Which means I’m awake in the arms of a man I know almost nothing about—some beautiful, murderous convict from the same mental prison I’ve volunteered to rot in for three years and change—and that, the sober part of me notes through the warm fog, is an opportunity. The true test. The clean, quiet, undefended moment in which I find out whether my plan survives contact with him, or whether I’ve gone and done the one thing I swore I never would, and let a man become a variable I can’t solve for.
So I don’t speak…at least not yet.
I notice things instead, because noticing is the one habit that survives every switch, the through-line that stitches all my selves into a single dangerous garment.
The water has gone from hot to lukewarm, which tells me we’ve been folded into this tub far longer than I have any memory of. The herbal salts have softened to a ghost of themselves under the burnt-sugar of my own scent and the woodsmoke-and-iron of his.
And my body—this is the detail that genuinely unnerves me—my body is completely, bonelessly relaxed. Not performing relaxation. Not faking the ease of a creature lulling a predator. Relaxed.
For the first time in more years than I care to count, every muscle I own has simply… let go.
I could flick the switch back.
Reach for the part of me that files everyone under threat and wears Vex like armor, and let her take the room. But she’s still asleep down there, curled and quiet, and for once I find I don’t want to wake her. The mastermind can keep her watch from the back of the house. I’ll do the talking.
“Vex.”
He says it gently, my false name, the syllable softened to something almost reverent in the mouth of a man who has ended lives.
When I don’t answer, a thread of humor warms his voice, and he tries again, lower, like a man testing a lock he already suspects he holds the key to.
“Violet.”
“You’re a nuisance,” I tell the bathwater.
It’s a deflection and we both know it; insulting a man is simply the prettiest way I have of declining to admit he’s reached something true. I have no intention of acknowledging that, soI let the accusation hang and feel my own face heat when his chuckle rolls up through his chest and into my back, vibrating along my spine like a struck chord. His arms tighten around my waist—not restraint, exactly, more a quiet instruction not to scurry off, which is precisely what some skittish part of me wants to do, switch flicked, walls up, gone before he can see whatever it is I’m letting him see.
“I’m not teasing you,” he murmurs against the wet crown of my head. “I just enjoy your improved appearances.”
“Hmph.” I pout at the far tiles, supremely articulate, and let myself sink back into him anyway. The contradiction of it doesn’t escape me. Nothing escapes me; it’s simply that some things, today, I’m choosing to let win.
“What’s your motive,” I say.
I go straight for it, no garnish, because I don’t have the luxury of time. A mind like mine isn’t a fixed estate I get to wander at leisure; the switch can come for me at any moment, drag whichever self is fronting back under and surface another with no memory of what was learned. There is only so much sovereignty any one of me holds over the whole. So when a door opens, I walk through it fast, before the house rearranges its rooms.
He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. That, more than anything, is what makes me listen.
“Someone hired me,” he says, plainly, his thumb tracing an idle line along my hip beneath the water, “to come to Blackthorn and kill the woman who burned her ex-Alpha to ash.”
The water laps at my collarbones. Outside the window, a bird I can’t name sings something obscenely cheerful into the valley.
I say nothing for a long moment. Then I huff out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “Figures.”
I mean it—I’m not surprised, not even slightly.
The part of me always running the numbers had already filed a contract on my life as the likeliest explanation for half of what’s happened; a hand reaching into the most secure asylum in the country to plant a killer beside me is exactly the shape of the threat I’ve felt breathing down my neck since the bodies started.
What I didn’t have was confirmation. Now I do.
Someone paid for my death. A being with the reach to buy a convict and aim him. The case file in the back of my skull turns a fresh page and begins, very calmly, to take notes. Who? Who has the money, the access, the grudge. Who wanted the woman who burns her owners gone badly enough to commission it. The list is short, and one name on it is supposed to be dead.
That’s the splinter I can’t leave alone, even now, even melted into the arms of the very weapon that was aimed at me.
A dead man can’t sign a contract. Can’t wear a guard’s uniform and watch me seize on a cafeteria floor with eyes I once watched fill with fire.
And yet the math keeps arriving at the same impossible sum, the one I refuse to say out loud because saying it makes it real:that the freedom I bought with a single struck match may have been an illusion, that the body I never stayed to confirm may have gotten up and dusted itself off and started, patiently, to collect.
I file it. I don’t solve it.
