—a flyer tacked to a community board between a lost-cat notice and an advertisement for a knitting circle.

I cannot, despite a lifetime of practiced composure, stop the corner of my mouth from lifting, and her euphoria is loud enough to turn the heads of two passersby who decide, wisely, to keep walking.

Silas is in the apothecary-turned-boutique across the cobbled street, no doubt charming some attendant out of a ribbon the precise shade of a bruise.

Riot is—somewhere. The man evaporates the instant the word shopping enters a conversation, a magic trick I’ve stopped trying to explain, though I noted a mechanic’s shop at the foot of the lane on our way in, and I’d wager good money he’s currently running reverent hands over whatever rusted motorcycle the town keeps for decoration, plotting a theft he has no intention of committing yet.

Which leaves me with Vex.

Alone.

And the strange discovery of the morning is how little that unsettles me—how the prospect of an hour of her undiluted company registers not as a duty to manage but as something closer to a privilege I haven’t earned.

I am not, by any measure anyone has ever applied to me, a restful man. I do not idle well. Yet I find I can stand in a sunlit square and simply watch her exist, and feel my own perpetual machinery quiet by a degree.

She doesn’t mind my silence.

That is its own small miracle—most people fill my quiet with nervous noise, mistaking the absence of chatter for disapproval. She does the opposite. She lets it be, moving from the flyer to a barrel of early apples to a chalkboard menu, touching things, reading things, tilting her head at the ordinary furniture of a free morning as though cataloguing a foreign country.

Which, I suppose, it is. I am only now beginning to grasp how drastically the world reshaped itself while she was under—while she lived, by her own engineering, inside a routine of sanctioned chemicals and curated chaos, years of it, the world turning on without her.