Page 83

“Alive. Well. And—” she ticks the points off on slender fingers, “—in my professional estimation, very probably the man who paid to have Riot installed inside Blackthorn to dispose of me. Who somehow gathered the three of you into the same square footage. Who pulled the strings that brought a doctor, a convict, and a mortician into orbit around one inconvenient Omega.” She pauses, and her mismatched eyes glitter. “Which brings us neatly to this charming little stalking letter, doesn’t it. Proof he knows exactly where we’ve been moved. Which means the ball, gentlemen, is firmly in our court.”

“Grand,” Doc hums, in the tone of a man who has just been handed a far larger and far more interesting problem than the one he walked in with.

I confess my own mind has run ahead to the husband himself—to the shape of a man who would do all this.

He didn’t simply want her dead; that’s a thing money buys in an afternoon, a single quiet professional and a closed casket. No. He bought a convict and walked him into the most secureasylum in the country. He arranged, somehow, for a doctor and an undertaker to drift into the same orbit. He has been patient, and theatrical, and personal about it, and now he writes letters that begin with my love.

That isn’t a man settling a score.

That is a man who cannot bear that the thing he once owned got free of him, and has decided that if he cannot have her caged, no one will have her at all.

I have arranged the funerals of a great many men like that. They are, without exception, the easiest kind to bury—because their need makes them careless, and carelessness is simply an open grave a person digs for themselves.

He thinks his obsession is a weapon. He has not yet met three men whose obsession is considerably better organized than his.

I clap my hands together, unable to help myself.

“So. Shall I begin the arrangement now, for your approval—or later?”

Riot’s head turns toward me with slow, predatory deliberation.

I lift both hands, the picture of wounded innocence.

“It could have been a wedding bouquet, you brute. You’ve no idea what I’m planning.”

“Fuck off and try it,” Riot warns, with the flat certainty of a man who would absolutely separate me from my arranging hands if I made the funereal one first.

I bite down on my lower lip to keep the snicker behind my teeth. Vex is openly smirking now, thoroughly entertained by the convict’s blunt, bristling possessiveness—and I note, with a fresh little curl of delight, that she enjoys that too.

The jealousy.

The proof of being wanted enough to be guarded. Another tell, filed beside the first. Our girl is a garden of them, and I intend to learn every bloom by name.

She crosses her legs, leans forward, and lifts the photograph of the burned room from the table—the ruin of the man she’s never denied killing.

She studies it. Not with fear, not with guilt; with something quieter and far harder to name, the long still attention of a person looking at a closed chapter she hasn’t reread in a while.

She holds the image long enough that I can’t stop myself.

“Did you love him?” I ask.

She blinks, slow, and lifts her gaze from the ash to find the three of us watching her—and here is the thing I notice, the thing my whole strange trade has trained me to notice:it isn’t the answer that matters.

It’s what lives in the eyes before the answer arrives. And what lives in hers, for one unguarded breath, is purity. Genuine, uncostumed, unperformed. Whatever she says next, I already know, because the truth is sitting plain in that mismatched gaze where the lunatic mask forgot to cover it.

“I did,” she admits, and it surprises me anyway, the bare honesty of it. “He was my way out. He helped me with the paperwork—got it all filed, made it official, made me a divorced woman free and clear. You’ve no idea what a privilege it is, to be a single Omega again after… that. To belong to no one.”

Her thumb moves over the glossy ruin almost tenderly.

“I was wrecked in the head from the marriage. Properly broken. And he didn’t flinch from it. He embraced the broken thing I was, all the jagged pieces of me, and for a while it was the closest I’ve come to being loved as I actually am.”

Her thumb goes still.

“And then he cheated.” The warmth ices over so smoothly I almost miss the transition. “So I ask you, gentlemen—do you honestly believe I could let a cheater go on breathing?”

“Nope,” the three of us answer, in perfect, instant, unrehearsed unison.

It pulls a smirk out of her, and she sets the photograph face-down on the table with the gentle finality of a woman closing a coffin lid she made herself.