“Yes,” Doc answers, simple and unbothered.
“Does the CEO know that?” My eyebrow climbs. A pack of three of the most dangerous men in the system, bonded and aligned, installed around the very patient they were hired to evaluate—that is not a detail an institution would knowingly approve. That’s a detail an institution would have a stroke over.
“Not a damn clue,” Silas hums, delighted. Then, as if it’s an afterthought of no consequence whatsoever, he adds, “Oh—I checked the mail, by the way.”
“Anything valuable?” Doc mutters.
“Just a letter.” Silas crosses the room with that gliding, unhurried walk and passes a pale envelope into Doc’s hand—and Doc’s brow furrows the instant he reads whatever’s written on the front.
The three of them go still over it. Not panicked—these are not men who panic—but focused, sharpened, the temperature of the room shifting by a degree as all that lethal attention narrows onto a single rectangle of paper.
“What?” I ask, when the silence stretches past my patience. I sit forward in my cushion, scenting the change in them before I understand it—a tightening in the air, woodsmoke and library and lilies all going alert at once. “Ooh. Is it for me?”
None of them answer, which is its own answer, so I do what I always do with a thing three powerful men don’t want me to have: I reach out and snatch it clean from Doc’s fingers.
The look he gives me—startled, affronted, a man unused to being relieved of anything—is so genuinely delicious that I giggle as I tear into the flap. He moves to stop me, one hand lifting, and I wave him off without looking up.
“Relax, Pretty Doc. If it were powder or poison meant to finish me, they’d have done it in the hospital while I spent a week as an unconscious vegetable with my mouth open and no one guarding my IV. Nobody mails a corpse a death they already had a free shot at.”
It’s sound enough logic to ease the tension out of his shoulders by a fraction—enough, anyway, to let me unfold the page.
I clear my throat, and I read it aloud, performing every syllable, because if someone’s gone to the trouble of a handwritten threat the least I can do is give it a dramatic table read.
“‘I’ll grant you this much—I’m impressed you’ve carried your little masterplan as far as you have. Truly. But this is where the road ends, my love. You and your collection of pet criminals are about to learn precisely what becomes of anyone foolish enough to attach themselves to a psychotic bitch who deserves to burn in hell. You, of all people, should know how a fire ends. See you soon.’”
“I’m not a criminal,” Doc says, with crisp, wounded dignity, as though that’s the load-bearing error in the entire document.
Silas loses it.
He throws his head back and laughs like a man at the funeral of someone he despised, bright and unhinged and far too loud for the cozy little room, one pale hand pressed to his chest. Riot doesn’t laugh. Riot uncrosses and recrosses his arms, that storm-grey gaze fixed on the page in my hand, and asks the only practical question in the building.
“What’s the point of the message?”
“It’s posturing.” I turn the page over, checking the back for anything cleverer than menace, finding none. “No demand, no terms, no instructions. Just feelings.” I shrug. “Sounds like an angry ex, frankly.” And I rip it, once, clean down the middle—not because the words frighten me, but because a person who writes you a letter wants you to keep it, and I have never once given anyone the thing they wanted simply for asking.
Though I do keep the things that matter.
Not the paper—the paper is theater—but the tells underneath it, the ones the writer didn’t mean to leave. The looping, unhurried hand of someone who had time and wanted me to know it.
My love, that small poisoned endearment, used by exactly one kind of man:the kind who believes ownership is a form of devotion.And See you soon, which is not a threat from a stranger. A stranger threatens what you are.
This threatens because of what we were. Whoever penned this knows me—knew me, in the biblical and the catastrophic sense—and that narrows my short list to a length I could count on the fingers of a single ruined hand.
“You’re not afraid,” Doc observes. It isn’t a question from him either; it’s a data point, logged with that unreadable steel-blue calm.
“Why would I be?” I counter.
“Why indeed,” Silas purrs, wiping mirth from the corner of one amber eye, “when our darling already burned her ex tocinders and walked out humming. Hard to lose sleep over a ghost you’ve personally cremated.”
And there it is.
The assumption.
The lovely, tidy, universal assumption that sits at the center of my entire file and my entire myth, the one everyone from the CEO to the courts to these three obsessive men has accepted as the simple bedrock fact of me.
I look at the torn halves of the letter in my lap. I think about the handwriting. I think about See you soon, and the particular, intimate venom of my love, and the one name on my short list that is supposed to be ash.
And I decide that perhaps now—lovely, dangerous, pack-bonded now—is the moment to clear a little air.
