All of them, all at once, the whole fortified architecture of selves simply lowering its drawbridge, and for one suspended moment I look at this dangerous, devoted, impossible man the way I might have looked, in some other life, at the one good man I always wished the world had bothered to send me.
His eyebrow arches.
Something shifts in his gaze as he reads the change in mine, and when he speaks, it’s careful, like a man naming a wild thing that might bolt at the wrong syllable.
“Not Violet,” he says.
I shake my head, slow.
“Nor Vex.”
Another shake.
“Genevieve,” he whispers.
And I give him the deepest, truest nod I have ever given anyone—because he found her.
The one underneath all the others, the girl whose name they printed on the file before the world taught her to wear sharper ones, the self I keep so far down that I half believed she’d drowned years ago.
He reached past Vex and past Violet and pulled the realest of me up into the light, and named her correctly on the first try, and didn’t flinch at what he found.
And then I blink.
The light in the far room flicks. The drawbridge hauls back up. And I surface into the cooling water with a jolt of disorientation, my mouth already moving on instinct while the rest of me scrambles to catch up to a conversation I have apparently not been present for.
“Vex,” Riot announces, with the fond exasperation of a man greeting a returning houseguest.
I pout, because that’s the first thing that arrives, and stare at the lukewarm bath and his arms around my middle and try to reconstruct the missing minutes from nothing.
There’s a warmth in my chest I can’t account for. A wetness at the corner of my eye I refuse to investigate.
“Um,” I manage, and let it fall, and pout harder. “I need a catchup.”
“Violet was here,” he reports, clearly enjoying himself. “And then, I think—Genevieve?” He says the last name like he’s still a little stunned to have met her.
I whistle, low and impressed, despite the strange ache the name leaves behind.
“Wow. You’re like the chosen messiah of insanity. Three for three and the morning’s barely started.”
He laughs, the sound rumbling warm against my back.
“So all your sides of crazy enjoy me,” he says, insufferably smug. “I’m clearly blessed and favored.”
“Don’t get cocky, criminal.” I smirk, settling back into him with a comfort that should alarm me far more than it does, and reach for safer ground. “Where are your partners in crime, anyway?”
“Doc’s somewhere in the house. Probably loitering outside a polite distance, waiting for our little sex frenzy to wind down before he shows his face.”
“Courteous of him,” I say. “He could have joined. Rude not to extend the invitation.”
“He’s a perfectionist.” Riot snorts. “He’d want to make it romantic. Candles. A whole production. He’d have notes.”
“How sweet,” I coo, and mean it more than I’d admit. “And Crowe?”
“Probably out on a spree. For flowers.”
“Fun.” I tip my head back to grin at the ceiling. “Still planning my funeral, then. How absolutely divine of him. I do hope he’s landed on a color scheme.”
“We’ll work on slowing that down,” Riot mutters, more to himself than to me, with the grim resolve of a man adding an item to a list, and the sheer domestic absurdity of it—a convict quietly vowing to dissuade a mortician from prepping my burial—sets me giggling into the water like a woman half my age and none of my crimes.
