Twenty minutes before that he had been inside me, pressed against me, my sweat mingled with his.

I know her identity.

I had told myself that I was pretending. I had told myself I didn’t care about Lander at all. I just needed to get him to care about me for the sake of my plan, a plan designed to make his family pay for setting my mother up for a crime she didn’t commit. That’s it.

But that’s not entirely true.

I thought that Lander was taken with me. I thought he saw me as someone who was true and kind.

But that’s not right. He sees me as Mata Hari, the enemy. And that’s what I am.

I’m Mata Hari.

A seductress.

A whore.

A traitor.

And what we’re doing . . . it’s nothing more than a game of poker. We place our bets. We bluff, we hide our cards . . . We’re opponents. One of us will win and the other will lose everything. Just a high-stakes game of poker, nothing more tender or sentimental than that.

But when he holds me in his arms, it feels like something else. I wanted, just for a moment, for it to be something else.

I keep trying to pretend that the only thing on my mind is revenge and how I can overcome Lander’s suspicions in order to achieve that goal . . .

But that’s simply not the case.

And now, as scary as it is, I might have to stop lying to myself.

And if I do I’ll have to admit that I want at least one person to see me as good, even though it’s not true. My mother saw me as someone good when I was a child, but that changed. By the time she killed herself she had seen me for what I am: rotten, ruined, hateful . . . stupid. I don’t like to think about it, but when my mother was alive I had been stupid. After she passed, I had hoped that in honor of her memory I could at least overcome that one shortcoming. I had tried to be smart . . . even clever.

But I failed. I’m just as stupid as ever.

I’ve bet everything I have. He saw through my bluff and now he’s about to lay down his winning hand.

I’m about to lose everything.

That can’t happen.

In an instant I’m on my feet, the drawing clutched in one hand, the solution to the anagram crumpled in the other. With a jerk of my arm I throw the latter into the wastebasket.

I do have a contingency plan. I know what needs to be done if one of the Gables learns who I am.

But it involves violence.

And I don’t want to hurt him.

I just want to keep pretending.