I stood at the edge of the boundary and squinted into the high afternoon sun. Stifling a yawn I shifted on my feet and continued to wait. Despite being back on a Moroi schedule it was still decidedly weird for high noon to be considered dead of night. But this oddity would serve me well in this task. I really shouldn't be doing this. But nothing about this place held any kind of authority over me anymore. Dimitri had said it himself in his final letter before my test.

I'd snuck out of my dorm effortlessly to do this, I'd barely had to try in class - other than math. Nothing could compare to what I'd survived in Russia. Nothing could compete with what I'd learned on my vigilante spree. No one left here would ever be as skilled as he was...is. Because he was still everything to me. And we both knew that. I would forever be trapped in this sick dance with him, this undulating swoon between lust and hate, sacrifice and devotion, love and loss. The only way to end it was to end him. It had to be me. Us. Until the end. At least we could agree on that. I wondered if that meant I was just as sick and twisted as he was.

I gripped the book in my hand again and then crossed my arms over my chest. Seriously? Dimitri's human spies were getting awfully sloppy.

"Hello?!" I called out toward the woods. Again I was grateful everyone was still asleep back on campus. No one needed to see me screaming out into the trees like a crazy person. I already had enough black marks against me. For a fleeting moment, I wondered if no one was there. Could it be possible that he had been lying the entire fifteen weeks he'd tortured me with those letters? Could all my instincts about being watched have been in my head?

The brush rattled and a head started moving toward me. Nope. Just as I thought. He couldn't stay away from me. Nor I him. The human slowly struggled through the tall grass, swiping at his sweaty forehead as he trudged along. I held up my wrist tapping at an invisible watch irritatedly and yelled out,

"I haven't got all night you know!"

I looked back down at the paperback. When everyone had been packing up their belongings before we took off to court tomorrow I'd remembered a missing pair of gloves I'd left in the training room. Digging through all the boxes of discarded items to find them had only landed me with this - a copy of Lonesome Dove. Once I'd regained my breath from the initial gut punch of seeing it I'd snatched it out of the box forgetting all about my search.

I hadn't told Lissa about this. She was far too worried about leaving for court and honestly I'd stopped sharing with her the last few letters I'd received from Dimitri. I'd taken all of them, about thirty total, tossed them into a trashcan and set it on fire in my room. Luckily it hadn't set off the smoke alarm, though it probably should have, and I'd glared at the ashes for a very long time. He'd meant for those letters to break me, to slowly pick away at me until I snapped. He'd wanted me to have an irrational reaction to them, to act on impulse rather than reason - but I hadn't. His power driven mind had miscalculated one thing - I wasn't the same person anymore. Everyone who cared about me, worried about me, loved me had seen that. None of those emotions existed inside him anymore, so why would he have noticed them now? To him, I was still that heartbroken girl that had searched all of Russia for him. I was still the girl that couldn't bear to kill him. He was wrong.

So I had taken the book and written a little love letter back to him. My parting gift. My warning shot. We both knew I was leaving in only a few hours and now we'd be on a level playing field again. I was up for the task. The human, short with a mop of brown hair, was finally a few feet in front of me. I threw the book across the ward,

"Take it to him."

I caught a glimpse of my dedication as it fluttered through the air. The guy, roughly my age, reached out and snagged it from my toss. Without another glance, he turned and left and I thought about what I'd written again. I swore I could already hear him laughing, and then scrambling his army to hunt me down.

Comrade,

I hope they have dusters in hell. See you soon!

Kisses,

Rose