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“Can… can I have one more kiss, Doc?”

The shyness undoes me more than any bold thing she’s ever said, because it’s so plainly a first—this woman who has never once asked permission for anything, who takes what she wants and burns what she doesn’t, suddenly small and uncertain over a request as simple as a kiss.

And I understand why.

I know who is asking.

It isn’t Vex, who would have simply seized my collar; it isn’t Violet, who would have made it a dare. It’s the rawest, most carefully buried of her, the one who learned that wanting things out loud is how you get them taken away, reaching out anyway, testing whether this once it might be safe.

So I make certain the answer is yes.

I take the step that closes the distance between us, lift one hand to cradle the line of her jaw, tip her face up to mine—and I kiss her.

Properly this time.

Not the brief punctuation of a forehead, not a clinical thing held at arm’s length, but a solid, unhurried, deliberate press of my mouth to hers, slow enough that she can feel every ounce of intention behind it.

Her sugar-and-cake scent rises warm between us, strawberries and dark chocolate threaded with that bright metallic note that is so entirely her, and I let myself sink into it for the length of the kiss, let my control loosen its grip by the precise degree required to make sure she feels wanted rather than merely managed.

That is what this is.

Not heat, though the heat is there, banked and patient.

Not strategy, though I have never in my life done a single thing without it.

This is a vow conducted in the only dialect I have ever spoken with any fluency at all—a press of reassurance to the root of this Omega.

Who’s been hurt and forced to build a fortress around her beautiful heart.

CHAPTER 21

~Vex~

Ileave the diner with my hand in Doc’s and two grease-spotted to-go bags swinging from the other, because apparently we don’t abandon our maniacs to fend for themselves at mealtimes—a sentence I never imagined applying to my life and find, alarmingly, that I enjoy.

“Silas has been hunting fabric all morning,” Doc says as we step into the bright cobbled lane, answering a question I hadn’t asked but had clearly telegraphed by glancing at the boutique he’d vanished into. “Bolts of it. Notions. Whatever caught his eye.”

“Why would a mortician need fabric?” I muse, and Doc gives me a sidelong look that suggests I’m about to learn something.

“He designs,” Doc says simply. “Clothing. He makes nearly everything he wears—every one of those impeccable antique coats, the waistcoats, all of it cut and sewn by his own hands. The dress he gave you this morning was the first thing he’s made for anyone but himself in years.”

I stop walking for half a step, recalibrating.

A man who arranges the dead with the same hands he uses to draft a bodice; who studies the drape of grave-flowers andthe fall of a hemline with equal devotion. It shouldn’t fit, and yet it fits him perfectly, the morbid and the beautiful threaded through the same needle.

I file the detail away in the growing dossier I keep on each of them, the one labeled things they didn’t mean to let me learn, and feel a small private thrill at how thick it’s gotten.

“Huh,” I say, which is the most articulate response I can manage to the discovery that the man planning my funeral has also, somewhere in there, been quietly making me beautiful. “And Riot? Where does Doc keep his convict when he wanders off?”

“There’s exactly one place he’ll be,” Doc says, with the weary certainty of a man who has located this particular needle in this particular haystack many times. “Come on.”

We walk, and I let myself notice how strange it is to simply walk.

No restraints. No orderly trailing three steps back. No camera tracking the precise geometry of my movements through a reinforced corridor.

Just cobblestones warm through the soles of borrowed shoes, and a hand in mine, and a town that smells of bread and woodsmoke and somebody’s late roses, going about the unbothered business of an ordinary morning.

I keep waiting for the wrongness of it to announce itself, for the trapdoor I know is somewhere underfoot. It doesn’t.