The shame of it only makes the threatened tears worse.
The teasing dies the instant the wet sheen hits my eyes.
They are monsters, but they are my monsters, and not one of them can bear it.
Doc moves first. He crosses the flour-strewn kitchen in three unhurried strides and folds himself around me from behind, his arms wrapping over mine, his chest a solid wall against my back, and the sheer steady mass of him is its own sedative.
“Breathe,” he murmurs against my temple, that even unflappable voice doing what it always does to my fractured wiring—dropping the noise, slowing the spiral. “Calm down. It’s flour and bananas, Vex. We can fix this.”
It should infuriate me, how easily he does it.
One pair of arms, one low even voice, and the screaming static in my head drops by half. I have spent my whole life as the most dangerous mind in every room, vigilant to the point of exhaustion, never once able to fully power down—and this man has learned the exact frequency that quiets me, and deploys it without effort, as though soothing a feral creature mid-panic is simply a thing he was built to do.
The mastermind notes, even now, that this is a vulnerability.
That a man who can calm me this completely could, in theory, control me. But I have stopped flinching from the thought, because I have watched Lucien Graves use his every power in only one direction: toward keeping me whole.
He doesn’t calm me to manage me.
He calms me because he cannot stand to watch me suffer, and there is a universe of difference between the two, and I have finally learned to feel it.
“It can’t be fixed,” I whine, and then the dam breaks and it all comes pouring out—the whole catalogue of my failure, delivered at a manic clip. “I added the wet to the dry instead of the dry to the wet, which overdevelops the gluten, so even if I salvage it the texture’s ruined. The butter was too cold so it didn’t cream properly. I think I doubled the baking soda. And the recipe says cream the sugar first, then the egg, then the banana, then alternate the flour and the milk in three additions, and if it’s not done in that exact order the whole chemistry collapses…it has to be that order, it has to be precise, and I broke the sequence in four different places and now the entire concoction is?—”
“It isn’t,” Doc says, gently, into the side of my neck.
And then he presses a kiss there, slow, warm, deliberate, right at the place where my pulse hammers, and the spiraling litany simply stops, hijacked by the heat that blooms down my spine.
His scent wraps around me, blood orange and old books and amber, threading calm directly into my overloaded nervous system the way only he can.
“Baking is more forgiving than you think,” he says against my skin. “It isn’t a bomb that detonates if the wires go in wrong. It’s a process. And here is what I propose.”
He turns me gently in his arms until I have no choice but to look at him, steel-blue and certain.
“We scrap this batch. We start from scratch, all four of us, together. And if it ever feels like too much…too loud, too fast, too many variables at once, we slow down. We go at whatever pace lets you actually see how each step is done. No spiral. No solo. Yes?”
I pull in one steady breath.
Then another.
And I nod.
So we begin again, the four of us, in a kitchen that looks like a snowstorm had a tantrum in it—and the first order of business, naturally, is cleaning up my disaster, which the three of them undertake with a running commentary so vicious and affectionate I forget to stay anxious.
“Riot, you’re smearing it, not wiping it,” Silas sniffs, gliding past with a damp cloth held like a scalpel. “Have you never cleaned a surface in your life?”
“I clean blood off concrete, Mary Poppins, not flour off marble. Different skill set.”
“It is genuinely the same motion.”
“Doc,” Riot calls, ignoring him, “why does the undertaker know how to wipe a counter better than both of us combined?”
“Because Silas has spent his life making messes presentable,” Doc says, measuring flour with surgical precision into a clean bowl. “It’s practically his vocation. Stop bickering and preheat the oven. Three hundred fifty.”
“He insulted me and you’re scolding me?”
“I’m scolding both of you. I contain enough disappointment for the entire household.”
I watch all of it from my perch on the counter, a fresh banana in hand, and something in my chest unknots one careful loop at a time.
