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He thinks he is delivering a villain’s monologue. He has no idea he is reading the part written for the fool, the mark, the body in the third act. Every gloating syllable is a man narrating his own undoing and mistaking it for victory. I let him have it.

I let him empty the whole poisoned cup, because a reveal is only worth three years of waiting if you let the condemned man finish congratulating himself first.

I arch a single eyebrow.

It is the only motion I permit myself, and it is enough to make his eyes gleam with the joy of finally provoking a reaction.

He leans in until his lips nearly brush mine, the intimacy of it a violation all its own.

“What,” he breathes, “did you imagine I waited? Three years, faithful, pining? That divorce of yours was temporary propaganda and we both know it—but a man has needs, and I couldn’t go three years without warming my bed. She’s waitingfor me now, obedient as a girl ought to be. And your father’s money will finance the rise of our family while she carries my heir to term. A son.” His grin spreads, cruel and certain. “That is what your kind is for, in the end. Breeding and warming sheets. Omegas don’t have personalities, or dreams, or ambitions. They don’t get to believe they deserve to be loved.”

He laughs softly, the sound curling through the cold air, and gives my throat a final little squeeze.

“Now be a good girl and walk yourself to your cag?—”

There it is.

The thesis of him, the whole rotten creed laid bare:that I am a thing for breeding and warming and nothing else, that the wanting and the dreaming and the deserving were never mine to claim.

It is the exact lie he carved into me on a wedding night a lifetime ago, the lie I wore like a wound for years until three impossible men taught me, night after night, that it was never true.

So I let him say it one final time, this man who murdered my family to prove I was property—because I want it to be the last thing out of his mouth before the floor of his certainty drops out from under him.

I want the lie still warm on his tongue when the truth arrives.

There is a poetry to timing, and I have always, always had impeccable timing.

He never finishes the word.

He jerks backward with a strangled hiss, snatching his hand away from my throat—and when he holds it up between us, the skin of his palm is sizzling, a thin curl of smoke rising from the place where his flesh met the red metal heart.

His eyes snap to mine, wide and furious and, for the very first time, uncertain.

“Did you just—” he sputters, “did you just fucking electrocute me?”

I shrug, slow and serene.

“Probably the collar.” I have to fight very hard to keep the smile off my face. “I don’t think my pack appreciates other men touching what’s theirs.”

“Your pack doesn’t own you,” he snarls, cradling his ruined hand. “And why didn’t that shock drop you too? You’re wearing the damned thing.”

My smirk finally slips its leash.

“I had coffee this morning. Made by a man who loves me very much. And I’m fairly confident he laced it with precisely the right dose of my medication for a day like today—the kind that gives a girl an obscene tolerance for pain and a rather generous surge of energy.” I tilt my head. “It’s how I waltzed through your fifty bodyguards without breaking stride. The blood, in case you were wondering. You assumed I’d let them deliver me here gift-wrapped. You should have wondered why I arrived looking like a slaughterhouse instead.”

You called him a fraud playing doctor.

That fraud calculated a dose to the milligram—enough to dull the agony of fifty men, sharpen my reflexes to a razor’s edge, and leave my mind perfectly, lethally clear—and sealed it in a coffee cup with a note, because he knows my mornings unravel without one certain thing to hold.

He didn’t just love me through this.

He medicated me through it, armed me through it, planned the chemistry of my survival down to the last decimal. The man you dismissed kept me alive across an island of corpses with nothing but a careful brew and a folded note.

You should have feared my fraud most of all.

He frowns, huffs, and stamps toward me—and then his stride hitches. He stops. He sways. He blinks down at his own hands asthough they belong to a stranger, the fury draining from his face into something far more satisfying.

“What the—” He staggers. “Wait. What did you do?”