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That the pole became mine, an art I mastered, a thing my doctor and I have since made beautiful and defiant and entirely my own. Everything this man ever used as a weapon against me, I sharpened and turned back into the room.

He just never lived long enough to learn it.

“How much,” I muse, mostly to myself, “did you have to spend to secure all this?”

The way he laughs tells me he’s delighted I’m clever enough to ask—that I understand, as he does, that money talks and everything else simply listens.

He rises, drains the last of the wine in one long swallow, sighs at the taste of it like a man savoring his own success, and begins a slow descent toward me, unhurried, certain, a predator who believes the hunt is already finished.

“I had all the time in the world to make money,” he says, taking the steps one at a time. “Particularly once the assets of a certain Omega’s empire happened to fall into my fingertips.”

I ignore the sting of it.

The empire my father built. The fortune my husband married me to bleed. I keep my face smooth and empty as a frozen lake, and I let him come.

He stops before me, close enough that I can see the contempt living in the fine lines of his handsome, hateful face, and he reaches out to flick a finger against the red metal heart at my throat.

“And this,” he huffs, lip curling in disgust, “is the very first thing that comes off your tainted skin. A collar. As though anyone else could possibly own you—least of all men so cynically deranged.” He says the word like it tastes foul. “A fraud playing doctor. A criminal who belongs in a hole. A mortician who fondles corpses for a living. That’s the company you chose over me?”

He shakes his head, slow and pitying.

“You should crave a man of intellect, darling. A man with the patience and the cunning to let you scurry through your little games for three whole years, simply because he knew you’d be delivered back to him in the end. Not that menagerie of broken things.”

I say nothing, even as his hand leaves the collar and closes around my throat instead, even as his fingers tighten and his thumb presses to my pulse and he leans in until his breath fans hot and sour-sweet across my face.

He calls them broken.

A fraud, a criminal, a man who fondles corpses.

And the only thing that keeps the smile from my face is the knowledge of how spectacularly,fatally wrong he has it.

My doctor is not a fraud; he is the most disciplined mind I have ever met, a man who taught himself to feel by design and chose, freely, to spend that hard-won feeling on me.

My criminal is not a hole-dweller; he is the most loyal heart ever poured into a scarred body, a man who vowed to die for me and meant it to the marrow.

My mortician does not fondle the dead—he honors them, he understands endings the way poets understand grief, and he looked at the most discarded thing in the world and called it a flower worth keeping.

My ex-husband sees three monsters.

He cannot conceive that monsters were precisely what I went looking for, or that the right monsters, loved correctly, make the safest home a hunted woman ever built. His contempt is just one more thing he got backwards.

He has built an entire life out of getting me backwards.

“You really believed it,” he growls. “That you’d earned your happy ending. That you could outmaneuver me by collecting three strays to claim you, filing your sweet little pack paperwork, pretending you had connections enough to make it stick. So let me remind you, since you’ve clearly forgotten, exactly who the real Joker is in your life.”

His grip flexes.

“Me. I rule everything that orbits you. I own your father’s assets, his land, his name, his empire. All of it mine—with you as the perfect little pawn that unlocks the vault. You thought because he left it in both our names you’d somehow prosper. But I own you, and ownership grants me everything I require. Today, you open that inheritance for me, and I catapult myself into a tier of this world you cannot even imagine.”

He chuckles, low and intimate, his thumb stroking obscenely along the surface of the collar.

“You delayed me three years with your psychotic little performance. Impressive, in its way. But this is the end of that stream of insanity, my love. You will always be my pretty fucking pet. My property. My possession. Nothing more, nothing less. You’ll unlock that generous fortune, and I’ll keep you right here, on this lovely island I paid so handsomely to maintain, while I return to the life I built so beautifully in your absence.”

He says it all with such relish, such total faith, that I almost feel a flicker of something like pity. He believes every word.

He believes he is the Joker of this story—the agent of chaos, the man pulling every string, the architect grinning over the board.

The truly delicious thing, the thing I am holding under my tongue like a sweet, is that he has cast himself in exactly the wrong role and doesn’t know it yet.