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How annoying.

I ride out the next few blows, slipping the worst of them with small turns of my head she’s too far gone to notice, taking the rest on the meat of my shoulder. Then her hands leave their fists behind and find my throat.

Let me say, for the record, that being strangled is significantly less charming when the intent is sincere.

There’s a version of a hand at my neck I quite enjoy—slow, possessive, a question rather than a verdict. This is not that version.

This is all crushing earnest pressure, thumbs digging for the architecture underneath, and there is nothing kinky or coy about it, only the flat ugly arithmetic of a windpipe being asked to close.

My body knows precisely how to end it. Three points of leverage, a thumb bent the wrong way, the soft vulnerable hinge of a jaw—my hands twitch with the muscle memory of a dozen quieter resolutions. But every one of them would announce me to the lens above us as something other than a victim, and so I let my fingers scrabble uselessly at her wrists instead, playing the drowning girl while the cold professional in the back of my skullkeeps her own counsel, timing, measuring, waiting for the move that looks like luck.

Even now, even airless, I will not break character.

The character is the only armor that has ever held.

“You killed her,” she screams into my face, spit and tears and the grief-soured reek of her scent crashing over me. “You killed my Giselle!”

Ah. Giselle.

So that’s the name of the body before lunch, and the source of all this lovely sincerity.

I knew Giselle—knew her well enough, knew the not-especially-secret thing she and this mountain of a woman had been carrying on in the laundry alcove for the better part of a year.

Omegas have needs, and a place like this strips us of every gentle way to meet them; I’ve never personally been moved by the woman-on-woman of it, but I’m not in the business of grading other people’s comfort, and theirs was a real thing.

Solid. Tender, even, in the way only desperate places can grow tenderness.

She loved Giselle.

The fury makes sense. The fury is, frankly, the only honest thing in this whole staged little tragedy.

Which makes me wonder, even now, even with my air running out:how did Giselle die?

The same drug that took Wren and Della, the quiet violet death dressed up loud? Or has the composer changed instruments?

I knew them better than either would have guessed.

I know everyone better than they guess; it’s the only hobby this place permits and I’ve pursued it with devotion. I know that Annalise took the top bunk so Giselle wouldn’t have to climb on bad-knee days.

I knew Giselle hummed off-key when she was happy and went silent when she wasn’t, and that she’d been silent for a week before she died, which means she was frightened of something, which means she saw it coming.

Someone in this building made a gentle woman afraid, and then made her quiet for good, and now they’ve handed her grieving lover a reason to do their next murder for them.

It’s elegant.

I’d almost admire it, if it weren’t presently trying to crush my throat shut with another woman’s borrowed hands.

Something glints above me.

My vision is starting to spot and swim, the edges going soft and dark, but the glint is wrong enough to cut through it—a thin bright wink of moving metal where the cafeteria ceiling has no business holding anything bright.

I blink up past the contorted fury of her face, and for one disoriented heartbeat I am genuinely uncertain whether I’m hallucinating, whether the oxygen debt has started painting things, because surely there is not a long curved blade descending on a wire from the rafters, swaying with slow mechanical purpose, angled with what looks an awful lot like the intent to open us both like envelopes.

It’s the kind of thing that doesn’t belong in a sentence, let alone a ceiling.

A salvaged saw blade, maybe, or a length of industrial steel honed and hung—lowered by some patient mechanism timed to this exact moment, this exact pile of two struggling Omegas, this perfect tableau of the lunatic and her latest victim.

My starved brain turns it over even as the black closes in, and it reaches the only conclusion that fits:this was prepared.