Ground floor.
First floor.
Security system.
The back door.
The side gate.
The exact path from the woods to her bedroom.
I stand, stretching out the tightness in my shoulders, and cross to it, scanning the routes I’ve already tested in the dark. The path I took last night. The blind spots in the cameras. The window angle that gives me the perfect view of her vanity, of the mirror where she paints her face to look like she belongs in his house.
“Did you have a nice sleep, Scar?” I murmur, tracing the little rectangle that marks the master bedroom. “Wake up feeling like death? Head pounding? Throat sore?”
My lips quirk.
“Good.”
Noah wants her compliant.
He uses chemicals.
I use consequences.
He thinks drugging her makes her manageable. Slows her down. Softens the edges of the girl I knew, the girl who would snarl at anyone who tried to cage her.
All he’s doing is making it easier for me to walk in and take everything that’s mine.
I flick a look at the old analogue clock hanging crooked by the door.
Nearly midday.
He left in a hurry this morning—too fast, too messy, too guilty. That’s something I’m going to enjoy later. Picking apart his schedule. Making him late to meetings he thinks are important. Rearranging his nice, neat life the way he’s been rearranging hers.
But not yet.
Today isn’t about him.
Today’s about her.
I grab the marker from the windowsill—black, half-dried—and drag a line from the woods to the back of the house on the floor plan. The route I took. The route I’ll take again. I mark the kitchen with a little cross. The place I left the box. The note.
You taste the same.
A low sound leaves my chest that probably used to be a laughbefore prison fucked with all my edges.
“That got your attention, didn’t it?” I murmur to the empty room. “You put it on. Of course you did.”
I can see it in my head—her fingers trembling as she fastens the clasp, the chain lying cold across her collarbones, the pendant against that soft skin I’ve had my hands around a hundred times in every version of my fantasies.
She kept the locket when she should have thrown it away.
She called when she should have blocked me.
She confessed when she should’ve kept pretending.
She’s mine.
