Together, we were something new. Not hero and victim. Not savior and saved. Just two people who'd been broken by the world and decided to break it back.
"Start small," Nathan suggested. "Work our way up the chain. Find the weak links."
"I know where to begin." I'd been thinking about her for days. "There's a handler named Monica. She processes new girls, does initial psychological assessments. She has a weakness."
"What kind of weakness?"
"The kind that likes pretty broken things." My smile felt like a weapon. "The kind that takes special interest in certain subjects. The kind that might let her guard down if the right girl showed up at her door, scared and looking for shelter."
Nathan's face went careful. "You're talking about playing bait."
"I'm talking about using what they taught me." I squeezed his hand. "They trained me to be whatever someone needed. Time to find out what happens when I choose the role myself."
The plan took shape between us. Names, locations, approaches. Each piece slotting together like the puzzles Gabriel used to make me solve—complex but logical once you understood the patterns.
But beneath the strategy, something else was building. Not just revenge but reclamation. Each decision I made, each target I chose, was a step away from what they'd tried to make me and toward what I was making myself.
"What happens after?" Nathan asked eventually. "When you've hunted them all down?"
I thought about it. The future had been a forbidden concept for so long—pets didn't plan, weapons didn't dream. But now...
"I don't know," I admitted. "Maybe that's the point. To get to choose what comes next."
His thumb stroked over my knuckles. "Whatever it is, we'll face it together."
"Together," I agreed, and meant it.
The sun climbed higher, burning away the morning's gentle light. Somewhere out there, Gabriel was healing. Planning. Waiting for his Bunny to come home like he'd promised.
He was right about that much. I was going home. But not as the broken doll he'd crafted. I was coming as something else entirely—his techniques turned against him, his conditioning redirected toward destruction instead of submission.
They'd wanted to create the perfect victim. Instead, they'd forged something harder. Something with teeth behind its smile and calculation behind its tears. Something that knew their world from the inside and had decided to burn it down.
I looked at Nathan—my thief, my anchor, my chosen companion in this war we were planning. He met my gaze steady, marked by my nails and my need and my newfound purpose.
"When do we start?" he asked.
"Tonight." I stood, pulling him with me. "Monica has a standing appointment at a private club downtown. High-end,discrete. The kind of place where she might notice a familiar face."
"You're sure about this?"
I thought about the photos I'd found in my research. Other girls, other projects. Some younger than I'd been when Gabriel started his work. All of them bearing that same hollow look I'd worn.
"I'm sure." The words came out hard as the choice that drove them. "They think their Bunny ran away. Time to show them what happens when prey learns to hunt."
Nathan pulled me close, and I let him. Let myself have this moment of connection before I put on whatever mask the hunt required. His lips found mine, gentle and grieving and proud all at once.
"Be careful," he murmured against my mouth. "Don't lose yourself in this."
"I already lost myself," I reminded him. "This is about finding who's left."
The day stretched ahead, full of preparation and possibility. I had work to do—personas to craft, approaches to plan, weapons to choose. But first, I had this: standing in Nathan's kitchen, marked and marking, choosing the shape of my own becoming.
I'd been Lilah once—young and trusting and foolish enough to think I could out scam a scammer. Then I'd been Bunny—crafted and conditioned and carved into someone else's design. Now I was neither and both, something born from trauma but not defined by it.
Soon, I'd be something else: a hunter in prey's clothing, turning their own weapons against them. Using every technique they'd taught me to dismantle what they'd built.
I'd find him. Gabriel and all the others who'd made an industry of breaking girls into dolls. No matter the cost. No matter whose blood I had to wear.
