The package was waiting on my doorstep when I came home from a morning run.
No return address. No postmark. No indication of how it had arrived at Mrs. Petrova's boarding house without passing through her hands — and Mrs. Petrova noticed everything that entered her building.
I stood in the hallway for three minutes, staring at the brown paper wrapping, before Vex materialized beside me.
"It's clean," she said. "No explosives, no biological agents. Just paper and... something else. I couldn't identify the material."
"How long has it been here?"
"Since sometime before dawn. I checked the hallway at 4 AM. It wasn't there. I checked again at 6 AM. It was."
Two hours. Someone had delivered a package to my door during a two-hour window when even Vex's surveillance had gaps. That level of operational precision narrowed the possibilities to a very short list.
I picked up the package and carried it to my room.
Inside the brown paper wrapping was a flat wooden box, the kind used to transport paintings. Inside the box, cushioned by velvet, was a playing card — not from any standard deck, but hand-painted, the cardstock thick and expensive.
The face of the card showed a portrait. My portrait. My face, rendered in oils with a precision that suggested the artist had studied me extensively. The brushwork was confident, masterful, the kind of technique that came from decades of practice.
I knew who had painted this before I turned the card over.
The back was simple cream cardstock with a message written in elegant script:
I've been watching your work. Clever, using my name. But names carry weight, and you've been accumulating debt. I think it's time we discussed terms.
— Jamie
The signature was a single name. She didn't need more.
I sat on my bed with the card in my hands, and for the first time since transmigration, I felt genuine fear.
Not the survival anxiety of facing Moran. Not the strategic tension of positioning against Sherlock. This was different. This was the cold recognition that I'd attracted the attention of someone who played games on a level I couldn't comprehend.
Jamie Moriarty had painted me. That meant she'd studied me — photographs, descriptions, probably surveillance footage. She'd taken the time to understand my face well enough to capture it in oils. And then she'd sent me this message, demonstrating that she could reach me whenever she wanted.
"She made you look interesting," Vex observed, studying the portrait from her position on my windowsill. "The eyes especially. She captured something sharp in them. That's probably bad."
"She wants something."
"Obviously. The question is what."
I turned the card over, examining the portrait again. The technique was impeccable — subtle gradations of color, confident brushwork, the particular quality of light that came from someone who truly understood their medium. But it was the expression she'd given me that disturbed me most.
She'd painted me as someone calculating. Someone dangerous. Someone who saw things others missed.
She'd painted me the way she saw herself.
"This isn't an attack," I said slowly. "It's an invitation. She's curious about me. She wants to understand what I am before she decides how to use me."
"Or destroy you."
"Same thing, from her perspective." I set the card on my desk, positioning it face-up so those painted eyes could watch me. "Jamie Moriarty doesn't waste time on people who don't interest her. The fact that she painted this herself — that's significant. She could have sent any message through Moran, through intermediaries. Instead, she created art."
"You're flattered."
"I'm terrified." The words came out more honestly than I'd intended. "An attack I could survive. I've proven that. But an invitation from Jamie Moriarty means she sees potential in me, and what she does with potential tends to destroy people."
I thought about Sherlock — how Jamie had targeted him specifically, how she'd created Irene Adler to seduce and devastate him, how their relationship had left scars that never fully healed. I thought about all the people in the canon who'd drawn her attention and hadn't survived the experience.
She was offering me the chance to be one of her projects. The only thing more dangerous than refusing would be accepting.
"What are you going to do?" Vex asked.
"I don't know yet." I pulled out my phone and checked for messages — nothing from Marcus, nothing from Sherlock, nothing that offered a convenient distraction from the painted eyes watching me from my desk. "But ignoring this isn't an option. That would be worse than any response I could give."
The portrait watched me think. Those eyes — my eyes, rendered through her interpretation — seemed to be waiting for my decision.
Jamie Moriarty was interested in me. That was the most dangerous thing she could be.
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