Building the plan took three days, and Wren discovered, somewhere in the middle of it, that watching Damon work was its own particular kind of seduction — not the possessive heat of the nights they'd spent tangled together, but something quieter, more dangerous. She watched him take apart twelve years of careful hatred and reassemble it into something precise, surgical, aimed at ending things rather than prolonging them, and understood, with a clarity that surprised her, that she was watching a man rebuild himself in real time.

"You keep looking at me like that," Damon said, without glancing up from the papers spread across his desk, late on the second night, the two of them working by lamplight with the last of the snow melting steadily outside.