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He wants me afraid.

He has built his whole strategy, his whole sense of me, on the foundational certainty that the sound of his name still makes me small. And that, precisely that, is the flaw I have spent three years sharpening into a blade.

I do something that would horrify the man waiting on the other side of that door, the man who has spent his life accustomed to my fear and my haste.

I take my time.

I finish my coffee first—the coffee Doc made before he left, brewed exactly the way I like it and sealed in the microwave with a folded note propped against the door, because my brilliant, careful planner knows that mornings are when my wiring frays worst, knows that a kitchen full of choices and no precise instruction will send me spiraling before the day has even begun.

He removed the choice. He left me one warm certain thing to start the day, the way he removes every variable he can reach, the way he loves:by making the world one degree less likely to hurt me.

I drink it slowly, and I taste the care in it, and I let it steady my hands.

Breakfast waits under a cloth on the counter, because Riot cooked.

My feral, blunt, beautiful Alpha has, improbably, taken up cooking since our disastrous baking afternoon—as though the kitchen chaos lit something in him, some need to feed the thing he loves—and he has left me eggs and toast and fruit cut into careless, devoted little shapes, the meal of a man who would rather chew glass than admit he learned to do this for me.

I eat. I will need the strength, and I refuse to insult his clumsy tenderness by leaving it cold. His scent still hangs in the room, woodsmoke and warm iron, and I breathe it in like armor.

My clothes are laid out across the bed, because Silas always lays out my clothes, and I stand over the chosen ensemble and feel something cold and astonished move through me.

It is not a Sunday dress.

It is not soft, not domestic, not made for a quiet morning at home.

It is a custom piece, one of his own creations, cut from flowing dark fabric that drapes like water and moves like a second skin—and the cut of it, I understand the moment I lift it, is built for motion.

For lunging.

For the full unhindered range of a body that may very shortly need to fight for its life.

My morbid, prescient undertaker laid out battle dress and called it an outfit, as though some part of him, the part that has always understood death before it arrives, knew exactly what this Sunday would ask of me.

I dress slowly, deliberately, the way I once dressed for the stage.

The fabric settles over me like poured ink, beautiful and weightless, and the moment I move in it I feel the truth of Silas’s design—nothing pulls, nothing binds, every line of it conspiring to let me be fast.

Then the daggers.

The pretty, wicked, balanced blades I’ve been learning to throw and carry and love through every knife practice in that forge, the ones that have come to feel less like weapons and more like extensions of my own restless hands.

I strap them where the flowing dark cloth hides them best—thigh, forearm, the small of my back—each one settling intoplace with a quiet click that sounds, to me, like a heartbeat finding its rhythm.

Lastly, because the small mad rituals matter, I gather my pink-and-violet hair and tie it up into two high pigtails, girlish and absurd and entirely deliberate, the sweet little bow on a package full of knives.

Then I look at the woman in the mirror.

And for one suspended moment, I let myself wonder if this is the last time I will ever see her.

The final reflection of this particular creature—the one who endured the cages and the chaos, the betrayals and the burnings, three years of glass and a lifetime of being someone’s tool or someone’s trophy or someone’s door to walk through.

The one who, against every law of probability and every wound she was handed, was somehow still found.

Still chosen.

Still claimed, every single night, by three impossible men who press their certainty into her skin and confirm without fail that she is worthy of keeping. I study her—the heterochromatic eyes, lavender and emerald, steady and unafraid; the pigtails; the hidden blades; the small ferocious smile already curving her mouth—and I find, to my genuine surprise, that I am not afraid for her at all.

I am proud of her.