His eyes descend—slow, deliberate, a clinical and entirely nonclinical sweep down the length of me that raises gooseflesh in its wake—before they climb back and lock onto mine with that fathomless steel-blue calm.
“You don’t want me to fuck you right now,” he says, mild as still water. “You like this—the sacred, silly playfulness you have with Riot—and you want to keep it sealed in its own jar, untouched by the rest of us. Not yet. Not today.”
I pout, because the bastard is right, and slide a glance at Riot, who is grinning like a man who got thoroughly laid—which, in fairness, he has, repeatedly, all morning—before I turn back to Doc with a glare.
“Your honesty infuriates me.”
“What do you need, Vex?”
“Clothes.” I sweep an arm at the gaping closet like a magician’s reveal of absolutely nothing. “You geniuses moved me into a fairytale and stocked the fridge and forgot that I might, on occasion, wish to be dressed. My jumpsuit has vanished into thin air. And while I’m perfectly happy to tour the town in my birthday suit—” I tip my head at Riot, who takes a serene swig of his beer, “—this one would slaughter anyone who caught a glimpse of my naked splendor, and that’s just unfair murder. The victims wouldn’t even know what they’d done.”
“Essentially,” Doc agrees, with the gravity of a man confirming a law of physics. “Silas should be back shortly.”
“Back from where?”
“The clothing store. He said he needed a zipper.”
“A zipper?” I repeat, and my curiosity sits up and takes notice, because Silas does nothing without a reason and most of his reasons are delicious.
“Don’t,” Doc says, reading my face with the resignation of a man who has watched me chase a mystery off a cliff before. “Whatever you’re assembling in that head of yours, simply wait the ninety seconds for him to arrive and show you. You’ll ruin his surprise, and he’s unbearable when his surprises are ruined.”
“I would never,” I lie, beaming, already three theories deep on what an undertaker wants with a zipper, none of them appropriate for a bright spring morning and at least one of them genuinely concerning.
“Back!”
The sing-song call floats in from the hall, and Silas comes practically skipping through the door—actually skipping, the long graceful glide of him bouncing with uncharacteristic delight—which earns him a flat look from Doc and a stretch from Riot that cracks half the bones in his spine.
“You only skip,” Riot observes, “when you’ve finished some project you’re proud of. So let’s see it.”
Silas looks genuinely, boyishly excited, which is enough to draw me forward despite myself, arms crossed over my breasts as I watch him produce, with a flourish?—
A dress.
And it’s stunning, in the most deranged possible way. The colors are odd and singular and entirely mine—pink melting into purple in a soft two-toned ombre, the whole thing scattered with neon-green accents that catch the light and twinkle like sparks off a live wire.
It is a walking billboard for mayhem. It is also, against every law of taste, the perfect garment for a bright spring afternoon. He produces a knitted sweater next, a soft pale green threaded with lavender and magenta buttons, and then?—
Then he holds up a collar.
And that—that—takes every clever word I own and quietly removes it from my head.
I walk toward it without a sound, without a quip, without the running commentary I narrate over my entire life, and the silence of me must be loud enough to startle them, because not one of the three says a word as I reach out and take the thing in my hands.
A heart hangs at the center of it, twinkling, and across the face of the heart, in bold and unmistakable red, is a single word.
THEIRS.
I turn it over with fingers that have gone strangely careful. On the reverse, engraved small and neat, are three names.
Theirs. All of them.
A claim with the receipts attached.
I should hate it. That’s the response a sane woman would have to a band engraved with the word THEIRS—I, of all people, who has spent a lifetime being labeled property by men who mistook a collar for a contract and a contract for love.
I know exactly what a collar means. I have worn worse around my neck than leather, and every one of them was a leash dressed as a gift. By rights this thing should make my skin crawl, should send the strategist in me clawing for the exits.
Instead, I stand here cradling it like something fragile and holy, and I cannot work out why the difference, until I let myself feel it: those collars were given to take. This one was made to keep.
