Page 69 of Ravage

Every decision.

Every move she makes will be reported to me.

She thinks she's free for a year, but she's never been less free.

Because now she knows what she's missing.

Now she knows what she needs, aAnd that need will drive her to become exactly what I want her to be—or it will destroy her.

Either way, she's mine.

My phone buzzes with a text from Lionel:

She asked to go to her apartment. She's wearing the collar openly. People are staring.

Good. Let them stare. Let them wonder. Let her feel the weight of it every second of every day.

I pull up the surveillance feeds from her apartment, watch as she enters.

She goes straight to her bedroom, to the closet where my men found her collection of evidence about her parents' murder.

She stares at the wall of articles, the sketch of the masked figure.

Her hand goes to the collar.

"I'll become someone you can't send away," she says to the sketch. To me, though she doesn't know it.

"I'll become someone worthy of your world. Someone hard enough to stand beside you. Someone who won't flinch at violence or show mercy to those who threaten us."

She starts taking down the articles, packing them away.

Not throwing them out—she's too sentimental for that—but putting them away.

Moving on.

Moving toward something else.

Toward me.

If only she knew she was promising the man who killed them.

If only she knew that sketch was my face behind a mask.

That the monster she's been obsessing over and the man she's fallen for are the same person.

But she will know.

Eventually.

When she's so deep in my world that she can't leave.

When she's so thoroughly mine that the truth won't matter.

Or it will matter too much, and I'll lose her.

But that's a problem for a year from now.

For now, I have work to do.

An empire to run. Enemies to destroy.

And a girl to watch transform herself into something worthy of standing beside a monster.

The countdown begins now.

364 days to go.