I want the whole feast.
As the sun begins to sink, painting the sky in long ribbons of amber and rose, Riot pulls off at a lookout perched high over miles of untouched wilderness, and we dismount, and I walk to the very edge.
I stand at the lip of the cliff and stare at the horizon, and the scale of it nearly undoes me—forest rolling unbroken to the foot of those blue mountains, a whole world going on and on past the limit of my sight, ancient and indifferent and breathtaking.
And I am overwhelmed, suddenly, achingly, by how much of it I have never seen.
How much of everything was stolen from me while I was busy surviving. An entire planet of wonders, and I spent my best years in a box, and the want of it rises in me sharp and enormous.
Riot comes to stand beside me at the edge, close enough that his warmth bleeds into my side, his woodsmoke scent steady against the cooling air, and he doesn’t say anything for a while.
He just looks out at the same impossible distance with me, two monsters at the rim of a world that spent its whole effort trying to make us small, and lets the silence hold the weight of it.Understands without being told. He always has, in his blunt feral way—the cage, the hunger for the horizon, the particular grief of a creature built for open spaces and kept in a concrete room. Of all of them, Riot knows best what it is to be wild and confined.
It’s why the road was his gift to give.
He didn’t bring me sightseeing.
He brought me proof that the walls aren’t the world.
“If we ever get out,” I say quietly, not looking at him, my eyes fixed on the dying light over the mountains. “Of this. The tamed little cycle they’ve got us running. If we actually get free…” I have to breathe before I can finish, because saying a wish out loud has always felt like handing the universe a target. “I want somewhere warm. Somewhere the sun doesn’t apologize for itself. I want us to be able to go anywhere—the whole world, all of it—under names that can’t be traced and faces no one’s hunting, free to just… live. The lives we actually deserve. Not the ones the world handed us for our crimes and our cracks and our imperfections. The ones we’d have built if anyone had ever let us.”
It’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever said aloud, more dangerous than any threat, because it’s a hope, and hope is the one thing I’ve never been able to afford.
Every other future I ever let myself want was taken from me—the empire, the marriage, the freedom Dorian promised—torn out by the root the moment I dared to plant it. I learned to stop wanting things that could be stolen, which is to say I learned to stop wanting anything at all.
Here I am at the edge of a cliff describing a life so vivid I can almost smell the salt of it, the warm sea, the unhunted mornings, the four of us somewhere no file can follow—and the wanting doesn’t feel like grief pre-loading this time. It feels like a map.
Like something we could actually walk toward, if we survive the man circling our borders.
A thing worth living through the danger to reach.
Riot is quiet for a moment, his knife-grey eyes on the same horizon, and when he speaks his voice is rough in that way it gets when he means something all the way down.
“Guess we gotta make it a promise, then.”
And he holds out his pinky.
His pinky.
This enormous tattooed convict, this feral creature carved out of violence and scar tissue, this man who has ended lives with the same hands he’s offering me now, is holding out one crooked little finger like a schoolchild on a playground, utterly serious, and the sheer absurdity of it cracks me wide open.
I burst out laughing.
“A pinky promise. You’re sealing the great escape of the Holy Trinity and their psychotic queen—with a pinky promise.”
“Most legally binding contract there is,” he says solemnly. “Ironclad. Recognized in every court that matters.”
“Name one court that matters.”
“The playground, Pretty. Highest authority in the land. Don’t you know anything?” He waggles the finger at me, unimpressed by my mockery. “You gonna leave me hanging? Real cold, breaking a man’s heart at a scenic overlook. Very on-brand for you, but cold.”
“You’re an idiot,” I tell him, still laughing, my chest aching with something that is the exact opposite of grief.
“Your idiot,” he corrects, and waggles the pinky again. “C’mon. Hook it.”
So I do. I reach out and I curl my little finger around his, this ridiculous, sacred, childish vow between two creatures the world wrote off as monsters, and the warmth of it settles somewhere deep and permanent in my chest.
And I know—the way I know everything, in the cold sure place beneath all the laughter—that Riot does not break his word.
