“Do it,” I said. “I’m trusting you to get everything in order. Let the Game begin, old friend.”
Henry nodded once, the motion slow, grave, and loyal.
“Of course, sir.”
And just like that, the countdown to Christmas Eve began.
December 9
The west wing of the hunting lodge was colder than the rest of the place, half because the insulation was older than sin and half because I kept the vents closed so the computers and screens that displayed the security feeds didn’t overheat. I didn’t need this room warm. I didn’t need it to be comfortable. I needed it quiet and private and cold.
Henry and I had spent the past ten days putting all the preparations we needed for the Game into place, and I was itching to see how things would play out.
I flicked on the single lamp near the far wall, its light cutting through the shadows and illuminating the long table Henry had built for me when I first woke up from the coma and came home… when I couldn’t handle crowds, or noise, or being seen. Back then, I’d used the west wing to slowly re-learn my own damn name, and the art of being human, or a human-shaped monstrosity, as it was in my case.
Now? Now, it housed a different kind of recovery and a different kind of obsession.
I opened the top drawer and pulled out the folder I’d touched more times than I’d ever admit aloud. It was thick, worn at the corners, and stuffed full of four years’ worth of answers to a question I hadn’t been able to stop asking:
Who is Chrissy Jones?
I flipped the folder open.
A photo of her sat on top, a copy of her employee ID badge from the mediation office in downtown Stonewood. Her dark brown hair was shorter in it than it had been when we met in the hardware store, and fell in soft waves around her face, curling where it brushed her shoulders. She wasn’t smiling, just staring straight at the camera with those big, beautiful brown eyes like she was neither afraid of seeing, nor of being seen.
My chest tightened as I thumbed through the rest of the folder, my eyes tracing over information I’d long since memorized.
The folder held four years’ worth of intel, and I flipped through it all.
Her employment history since graduating from Stonewood University.
Certification paperwork showing she’d become a mediator, and a damn good one.
Notes Henry had collected from public hearings she’d participated in.
Complaints she’d filed against employers and angry ex-husbands on behalf of women who’d been too scared to speak up for themselves.
Screenshots of her LinkedIn.
A grainy photo of her hugging Granny Irene outside the hospice.
My throat burned and I swallowed hard.
Chrissy was doing everything alone.
I turned another page, this one cataloging her relationships.
She’d had two casual boyfriends in the past four years. The first lasted for five months. The second didn’t make it past eight weeks.
Both of them were… well… they were weak, to put it simply.
They were the kind of men who wilted and made themselves scarce the second Henry asked them a single, pointed question while they were out drinking with their buddies. He didn’t even have to make a threat or give them a warning. All he had to do was have a casual conversation that made them suddenly realizethey weren’t ready for a real commitment, and certainly not one with my girl.
It was so fucking easy to buy them off and redirect them. It only cost me a total of fifty thousand dollars, twenty-five thousand dollars each, for them to direct their interests elsewhere.
Why did I do it?
I didn’t do it because I was jealous. I did it because they weren’t worthy of my girl. They wouldn’t have protected her… not the way I will...
