It was the man I had been my whole life stepping back into a body that had been playing a corpse.

I watched Dulce’s certainty crack as she registered the change in my posture, the steadiness of my hands, the clarity in a voice she had spent a year and a great deal of effort trying to cloud.

She had built her entire scheme on the premise that the man in front of her was diminished.

And here he was, sitting up straight in his own study, undiminished, having let her believe otherwise for as long as it took to gather the rope she was about to hang herself with.

Chapter 31 — I Stopped Drinking the Tea

She blinked, thrown.