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“Well,” I say, drawing the word out, feeling the cushion swallow me soft as I settle in for it. “Seeing as we’re sort of a pack now, or whatever this gloriously unhinged arrangement is—maybe it’s time I came clean about a thing or two.”

“What?” Riot says, instantly alert, the lazy panther gone and the predator surfaced.

Doc sets down his pen.

Silas’s smile slows.

All three of them turn toward me with the full, terrible weight of their attention, and I feel it settle over my skin like heat off a fire—and some preening, theatrical, deeply unwell part of me has been waiting my whole life for an audience this perfectly suited to the punchline.

Here is the thing about a secret kept long enough:it stops being something you hide and becomes something you own, a card sewn into the lining of your sleeve, warm from your own skin.

I have carried this one through courtrooms and intake interviews and four years of a padded cell, through everyassessor who thought they’d mapped me and every man who thought he’d caught me. None of them ever asked the right question, because the wrong answer was so much simpler and they all wanted simple. Mad girl burns her abuser.

Tidy. Quotable. Closed.

They never once paused to wonder whether a girl with my particular history might have collected more than one man worth burning—or whether the fire they all keep talking about was the first of its kind, or merely the loudest.

“You didn’t burn your ex to death,” Doc says slowly, reading my face, reaching for the recalculation.

“Oh, I did.” I let the emphasis land, savoring it, every consonant crisp. “I absolutely, gloriously did. Watched him cook. Hummed the whole way out the door.”

I tip my head, and I let the sweetest, most lunatic smile I own bloom slow across my face, and I deliver the finishing blow with the gentle relish of a woman laying down a winning hand three players never knew she was holding.

“But you’re not asking the prime question.”

The room holds its breath.

Three of the most dangerous men alive, leaning toward a girl in a giant cushion, and not one of them sees it coming.

“Which ex,” I purr, “are we referring to?”

CHAPTER 18

~Silas~

“She’s a runner, she’s a track star,” Riot croons, low and tuneless and entirely delighted, sprawled across the loveseat like the punchline of a joke only he finds funny. “Slipped every cage they ever built—didn’t you, darling.”

Poor Doc pinches the bridge of his nose between two fingers, as though the pressure might squeeze the imploded puzzle back into a shape he’s allowed to solve.

It won’t.

I could tell him it won’t, but I’m enjoying his suffering far too much to interrupt it.

As for me—I am, at this precise moment, on cloud nine. Possibly cloud ten.

Because holy living hell, we have done it, we have actually gone and found her:a genuine mastermind wearing the costume of a lunatic, an Omega who may well be cleverer than the three of us stacked end to end, because she has outwitted every legal system, every investigator, every credentialed predator who ever thought they had her measured—and that roster, I will say with some authority, includes me.

I have read the bodies of statesmen and the confessions of men who ran nations. I have never in my life encountered intelligence like this folded so neatly inside a frame so easy to underestimate.

So I clap.

Genuinely, helplessly, I bring my pale hands together in slow applause for the psychotic queen reclining in her cloud of a cushion, because she has earned an audience and I have always been the most appreciative one in any room.

She is the most exquisite mastermind of brilliance ever to draw breath, and—the part that makes my chest go tight and giddy—she is ours.

I want to be clear about the magnitude of what I’m applauding, because the men in this room with me are extraordinary and she has eclipsed every one of them without appearing to try.

Lucien plans the way other men breathe; I have watched him route around obstacles that would stop a government. Riot is a force of nature with a body count that reads like weather.