And want like mine, want with this much joy nailed to the back of it, does not lose.
It cannot afford to.
I press two fingers to my lips and then to the photograph of the three of them, a kiss sent ahead into whatever comes, and I let the joy and the love and the ruin of it all settle into the cold clear thing at the center of me that has been waiting patiently for this morning since the day I first engineered my way into this beautiful trap.
They all assumed I was the prey.
The hunted thing, the diamond to be reclaimed, the pretty broken girl waiting in her tower for the monster to come. They looked at a stalker romance and never thought to ask who, precisely, had been doing the stalking.
Who chose Blackthorn.
Who let three dangerous men drift so perfectly into her orbit.
Who learned every habit, every wound, every devotion, and arranged each piece exactly where she needed it to stand.
Who turned a cage into a snare, and grief into a plan, and an ex-husband’s certainty into the rope he’ll hang from.
Three years ago, I made myself a promise over the ashes of my family.
I would not run forever. I would not spend my one wild life flinching at every shadow that wore his face. I would build something so precise, so patient, so perfectly baited, that thehunter would walk into it grinning, congratulating himself on his cleverness, never once suspecting that every door he opened had been left open by me.
The institution he buried me in.
The clemency that loosed my leash.
The three lethal, devoted men who would fight the apocalypse itself to keep me breathing. Every piece of it—every single piece—placed by my own hand, on a board only I could see.
He thinks he is the artist.
Believes this is his composition, his grand recapture, his final act.
He has no idea he has only ever been a piece in mine.
I smile at the wall of stolen, joyful, hard-won life, and I whisper to the empty house, to my absent pack, to the three obsessions I made my own one careful move at a time.
“It’s been a pleasure stalking the three of you.”
With that, I reach for the doorknob. My pulse is steady. My blades are warm against my skin.
The man who murdered my whole world is waiting for me believing he has finally cornered the girl he broke—and he has no earthly idea that he has simply walked, at long last, onto the exact square I have spent three plus patient years maneuvering him toward.
I turn the knob, and I step forward to play my ultimate move.
Checkmate.
CHAPTER 35
~Vex~
“Here comes the bride,” croons a voice I have not heard in three long years, “all dressed in white.”
To hear that particular tone again, that lazy musical cruelty, is a blessing and a curse poured into the same cup.
It crawls down my spine like a remembered fever.
I am still catching my breath as I step into the cavernous space, lungs heaving, my flowing dark masterpiece of an outfit cloaked in splotches of blood—none of it mine.
I have come through, by my best count, somewhere near fifty men to reach this room. Bodyguards. Hired muscle. Big confident creatures who took one look at the crazed little psycho they’d been paid to capture and assumed it would be simple.
