“And you, sweetheart—take some self-defense classes while you’re here. Never hurts.”
I smile back, slow, and let it widen until my teeth show.
“Daggers,” I tell him sweetly, “are my weapon of choice.”
It isn’t a boast. It’s a résumé.
I learned blades the way I learned the pole and the barre—with my whole body, obsessively, in the years when the only thing standing between me and the men who thought they owned me was how fast my hands could move.
A dagger suits me the way a scalpel suits Silas and a plan suits Doc: it’s intimate, it’s precise, it requires you to be close enough to smell your problem’s fear before you solve it. Guns are for people who want distance from their consequences.
I have never once wanted distance from mine. I want to watch them understand.
He arches a bushy eyebrow, holds my gaze for a beat—and then barks out a delighted laugh, nodding his approval like I’ve passed some test I didn’t know I was taking.
“Course they are. Then you go see the blacksmith—right beside the artistic institute, you can’t miss it. That’s where they run all the dance classes of an evening, the pole and the heels and whatnot, weeknights after dark. Fella named Barney keepsa forge there. Loves nothing more than teaching Omegas the proper handling of a blade.” He winks. “Just bring one of your men with you. House rules.”
“Silas will go with you,” Doc says at once, settling it before I can, and I find I don’t mind the deciding—there’s a poetry to it, the undertaker escorting me to learn the blade.
And something in me sharpens pleasantly at the prospect.
A forge. A blacksmith named Barney who arms Omegas after dark. A standing reason to keep a length of honed steel close to my body in a town where my husband’s shadow is already learning the streets.
The trinity has wrapped me in collars and accounts and bodyguards, and I love them the more for it—but a woman who has survived as many men as I have does not feel truly safe until the safety is sitting in her own hand, weighing right, sharp enough to settle an argument permanently.
Let them guard me.
I intend to be the last and worst surprise anyone hunting me ever finds.
“Thanks,” I tell the owner, and mean it. “Our new friend.”
“Anytime.” He gives a hearty, rolling laugh that fills the whole oil-scented bay. “Just don’t go forgetting about me when you lot move on to wherever you’re really headed.” He winks again, and there’s a knowing in it that confirms he understands far more than he’s said. Doc inclines his head. Riot claps the man’s shoulder in thanks, and we step back out into the sun.
“You’re leaving the bike?” I ask, because Riot has already materialized at my free side, sliding his hand into the one not occupied by Doc and pressing a warm kiss to my temple as we walk.
“For now.” His thumb strokes the back of my hand. “I’ll come back and test her out properly. I’m not putting you anywhere near that machine until I know she’s a hundred percent safeto ride with you on the back, Pretty. Not taking that chance tonight.”
And there it is again—the casual, total protectiveness, the way every single one of his calculations now routes through my safety like water finding the sea.
I should find it suffocating. The old me, the one who burned her way free of exactly this kind of attention, would have.
Instead I lean a fraction into the kiss and let myself be held between the two of them, flanked by a doctor’s calm and a killer’s warmth, and I scan the lane for the third point of our strange compass.
“Where’s our Crowe?”
“Hereeee,” comes the sing-song reply, and Silas rounds the corner practically gift-wrapped in his own purchases—juggling an absurd architecture of bags and bolts and paper-wrapped parcels, somehow graceful even buried under all of it, a smear of joy where a man should be.
Doc sighs through his nose.
“You know they would have delivered all of that. I watched you decline the delivery.”
“They fold wrong,” Silas whines, genuinely aggrieved, hugging his haul closer. “They crease the fabric along the grain and ruin the drape and they have no idea, none, what they’re handling. Some things a man simply has to carry himself.”
“Perfectionist,” Riot says, flat and fond, the single word a whole diagnosis.
“The word you’re reaching for is artist,” Silas sniffs, redistributing his teetering tower of parcels with the wounded dignity of a man defending his life’s work. “And one day, when our Darling is wearing something I’ve made that stops an entire street, you’ll all eat those words with a very small, very ironic fork.”
He shoots me a conspiratorial look over the bolts.
