Page 68 of The Rook’s Obsession

“Okay,” I say. “Tonight first.”

She looks at me. Studies me the way she does, reading whatever lies beneath my words. After a few seconds, something in her expression eases. Not all the way, but enough.

Then she leans in to kiss me. Slow, deliberate. Her hand rests against my chest over my heart like she’s checking it’s still beating. When she pulls back, she rests her forehead against mine. “I don’t know what comes after,” she murmurs. “All I know is I want you in it. Whatever it is.”

It’s not a promise. It’s not the answer I was looking for. But it’s honest, and it’s coming from someone who spent a long time being lied to by everyone she trusted. When I look at it that way, honest is worth more than any promise I could ask for.

I’ll take it. For right now, I’ll take it.

“Go get dressed,” I tell her, stretching, trying to grin. “We’ve got work to do.”

She almost smiles. Then she kisses me one more time and rolls out of bed, and the day begins.

IVY

The first thing I wasn’t prepared for: being taken to a dressing room on my arrival, though I’m already prepared the way I was last week. “Mr. Russo needs time to ready himself for you,” one of the other employees informed me before directing me here. It’s simple, narrow, with a rack stuffed with various costumes. I guess not everyone has their own collection like I do. The mirror mounted along one wall is lined with warm bulbs that make everything look softer than it is. I don’t feel soft.

The wig is in place, and the makeup is done. The corset is laced, and the camera is pinned exactly where it was last week, angled outward at chest height. My hands are steady, because they’re always steady. It’s the rest of me that’s a different story.

I keep thinking back to this morning, no matter how I remind myself to focus. Nick’s face when he asked me what happens after tonight. The silence I filled with practicality because I didn’t have anything better in the moment. Let’s get through tonight first. As if tonight is the reason I don’t have an answer, when the truth is I wouldn’t have one regardless.

I’ve never thought about the future. Not the way he means it. The future was always the next assignment, the next identity I pulled from the cabinet and wore until it was no longer useful. Life happened in the spaces between, but it was never the point. The point was the mission. The mission was the structure, and the structure was the only thing holding me together.

Without it, what am I? A woman with a drawer full of passports and no idea which name is really hers. A weapon without a hand to aim it. Nick wants to build something, and I can see it in his eyes every time he looks at me—a vision he has of a life that includes me. Permanently. Not as a mission or an objective, but as a person who stays.

I don’t know how to stay. I’ve never stayed anywhere. Every place I’ve ever lived was temporary by design. Every person I’ve ever trusted has eventually revealed themselves to be something other than what they promised. Vincenzo promised me a family and gave me a leash. My handlers promised me purpose and gave me a kill list. Even Elena, the one person who showed me genuine kindness, was taken from me the moment Vincenzo decided she’d gotten too close.

So when a man lies beside me in the morning light and asks me to imagine a future, the first thing my mind does is search for the trap. Where’s the hook? What’s the cost? What will he take from me once I’ve given him enough to make the taking worthwhile?

I hate that I think this way. I hate it even more that I can’t stop.

Nick is not Vincenzo. I know that. He’s proven it in every way a person can prove something without words. Through patience and presence, through his stubborn, infuriating refusal to walk away no matter how many times I’ve given him a reason to. But knowing something and believing it are two different animals, and the distance between them is more than a decade wide.

A knock on the door pulls me back into the room. The bouncer who led me here. “He’s here. Whenever you’re ready.”

“One minute, please.”

The door closes, and I look at the mirror one last time. The woman staring back isn’t me. She’s a role, a performance. A thing someone built from the ground up to be whatever the situation required. How ironic that I’m about to use his own creation against him.

I check the camera. The tiny green light pulses once. Live.

“Feed’s up,” Nick confirms in my ear. His voice is taut but controlled. Professional. Whatever he’s feeling, he’s packed it away for now. Good. I need him sharp tonight.

I make sure the mask is in place, take one breath, and step out of the dressing room.

The corridor is dim. My heels click against the floor as I walk toward the room at the end of the hall. The same room we used last week. I push it open and step inside.

Then I stop.

Vincenzo Russo is on all fours in the center of the room. He’s wearing nothing but a leather collar buckled snug around his throat, a leash attached to the D-ring and pooled on the floor next to him. His clothes are folded neatly on a chair by the wall: jacket, trousers, shirt, all arranged with the same brutal precision he brings to everything. His head is bowed. He hasn’t looked up.

I can’t move for what feels like forever. This is the man who controlled every aspect of my life. The patriarch, the iron hand. A man whose voice could silence a room and whose name made powerful men careful with their words.

He’s naked and collared and waiting on his hands and knees for a woman he thinks he’s never met to tell him what to do.

“Holy. Shit,” Nick whispers.

Yes. That’s roughly the whole situation in a nutshell.