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Proud she made it here, to this exact and improbable point, with a full heart and a fuller arsenal. So I let the smile bloom, sharp and bright and entirely sincere, because whatever happens past that door, I intend to remind my men of one immutable truth:I am an obsession.

I am the obsession they will carry to their own graves, the addiction that will never once loosen its hold on them—alive or dead. Whichever way this morning breaks, they will never stop being mine, and I will never stop being theirs, and not even theman who taught the whole world to fear me can sever a thing engraved that deep.

It is a strange thing, to arm yourself with love.

I spent my whole life believing softness was the wound through which the world destroyed you—and the man on my doorstep is the one who taught me that lesson, with a blade, the morning after our wedding, when he smiled and explained that I had only ever been a transaction.

He made me into a creature who burned what she loved and fled what caged her, and he did it on purpose, and he has spent the years since smug in the belief that he hollowed me out for good.

What he cannot conceive—what men like him are constitutionally unable to conceive—is that the hollow filled. That three impossible monsters poured themselves into the wound he carved and made it whole, and that a whole woman is infinitely more dangerous than a broken one.

He sharpened me.

He just never imagined I’d turn the edge back around.

I nod once to the woman in the glass.

Then I go.

On my way out I leave the open invitation on the table—the cream envelope, slit and read, propped where my men will find it the instant they walk in. It is the only honesty I can afford them: a breadcrumb, a confession, a door left ajar.

I know, with a clarity that does not waver, that by the time the three of them come home to this house we have improbably crammed full of memories, they may already be too late.

The thought should gut me. Strangely, it doesn’t.

I have made my peace with the arithmetic of it. Better they arrive too late to a finished thing than too early to an unfinished one; better I face him with my pack safe across the valley thanrisk a single one of my final pieces on the board before I’ve made my move.

At the door, I pause.

There, taped and pinned across the wall beside the frame, is the gallery I made just yesterday—the developed photographs, real and glossy and held in my own two hands at last.

Me on the back of a motorcycle, wind-wrecked and laughing.

Me flour-dusted and furious.

The four of us crammed into a Ferris wheel gondola, lit gold.

Scattered among them, the small collected treasures of a life I dared to start keeping—a pressed black rose, a carnival ticket stub, a smooth river stone, a single absurd plush frog named Geoffrey perched sentry beneath it all.

Proof.

Proof that I lived.

Proof that I was loved.

If I survive this, I think, I’ll build it out properly—a whole wall, a real board, every moment pinned where I can see it. Hell, I might even take up that junk journaling the therapists are always pushing, glue and ribbon and ticket stubs, a scrapbook of a woman learning, at long last, to be a person instead of a weapon.

The thought brings a wholly unexpected joy welling hot behind my eyes, fierce and ridiculous and bright, here on the threshold of the most dangerous morning of my life. I am going to fight for the chance to make a scrapbook.

There has never been a more lethal reason to win.

That is the thing he will never understand, the calculation that tips the whole board in my favor. He is coming here to take a life.

I am defending one—a real one, finally, full of muffins, motorcycles, pressed black roses, and three men who would set the world alight for me.

A man fighting to destroy and a woman fighting to keep are not evenly matched, whatever the arithmetic of strength and surprise might say. He wants me dead.

I want a future.