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Whatever she felt walking out of that fire, it was not the grief of a girl who burned for love.

Her Joker was a measly little man who hadn’t the wit to match her.

He wasn’t the architect of her ruin.

He was a tool she selected, used, and discarded in flames—a doorway, chosen for where it led rather than what it was.

She didn’t burn for him.

She burned through him.

Which raises the question the file never thought to ask, the question now sitting in my chest like a swallowed coal.

If that ordinary man could never have met her standard—could I?

Could anyone keep pace with a mind that runs at her temperature, that plays a game across years without showing a card, that walks into the most secure facility in the country and treats it as a venue?

She has a standard.

I read it in every line of her, the way she tested me and discarded the test the instant I cleared it, hungry already for a harder one. She is looking for someone who can keep up.

And the worst of it, the part I will not be writing in the institute’s notebook, is not whether I am capable of matching her.

It is that I have already caught myself wanting to.

Because she is here for a reason, and the reason is not the one stamped on her admission.

No one performs insanity with that much discipline for that long by accident.

Three years, seven months, thirteen days—she said the number aloud, idly, the way another woman might mention the weather, and a number kept that precisely is not a sentence being endured.

It is a clock being watched.

She is counting toward something.

She has spent these years embedding herself, mapping the rhythms, picking the locks and sitting back down inside the open doors, learning the building the way a surgeon learns a body she fully intends to open.

She is not waiting to leave.

She is waiting for the right moment to take whatever it is she came in to take.

And I have a choice, which is the part that has my hands so still on the blotter. I can do the responsible thing—solve the puzzle of what she wants, name it, document it, neutralize it, and watch the long elegant machine of her purpose seize and die.

Or I can refuse the puzzle entirely, treat her as the file insists, dose her into a pretty fog, and remain forever a piece on a board moved by smaller men.

Or…

There is a third door, and I have already noticed I keep turning toward it.

I can play.

Follow her down the length of her own scavenger hunt, step for patient step, and find out—not whether I can stop her, that would be trivial and dull—but whether I can keep up with her.

Whether the chase is worth the having. Whether, at the end of whatever she is reaching for, there might be room for a second pair of hands.

A reasonable man would recognize that last thought as the precise moment the prior directors began to come apart.

I have never been especially interested in being reasonable.