Chapter 004

What is this? and who sent it?," I asked the receptionist.

"It's from Mr. Rivers, he asked for it to be delivered to you personally."

This was the seventh gift he had sent in the span of two weeks.

A bracelet this time, with diamonds set in a line too thin and expensive to be anything but deliberate, tucked into a box with a card in Thane's handwriting:

Everything you want and more, Emily. All you have to do is accept it.

I packaged it back up and had it returned to his office before lunch, the way I had returned the six gifts before it. A necklace. A penthouse key I never used. A sports car, one of its kind in the country. A watch worth more than most people made in a year.

Each one sent back unworn, untouched, and each one answered within days by something larger, as if refusal were simply a negotiating tactic he hadn't cracked yet.

He didn't understand that I wasn't negotiating.

I was grateful to him. Genuinely, in the specific, complicated way you're grateful to someone who pulled you out of one kind of danger and trained you to survive worse. He had given me skills, resources, eight years of a life I wouldn't have built alone. But gratitude wasn't the same as wanting to belong to him, and I hadn't clawed my way out of one prison just to walk gift-wrapped into a nicer one barred with gold.

He couldn't hear that distinction. I wasn't sure he ever would, and that part of it scared me a bit because I knew how far he would go to get what he wants.

I woke that morning from a dream I didn't ask for. Patricia's hand at the back of my neck, water closing over my face, the particular taste of chlorine and fear I hadn't tasted in years. I lay still for along moment after, waiting for my pulse to settle, trying to place what had dragged it back up after so long quiet.

I didn't have an answer. I rarely did anymore. The past surfaced when it wanted to, uninvited, and all I could do was wait it out.

I went for my run anyway, because routine was the only antidote I trusted.

Three streets in, I caught it. A flash of light from a parked car window, quick, deliberate, the unmistakable signature of a camera shutter. I didn't break stride, didn't let my face change or show awareness, just filed the location and kept running the same loop I always ran.

On my second pass, the car was empty.

Whoever it was had already gone, but they had left something behind in their hurry. It was a single photograph, dropped on the pavement beside the curb. Me, from twenty minutes earlier, mid-stride, caught from an angle that meant they had been close.

I picked it up without much reaction. This wasn't my first stalker, and it likely wouldn't be my last. A hazard of working in Thane's world, or maybe just a hazard of being a woman alone often enough for the wrong person to notice. It never bothered me the way it probably should have. These things had a way of resolving themselves.

Either I handled it, or Thane did, whichever of us found them first, and it never ended well for them either way.

I tucked the photo into my pocket and finished my run.

A package was waiting outside my door when I got home. No label, no return address, nothing but my name.

My first thought was Thane, but he never did anything this quiet. His gifts arrived with couriers, with cards, with his name attached like a signature he wanted admired. This was different. It was smaller and deliberately anonymous.

I ran the device I kept for exactly this reason over the box before I touched it. A precaution Thane had insisted on years ago, back when I had laughed it off as excessive. It came back clean. No explosives, no wiring, nothing but cardboard and whatever was inside it.

I carried it to the kitchen counter and opened it there, standing, ready to move if I needed to.

Photographs slid out first. Me, again. Leaving the office, getting coffee, the same stride captured from a dozen different mornings. My stalker, I assumed, finally working up the nerve to announce themselves properly. What a careless move, probably his first gig as a stalker.

I almost felt sorry for whoever it was, the same way I'd feel sorry for anyone about to learn exactly who they had decided to follow.

Then I reached the bottom of the box, and the feeling evaporated entirely.

A single photograph, old, worn soft at the corners. Me as a child, standing between my father and my mother, before everything. A photograph that shouldn't exist anymore. One I'd never seen outside the house that burned, a house that took every photo in it down with the roof.

A red X was drawn over my father's face and another over my mother's.

Mine was untouched.

My hands had gone cold before I even turned it over, some old, buried instinct already understanding what the rest of me hadn't caught up to yet. I turned it anyway.

You can run but you can't hide, Cora. Yours truly, Jake.

The photograph slipped from my fingers and hit the counter. My hand was still raised, fingers curled around nothing, trembling. I stared at it like it belonged to someone else. In eight years, through every job, every body, it had never once done that.

I pressed it flat against the counter. It didn't stop.

A sound climbed out of me before I could catch it. Unfamiliar, nothing like my own voice. I clamped a hand over my mouth and slid down until I hit the kitchen floor, knees drawn up, breathing like I had run the length of the city.

I hadn't cried the night I killed my family.My face was wet now, and I didn't understand it.

All I understood was the photograph above me on the counter, and the four words on the back of it, and the fact that Jake, if he was still alive or whoever wrote them, knew exactly what they were worth.