We walk through the automatic doors together. The air hits me like a slap, cold and damp. I stop under the awning, breathing in the sharp air. Vega presses against my leg, patiently waiting for instructions.
The taste of Sage still lingers, a ghost on my lips. I can feel the imprint of her hands on my chest, the echo of her voice calling me poison. The word repeats in my head like a curse.
Maybe she's right. Maybe that's what I am. But poison doesn't crave the thing it destroys. Poison doesn't ache to protect it or stand in a hospital parking lot, wondering how to keep someone safe when they want nothing to do with you.
I look back once, toward the glowing windows of the hospital. Somewhere behind that glass, Sage is watching over her sister. She will cry again, maybe curse my name, and promise herself that she will never see me again. But she will. Because this isn't over.
Misha will stay behind, stationed just out of sight, keeping watch over the Bellamy sisters because I trust him with what I can’t protect myself right now. If anything happens, he’ll act before the threat even reaches their door.
I slide into the SUV, Vega leaping in after me. The seat creaks beneath my weight, the leather cool against my palms. Theengine hums to life when I press the start button, but I do not drive yet. Sunlight spills across the windshield, glinting on the streaks of dust and glass. People move along the sidewalk, unaware of the war brewing in their quiet town. I focus on the reflection instead of my thoughts, needing a stillness I can control before I move again.
I shift the gear into drive and pull out of the parking lot, the tires crunching softly over the gravel. In the rearview mirror, the building grows smaller, but the image of Sage doesn’t fade with it. She’s burned into my mind now, permanent as a scar.
13
SAGE
Two days have passed since Hope was rushed to the hospital, yet the antiseptic smell clings to my memory as if it seeped into my skin. She is in Denver now, tucked inside a private rehabilitation suite with a round-the-clock nurse and one of Luka’s men stationed by the door. I hated that he made the arrangements before asking, but I didn’t have a better plan. The doctors called her seizures volatile, the kind that could spiral if she stayed anywhere near the stress that is following me.
I told myself I came back to Aspen Ridge for answers, to see what pieces of my life were still standing after the fire, not because some part of me still listens when Luka tells me what will keep my sister alive. But the truth is messier. I let him take charge because he was the only one who could move fast enough, pull strings I didn’t even know existed, and make sure no one connected to Ray could find her. Hatred is easy to say aloud. Trusting him in silence is what costs me.
Steam curls from the mug between my hands as I stand in Luka’s kitchen, the faint scent of chamomile rising with every breath. One of the maids brought it earlier and left a kettle of hotwater on the counter, in case I wanted another cup. She slipped out quietly afterward, the soft click of the door swallowed by the storm. Thunder rolls across the mountains in low, warning growls that make the windows tremble in their frames. It’s early evening, the dark lingering at the edge of daylight. The wind rises every few minutes, hurling rain against the glass in violent bursts that sound like handfuls of pebbles thrown by an angry sky.
Luka drops a folder on the table in front of me. Photographs skim out in a neat fan. One slides toward me until the corner taps my knuckles. A younger man I know almost nothing about stares up at me in stark black and white. Thomas Bellamy, my father. He’s dressed in a sharp suit, jaw set as if he’s already halfway through a fight, standing beside men whose faces are carved from stone. Words catch in my throat and die there.
I stare at the photograph longer than I should, trying to reconcile the man in the picture with the fragments of memory I have left. In my mind, my father never looked this severe. He was softer around the edges, gentler in the moments I can still recall. There was a morning when I was three or four, when he made pancakes that were too thin and kept tearing apart on the spatula. He laughed at himself in a way that made my mother smile from across the kitchen. These are the pieces I have held onto, the ones I dusted off whenever someone asked about him. The ones I told Hope about when she was old enough to wonder why we only had one parent.
But the man in this photograph is not the one who made bad pancakes or pushed swings. This man has a hardness in his eyes that I don’t recognize, and a tension in his shoulders that suggests he’s ready to move at any second. His suit is expensive, tailored in a way my mother could never have afforded on herown. The men beside him are worse. They look like violence waiting for permission. One has a scar that runs from his temple to his jaw, pale and raised against tanned skin. Another has tattoos creeping up from his collar, dark lines that disappear into the fabric but promise more beneath.
I don’t want this to be real. I want it to be a mistake, a photograph that accidentally ended up in a folder with my father's name on it. But the longer I look, the more I see the features I inherited. The shape of his nose, the angle of his jaw, and the way his left eyebrow sits slightly higher than his right when he’s thinking. These are things I see in the mirror every morning that connect me to him, whether I want them to or not.
“Your father was ours,” Luka declares calmly. His accent clips the words clean, leaving no room for misunderstanding. “He handled legitimate businesses for the Barinov Bratva. He severed ties after clashing with his brother, Ray.”
The words hit, then echo, then settle like cold stones at the bottom of a lake. I want to tell him he’s wrong. I want to tell him no version of my father fits inside the frame he just handed me. My mother protected our home from this kind of story, scrubbing it out of corners the way she scrubbed coffee stains from countertops until the surface looked new. I stare at the photo until my eyes burn.
“No,” I whisper. It’s barely a sound escaping my lips.
Luka watches me without blinking. He stands on the other side of the table, the lamplight tracing the hard lines of his face, every shadow carved with intent. His hazel eyes are cool and distant, as if he’s already decided how this conversation will end and is simply waiting for me to catch up. Outside, the storm surges,then lulls, then surges again. The room is quiet except for the weather and the soft sound of Vega's breathing.
“You keep trying to arrange the truth until it looks different,” Luka offers. “But this truth doesn’t change shape just because you want it to.”
“I don't know him like this.” I hear the thinness in my voice and hate it. “My father left when I was four. He died when I was nine. There were flowers and casseroles. There was no suit like that. No men like that.”
“Thereweremen like that,” Luka replies. “They simply didn’t knock on your front door.”
I look down again. The image turns slippery and wet beneath my stare, as if the storm found its way inside. I pick up the photograph with both hands, the edges digging into my fingers. My father's expression is so confident that it could belong to a stranger. There is a small nick on his chin that I don’t remember, and a dark band at his wrist that might be a watch. He stands beside a man whose eyes meet the camera, as if issuing a warning. My stomach twists, and I suddenly feel sick.
The wind picks up outside, rattling the windows hard enough that I flinch. I set the photograph down and wrap my arms around myself, trying to hold in the warmth that seems to be leaking out of me from the slow unraveling of everything I thought I knew.
My mother used to tell me that my father was a good man who made bad choices. She would sit at the side of my bed after he left, smoothing my hair back from my forehead with hands that smelled like dish soap and lavender lotion, and she would promise me that he loved us even if he couldn’t stay.
When I was older and angrier and I demanded to know why he abandoned us, she would get this faraway look in her eyes and tell me that sometimes love isn’t enough to protect the people you care about. Sometimes you have to leave to keep them safe. I believed her because I needed to, and the alternative was too painful to consider.
“Why are you doing this to me?” My voice breaks on the question, caught between confusion and dread. “Why now?” I snap, the words sharper this time, anger pushing through the shock.
“Because your uncle is not finished,” Luka announces with the certainty of a verdict. “He believes the past is a key and he is turning it in every lock he can find. And the reason you and your sister are targets did not begin with your café or the day we met. It began here.”
He taps the photograph, delicate in motion, merciless in intent. I step away from the table, my hip brushing the chair. My legs feel hollow. Vega pivots to track me, his ears pricked. Luka doesn’t move. Luka holds the room with a stillness that turns silence into a weapon.
