Page 22 of Our Pretty Darling Psycho
I look down at myself, there in the streaming cold, and confirm what I already knew from the ache.
Hard. Painfully, defiantly hard, in a chamber engineered to shrivel a man down to nothing, where the water runs cold enough to make the whole idea of arousal a biological joke. Mybody has overruled the temperature. My body has cast its vote, and it voted for her.
This Omega is going to be a problem.
I know it the way I know the weight of my own fists. A problem dressed in pink, skipping toward me across a room she should’ve had the good sense to fear.
And the worst of it is I can still smell her.
Hours later, soaked to the marrow in a freezing stone box, her scent is still wrapped around me like a spell somebody cast and forgot to lift. Strawberries gone warm and soft. Spun sugar. A deep rich note underneath like cake split open while it’s still hot from the oven, sweet enough to ache the back of the throat. It clings to the inside of my nose, to the place on my mouth where she breathed her party-favor secret, and the cold can’t scrub it loose.
I do what I always do with a thing I can’t get rid of.
I take it apart.
Piece by piece, the way she took mine apart at my feet—the bright top of the strawberry, the powdered middle, the dark baked heart of it, the faint chemical ghost of the suppressants they keep her dosed on, fighting a losing war against a scent that clearly refuses to be told what to do. I break her down into her parts and lay them out in my head like a man unloading a weapon to understand it.
It does not help. It is, in fact, the precise opposite of help.
Each piece I name only makes the whole of her bloom larger in the dark behind my eyes.
Scent is supposed to be information.
That’s the whole brutal economy of what we are—designation reading designation, threat measuring threat, the body’s oldest language spoken under all the newer noise. I’ve used mine like a blade my entire life, watched a room go pale and compliant theinstant my anger soured the air. Scent has only ever told me who to fear and who to break.
Hers told me something my body has no filing system for. It reached past every wall I’ve mortared up over the years and rang a bell in a room I thought I’d bricked over for good, and now the room won’t stop ringing, and the cold can’t drown it, and I’m kneeling here learning the humbling fact that the most dangerous man in the building can be undone by the memory of birthday cake.
A man shouldn’t jerk off during punishment.
There’s a principle in it somewhere, some last shred of dignity the chamber is meant to strip from me. But dignity’s a luxury too, and I told you what I think of those, and I genuinely don’t know how I’m supposed to kneel here aching and frozen and haunted by the vivid, taunting, defiant image of her, that bright lunatic grin, that flat deadly whisper, and not do something about it.
And then there’s the tick.
The one I don’t think anyone else in that hall caught—anyone but Doc, who catches everything, the smug bastard.The moment I needled her about her made-up alter-ego and she stopped. The sugar drained out of her like a plug pulled from a sink. And she gave me a name in a voice that didn’t belong to the woman who’d been performing the whole hour—lower, older, real.
Violet.
Not Jezebel.
She made that crystal clear, didn’t she. Jezebel was the decoy, the toy name tossed out to be laughed at. Violet was the truth that slipped its leash, and the second it left her mouth she knew it, and so did I, and so did the man in the expensive glasses watching from the far wall.
For one suspended heartbeat I wasn’t looking at the goddess on the plinth. I was looking at whatever lives underneath her, the thing that does the actual hunting, and it looked right back at me and recognized its own kind.
That was a turn-on I never saw coming.
The eye contact alone made my heart do something it has no business doing—skip, stutter, lose its footing for a single beat like a man missing a stair in the dark. Nothing has ever made me feel that particular voltage.
Nothing except the moments that meant death.
And I’ve always been a little too fond of those.
Transferring me here was a mistake. Whatever board these people think they’re playing on, whatever neat little experiment the suits upstairs cooked up when they shipped the prison’s worst problem to the asylum’s most secure wing—they miscalculated. Badly. They put me in reach of her.
They’ll come to understand the size of that error. They always do. It’s usually the last thing they understand.
I huff out a breath that fogs even in this dripping dark, and I make my decision the way I make all of them—fast, and without the burden of a second opinion.
Self-love, then.
