Page 47

The puppeteer.

Composing again.

And sloppy enough, this time, to leave brushstrokes.

Three quiet kills, each one a small immaculate poem, and now this—a public spectacle, a rigged blade, a grief-mad pawn, a blade in the open. The composer has stopped writing in their elegant private hand and started shouting.

That isn’t confidence.

That’s fear wearing confidence’s coat.

Somebody decided that the slow, patient framing of me had run out of time, that I needed to be dead and disgraced today, this hour, in front of witnesses—and the only thing that changes a careful plan into a desperate one is a deadline nobody told me about. I tuck it away beside the rest, this single most valuable thing the whole bloody afternoon has given me:my enemy is on a clock now.

And frightened things, like loud things, make the mistakes that get them caught.

Then the world tips, gently, the way a boat tips when someone steps aboard behind you.

Something is wrong with me.

A cold thread of wrongness, unspooling from—I lift my hand to my neck before my mind has caught up to my fingers, and Iclose them around a thin metal sliver buried just below my jaw, and I pull.

A needle.

A syringe, slim and surgical, that Annalise drove into me sometime in the chaos of those crushing hands, and that I never felt for the strangling.

She’s grinning at me through her own ruin, blood at the corner of her mouth, dying and delighted.

“Got you,” she seethes. “Got you, bitch.”

I look down at the thing in my fingers. And here is the detail that turns the whole game, the detail my dimming, racing, gloriously stubborn mind seizes on even as the cold climbs my arm:the barrel is only half-empty.

She got perhaps half the dose into me before I tore her off. The other half is still sealed inside, a perfect little sample of whatever is currently rewriting my chemistry, and a sample is evidence, and evidence is the one gift I can still give the men I’ve decided are mine.

This is the calculation that survives even as the rest of me starts to fail, the cold machine ticking under the spreading frost:a half-full syringe in my hand, and a guard will bag it and lose it in an evidence locker that answers to whoever profits from my guilt.

A small dose, deliberately preserved, left in plain view at a scene a certain undertaker will be summoned to within the hour—that, no one can quietly disappear.

So I make it disappear myself, most of it, on my own terms. I become the only person who could have tampered with the proof, and I tamper toward the truth.

Allow them to try to explain why the prime suspect destroyed the very thing that would convict her. Let them choke on the arithmetic the way I’m choking on this drug.

I laugh.

It comes out cracked and wrong and surely looks unhinged to every staring face in the room, the lunatic cackling over a dying woman, but I don’t care how it reads, because the cameras can have this one. I hold the syringe up where Annalise can see it.

I depress the plunger, slow and deliberate, and let most of what remains drip wasted onto the tile—leaving only a small, deliberate, analyzable dose behind in the barrel. Just enough. Just enough for a certain undertaker with a reagent card and a decade of secrets to walk into this scene and read it like a confession.

“If you’re going to finish the job, Annalise,” I tell her, sweet as the butterscotch I never got to finish, “do it properly. A girl likes to reach the finish line. Anything less is just…worthless.”

It’s a cruel thing to say to a dying woman, and I say it anyway, because she came to murder me over a grief that wasn’t my doing, and because somewhere behind her there’s a real composer listening through her ears, and I want him to hear it too.

I want whoever rented this poor heartbroken creature to understand that his clever little instrument missed, that the lunatic is still upright, still counting, still very much in the game he thought he’d already won.

Consider it a love note.

We collectors do so enjoy announcing ourselves.

I watch it dawn on her, even as the light starts to leave—the slow, sick comprehension of who actually won this hand. Her grin curdles. Her scream, when it comes, is more grief than pain, the wail of a pawn realizing the board was never hers, and it tears through the cafeteria just as the guards finally, uselessly, snap out of their collective trance and surge into the ring.