Page 87 of Our Pretty Darling Psycho
And no one, in all my catalogued and ruined history, has ever once tried to keep me.
They only ever tried to own the keeping.
“I’ve been working on it since the day we were introduced,” Silas says, softer now, the theater drained out of his voice. “The collar itself had to come from abroad—they’re shockingly difficult to source, the ones designed to actually mean ownership rather than decoration. It has a tracker rooted into the band. And a chip, of a sort, so that if anyone ever questions whetheryou belong to a pack, the answer is already filed in the database where it counts. I made the request last night. A dear acquaintance was good enough to fulfill it by this morning.”
I blink at the collar.
Then I lift my head and look directly into Silas’s warm amber eyes, searching for the seam, the tell, the small dishonest flicker I’ve spent my whole life learning to find in the faces of men bearing gifts.
It isn’t there. He’s not lying.
“You’ve filed official documents,” I say slowly, “claiming I’m your—your pack’s—new Omega.”
Are they out of their minds? They have to be. No. I know they are; I’ve catalogued the precise flavor of each man’s particular madness over weeks of close study.
The trouble is that I am every bit as unwell as the three of them, and right now, holding a heart that says THEIRS in my two hands, I am rendered utterly, uncharacteristically speechless—because I will admit, in the privacy of my own splintered skull, that this is the single most romantic thing anyone has ever given me.
“Yes.”
It’s Doc who answers, and I turn to him slowly, and find that he’s taken his glasses off—just for a moment, pinched between two fingers as he regards me—and good lord.
I finally understand how an entire planet failed to tell a bespectacled reporter from a man in a cape, because without the glass between us this man is devastating, all clean hard lines and steel-blue gravity, and I cannot fathom why he gatekeeps a face like that behind a prop.
My traitor heart skips, then skips again, just to be thorough.
“You’re logged as single in the system,” he explains, in that measured voice that turns even sentiment into something structurally sound. “Which, even out here, even in a placethis gentle, would be a disservice to you. An unpacked Omega cannot move independently in Arch Hollow. You’d be confined, supervised, your every step chaperoned. The town has no packs that aren’t already bound in temporary alliance or permanent bond. There is a separate sector for unattached Omegas—but it sits on a detached island, deliberately, and I rather suspect the CEO neglected to mention it to us on the off chance you went conveniently ‘missing’ and turned up there, beyond our reach and inside someone else’s.”
He lets that sink in—the quiet machinery of the trap they pulled me out of—before he goes on.
“So we made an executive decision. You’re ours. Partly because once Riot commits to a thing, the rest of us lose the luxury of debate or he sulks the walls down—” a flat glance at Riot, who toasts the accusation with his beer, unrepentant and nude, “—but more importantly, because you deserve to be protected properly. Comprehensively. By people who will not blink.”
He pauses.
And before he slides the glasses back into place, we share a look—a real one, unguarded on both ends, the kind I don’t hand out and clearly neither does he.
“You deserve to be loved,” he says, low and certain, “in a way you can actually hold in your hands and understand is real, Genevieve. So consider this the founding document of a new legacy—the one that proves that even a pretty little psycho like you gets to be loved and cherished, after everything.”
“You literally just insulted her,” Silas mutters.
“She likes the truth,” Doc replies, but as he settles the glasses back onto his nose, his expression shifts, the calm cracking into a small sharp frown. Silas catches it, confused, and follows the line of Doc’s gaze back to me, and whatever he sees makes him gowide-eyed and slightly frantic in a way I’ve never witnessed from the unflappable undertaker.
“Oh—oh shit. Pretty Peony, don’t cry.”
I have to blink several times, because I genuinely had not noticed.
The tears are already falling. They’ve arrived without my permission, without the customary warning, sliding hot down my cheeks while my hands cling white-knuckled to a collar that says I belong to someone who chose me.
“Uh,” I manage, which is not a word so much as a small structural failure.
I blink again, clutching the heart, and the truth comes loose from somewhere I keep locked.
“The only other time,” I whisper, “I ever felt claimed—truly claimed, chosen, kept—was on my wedding night.”
I have never said this aloud.
Not to a therapist, not to an assessor, not to the dark of a single cell in three years.
The three of them go very still.
