That the trap was never his.
That it was always, patiently, mine.
For the first time, I am not dreading it. The hollow is filled, the board finally whole, and my final pieces gleaming around me in the firelight, I find I am ready—eager, even, in the way only the truly dangerous ever are—for the real game to finally begin.
Every piece exactly where I need it.
The psychotic queen, no longer waiting.
No longer prey.
I’m ready for him to play his Joker card—knowing well that this time around, I’m ready to flush him out…for good.
CHAPTER 34
~Vex~
When the letter arrives, I am expecting it.
I have been expecting it for weeks, the way you expect the other shoe, the way you expect the tide. So when the soft knock comes against the front door this Sunday morning—three precise raps, polite as a dinner guest—I do not flinch.
I simply set down my mug, tilt my head toward the sound, and let myself smile at the exquisite, predictable timing of it all.
Sunday.
The one day of the week the foundation that governs this gilded little nest scatters my three men to its four corners.
Doc summoned to the clinic for the mandatory clemency review.
Riot assigned across the valley to a sanctioned work detail.
Silas called to the chapel grounds on some invented administrative pretense, all of it stamped and ordered by the same machine of systems that keeps us caged here and pretends it’s for our own good.
Three men, three directions, one morning.
I would admire the choreography if it weren’t so insultingly obvious. Someone arranged the board to leave me alone in the house. Someone wanted the queen unguarded.
They simply never stopped to ask whether the queen wanted guarding.
The knock comes again, patient, certain.
On the floor inside the door, slid through the brass slot, a cream envelope waits for me with my name written across it in a hand I would know in my sleep, in my grave, in the dark behind my own eyelids. The looping, elegant script of the man who taught me that love was simply the longest blade a person could carry.
No return address. No need for one.
The scent of it reaches me from across the room—expensive paper and bergamot cologne and underneath, faint and unmistakable, the cold mineral note of a man who has never once in his life been told no.
“There you are,” I murmur to the empty room, to the envelope, to the ghost who has finally come to keep our appointment. “I was starting to think you’d lost your nerve.”
I cross to the door and crouch and lift the envelope, turning it over in my fingers, savoring the weight of the moment the way a sommelier savors a cork.
I do not need to open it to know what waits inside. There will be the same loving venom as every letter before—my love, my diamond, my darling girl—the language of a man who genuinely believes affection and ownership are the same word in two fonts.
There will be an instruction dressed as a courtesy.
A time. A place, though we both know the place is right here, right now, on the other side of an inch of wood. He has always preferred to announce himself.
He needs me to know it’s him; the terror is the entire point, the appetizer he savors before the main course of my undoing.
