She smiles.
There are a thousand questions stuck in my throat, and a headache stretching like a rubber band between my eyes, and I’m frozen, watching this happen like a car wreck I can’t stop.
“Leo, it’s nice to finally meet you,” she says, turning her attention to Genevieve’s father like I’m no longer the most important person in the room. “May we come in?”
Leo stiffens. “Who are you?”
They don’t answer him, and the men walk in, she follows, and the door hangs off its hinges behind them, and I realize with a sickening clarity that Leo doesn’t know her, but he’s not reaching for his phone or shouting or doing any of the things a man does when four armed strangers walk into his home.
“Papa.” Genevieve is in the hallway now, her eyes wide, taking in the men and the guns and the woman standing in her father’s foyer like she owns it. “What is this?”
“Mon chou, go back to the kitchen.”
Her eyes flick to Bever—Cassandra—and she tilts her head, like she’s trying to place her.
“Genevieve.” Leo’s voice is sharper than I’ve heard it all night. “Kitchen. Now.”
She doesn’t move. Her eyes land on me instead, reading my face, and whatever she sees there stops her cold.
“Bevie,” I say, and the name feels like broken glass in my mouth.
Genevieve’s lips part. Leo closes his eyes. And Cassandra stands in the center of it all, composed, patient, unhurried.
The queen doesn’t announce herself, after all. She waits until the board is set.
“You’ve always been sharp,” Cassandra says to me. “Even asa boy. You saw patterns other children missed. That’s what made you special.”
“Don’t.”
My stomach churns, and I feelsick.
“Don’t what? Give you credit?” She tilts her head. “You’ve survived six years in that cage, Lance. Most men would have broken in six months. You didn’t, because I built you not to.”
“You didn’tbuildme.”
She laughs.
“I put you in your first fighting class. I taught you discipline, strategy, how to read people. I told you the queen waits, and you listened. Everything you are, every skill you’ve used to stay alive, started with me.”
My hands are shaking. I shove them into my pockets so she can’t see.
“Is that why you’re here? For a trip down memory lane?”
“I’m here because you killed one of my men.”
Shock makes me woozy, and my vision blurs until I reach out and grasp the wall for support. “What do you mean ‘your men?’”
“Don’t play ignorant, child. That’s always been more of Alex’s trait.”
“You don’t get to talk about my family.”
“I raised you, Lance.” She says it simply, like it doesn’t slice me open from the inside. “Who sat with you when you had nightmares? Who taught you to ride a bike because your father couldn’t be bothered? Who played games with you every day until you learned how to outthink the world? Who held you when you cried after Craig told you that you’d never be good enough?”
My throat closes up.
“That was me,” she continues. “For years, I was the only person in that house who actually saw you. So don’t stand there and act like I’m a stranger.”
“You were a lie.”
