My brows furrow as I listen, every syllable drifting through the old house like a prayer whispered to the dead. I’ve heard this before. I know I have. I just can’t remember where.
La beauté ouvre les portes.
Le pouvoir les garde ouvertes.
La vengeance est ce qui les franchit.
My heart misses a beat.
The brush still glides through her hair, her reflection calm, her lips shaping each syllable with an absent familiarity that tells me she isn’t performing it. She’s remembering it. My fingers tighten around the crimson envelope until the thick paper threatens to crumble beneath my grip. I stare down at it as if it were on fire in my hand.
Those words.
Those exact fucking words.
The room falls away beneath my feet. Because I’ve heard them before.
Cameron.
I’m back in the tunnel before him, my gun pressed firmly in my hand while the other grips tightly to his scrubs as I watch the blood drip from the side of his face. Who is the woman sitting in my house? Who is the woman I’ve watched from the shadows for the last four years? The woman I’ve fallen for?
My eyes flick to her reflection again, then back to the thick red paper in my palm. I turn withoutanother word, taking the stairs two at a time. Each footfall rattles the old house beneath me as I tear down the hallway toward my bedroom. My hand barely finds the doorknob before I’m shoving the door open. With a sharp breath, I tear through the seal, my fingers suddenly feeling far less steady than they’ve ever had any right to. A single cream card falls free. Heavy. Embossed. Black-bordered. My stomach drops as I slowly unfold it. The first thing I see is the heading.
Funeral Notice.
All the air leaves my lungs when my eyes roll over the name etched into the card. Printed in elegant black lettering.Winter Delacour. Beneath it, a date of birth and the date they were declared dead. Then a photograph.
The same blue eyes. The same long black hair. The same full lips.
My little ghost.
No.
My eyes dart back to the top of the notice before dropping over every line again, searching for the mistake my mind refuses to accept. There isn’t one. My pulse crashes violently through my ribs. Nobody knows she’s dead. Nobody knows she’s alive. Nobody.
Which means…
My stomach twists as trepidation crashes through me. Someone believed she was dead long before theyprinted this notice. Someone signed off on it. The organs I’d delivered were only collected a few days ago. It’s impossible for her father to learn that she had died.
Her father.
Enzo Delacour.
The head of the French fucking Mafia!
My breathing turns shallow, and it feels like a knife has landed between my ribs. Someone on the inside ordered the hit. Someone on the inside is a fucking liar. And Cameron…the man connected with the fucking Royal. Did she know him too? Questions explode through my mind so quickly I can barely separate one from the next. Was the doctor trying to protect her? Does she fucking work for him? Well, that didn’t work out well did it? Because I put a hole right through his skull. Everything he said to me that day comes rushing back with terrifying clarity.
Access.
Opportunity.
Infiltration.
The ability to become someone else. To walk through doors that would have otherwise remained locked.
“You’d be amazed what people are willing to sacrifice for a second chance. And even more amazed by what they’ll sacrifice for revenge.”
The words are no longer the ramblings of a dyingman clinging to his final breaths. They were a fucking confession.
