Three identical looks of delighted challenge swing toward me.
“Oh,” Lucien murmurs, eyes glinting behind his glasses, “big words, little Omega. Place your bets, gentlemen.”
It strikes me, watching the three of them shake on the terms with the gravity of men brokering an arms deal, that this is its own kind of courtship—the group version, the one they’ve apparently decided I’m owed.
They have spent weeks taking me apart gently, one at a time, learning the private architecture of me in studios and greenhouses and on open roads.
Now they want to show me the other thing:who they are together.
The pack as a unit, a chaotic four-headed creature that bickers and schemes and competes over carnival prizes like the fate of nations hangs on a ring toss. It is, I realize, an invitation. Not to be courted by three men.
To be one of four.
The strategist who spent her whole life building cages of other people’s wreckage has no defense whatsoever against being, simply, included.
The day spirals into magnificent, total madness within the hour.
I, it turns out, was built for carnival games, and for cheating at them, which I do shamelessly and constantly, because winning honestly is for people without my gifts.
I palm extra rings.
I distract the booth operators with a calculated flutter of my lashes. I memorize the weighted lean of the milk-bottle stack and exploit it ruthlessly.
Riot,my beautiful accomplice, assists my every transgression while loudly performing innocence—blocking sightlines with his enormous frame, ‘accidentally’ jostling rival players, slipping me a second dart with the sleight of a man who has palmed worse things than darts.
“That’s cheating,” a booth attendant accuses, watching me sink an impossible shot.
“That’s talent,” Riot corrects, looming, and the attendant decides to find something else to do.
“You’re supposed to be competing against me,” I point out, accepting a third consecutive prize, “not running interference for my felonies.”
“Can’t win the ‘most prizes’ category if you’re disqualified for cheating, Pretty,” he says, with the airtight logic of a man who has clearly thought about this. “So really, helping you cheat is me protecting my own investment. I’m a giver.”
“You’re an accessory.”
“Your favorite accessory.” He bumps my shoulder, scenting smug and pleased, all woodsmoke and warm iron, and I have to look away before the stupid grin gives me away.
The mastermind in me notes, with mild professional alarm, that I am having an unironically wonderful time committing petty fraud at a small-town fair, and that this should not be as joyful as it is, and that I no longer care.
Lucien, the maddening creature, doesn’t cheat at all—he doesn’t need to.
He simply weaponizes probability and psychology with the cold efficiency he brings to everything, calculating the optimal angle on the ring toss, reading the tells of the strongman-hammer rigging, talking a vendor into adjusting the odds through sheer unsettling reasonableness.
He wins contests a man his size and temperament has no business winning, and accepts each prize with the faint satisfaction of a scientist whose hypothesis has been confirmed.
“You’re not even having fun,” I accuse, watching him dismantle a rigged balloon-dart game through pure applied physics. “You’re conducting an experiment.”
“Winning is fun,” he replies, popping the final balloon with surgical precision and collecting an enormous plush dragon he immediately presents to me without ceremony, as though it were a research finding. “And watching you carry seventeen stuffed animals is the most fun I’ve had since before I had a medical license. Hold the dragon, Vex.”
“I hate that I find that romantic.”
“You find everything we do romantic,” he says, infuriatingly correct, “because you have appalling taste in men and excellent taste in chaos. Now hold the dragon.”
Silas treats every single game like a piece of performance art. He doesn’t simply play; he stages. He turns a humble ring toss into a recital, narrating his own brilliance, bowing to imaginary crowds.
When we reach the axe-throwing lane—because naturally this town full of beautiful killers has an axe-throwing lane—hetransforms it into pure theater, removing his coat with funereal ceremony, addressing the wooden target like a man delivering a eulogy, and burying the blade dead center with a flourish that draws actual applause from passing strangers who have no idea they’re cheering an undertaker who throws axes the way other men breathe.
“SHOW-OFF,” I bellow across the lane.
