Page 56

And it plays it slow.

Everything moving through honey, the brawl unspooling at a fraction of its speed—and the strangest part, the part that prickles even through the sedative drift, is that I’m watching it from outside myself.

Third person.

Hovering somewhere above the chaos, looking down at the small fierce orange shape that is me tangled with Annalise on the tile, and the suspended blade, and the screaming ring. It’sdeeply odd, this vantage. It’s also, I realize, useful, because from up here, slowed and detached, I can finally see the whole board at once.

And I see him.

A guard. Standing among the others at the room’s edge, weapon raised like all the rest of the shouting authority straining to wrestle the moment back into order—except he isn’t shouting.

He’s silent. Still.

Watching the seizing thing on the floor with a fixed, patient, haunting attention that doesn’t belong on a man doing his job, and the wrongness of him snags my dreaming eye and holds it.

I don’t know this face. The uniform fits and the posture passes, but I have catalogued every guard who works these wings down to the way they lace their boots, and this one is a stranger wearing the costume of belonging.

Then the dream tilts his face toward the light, and I see his eyes.

And the cold that pours through me has nothing to do with any drug.

Because I know those eyes.

I have seen those eyes up close, in firelight, watching me from a bed they were handcuffed to—watched them go wide and white and wet with terror as the curtains caught and the heat climbed past the point a body could survive, protective suit or no.

I watched those eyes beg.

I watched those eyes understand, at the very last, exactly who they’d underestimated. And then I walked out humming and left them to the flames, and I never once looked back, because looking back is for women with regrets.

Those eyes are dead.

I made certain.

Didn’t I?

That’s the splinter the dream drives in deepest. The doubt. Because I walked out of that penthouse with the serene certainty of a woman whose plans don’t fail—I heard him screaming, I felt the heat at my back, I knew the math of fire and flesh—but I didn’t stay to watch the math finish. I never confirmed the body.

Confirming the body is the one discipline I skipped, the single sloppy seam in an otherwise immaculate piece of work, because I was so busy savoring my exit that I forgot the oldest rule of the trade I’ve made of vengeance:a thing isn’t dead until you’ve counted the bones.

Is my ex back from the grave I built him?

And if a dead man is wearing a guard’s uniform in my cafeteria, watching me die with his patient, terrible eyes—why?

What does a ghost want with the woman who burned him? What game brings a man back from the ash to stand at the edge of the room and simply, silently watch?

The question sinks its hooks deep, and I’m still hanging on it, still reaching for the impossible shape of an answer, when I feel a small sharp pinch at the crook of my arm and the spreading cool of something entering my blood.

My body unspools at once, every taut and frightened thread of it going slack.

The cafeteria dims. The dead man’s eyes wink out. The question itself loosens its grip and drifts away with everything else, the whole world thinning to nothing as the dark draws gently up over my head.

A moment of recovery before the beginning of a brutal storm.

CHAPTER 11

~Lucien~

“So let me get this straight.”