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“They have no vision, Sweet Peony. None. I’m building you a wardrobe that announces precisely what you are before you’ve said a word, and these philistines think it’s about keeping fabric from creasing.”

“It was about the creasing,” Doc notes.

“It was about the creasing,” Silas concedes without a flicker of shame, “and also about the vision. A man can hold two truths.”

Silas ignores him entirely and beams at me over the top of a bolt of pink-and-something fabric. “Did our Darling have fun?”

I consider the morning—the flyer, the stores, the burgers, the held hands, the quiet in my own head, the old man who saw straight through to the marrow of my situation and chose to arm me anyway. And I nod.

“It was a glimpse,” I say, and the honesty of it surprises me on the way out. “Of normalcy. What it might be like.”

“Good,” Silas declares, and there’s nothing performed in it for once, just a soft fierce gladness. “We need more of it. A great deal more. We’ll build you a proper routine—classes and breakfasts and ordinary boring beautiful days, as many as you can stand.”

I smile, and it feels different than my usual smiles—none of the teeth, none of the performance, none of the bright manic armor I bolt over my face when I need a room to underestimate me.

Just… ease.

Real and unguarded and faintly terrifying in its sincerity. And they tug me gently along between them, the three of them, toward the looping road that leads back to the temporary house we’re pretending is a home, laden with food and fabric and the promise of a blade-smith named Barney.

I am not a fool.

I know exactly what this is. I know the bubble has a countdown stitched into it, that somewhere out past the mossy arches my husband is sharpening his patience into something that will eventually come for all of us, that this golden lull is borrowed time on a clock I can hear ticking even now beneath the birdsong.

The artist’s grip is slipping. He will come. The owner is right, and I am right, and the peace will burst the way every peace I’ve ever known has burst.

But the bubble hasn’t burst yet.

For once in my splintered, hunted, exquisitely complicated life, I let myself stand inside it and simply feel the warmth—the hand in mine, the kiss still tingling at my temple, the madman singing about fabric grain, the quiet in my own head where the storm usually lives.

I realize, walking home flanked by three monsters who would raze the world before they let it touch me, is what it might actually be to belong to a pack that wants you whole.

Not a pack that wants to own you.

Not one that wants to display you, or use you, or keep you pretty and dependent and afraid. A pack that actually yearns to see you proper.

Who wants to see you win… and survive.

CHAPTER 22

~Vex~

Ican’t sleep.

I’ve been at it for hours—the tossing, the turning, the rearranging of pillows that have done nothing to deserve my hostility—until the bed itself becomes an accusation, and I finally surrender and slip out from under the silk to pad barefoot toward the stairs.

The house is dark and breathing around me, that particular hush a home takes on when the people in it are scattered to their own corners.

I don’t know where the others are.

They give me space to sleep, which is its own small marvel, considering how rarely any of them lets me out of arm’s reach by daylight—though Riot never hesitates to slip beneath the sheets and wrap himself around me when he scents the needy edge my body gets in the small hours, the heat that creeps up when an unbonded Omega’s system starts to ache.

It’s been… nice.

A word I distrust on principle and keep catching myself using anyway.

Two weeks.

We’ve been tucked into this storybook valley for two weeks now, and I genuinely cannot decide whether to feel relieved or to feel the noose. Because two weeks was the number. The experiment’s allotted span, the window the CEO granted to determine whether the bodies follow me out of Blackthorn or keep stacking inside it.