I brush soot from my gloves and turn toward Harper, only to find her staring at the file in her hands as if it’s pulsing.
Her lips press together, her shoulders tense in a way that makes me instinctively shift closer. Whatever she’s reading doesn’t look pleasant.
“What is it?” My voice sounds softer than I expect.
She hands me the folder, hesitating at first, then letting it drop into my waiting hand like passing off a grenade.
I turn the pages over, to read names and numbers, transactions and records that survived flame when almost nothing else did.
But it’s the familiar signatures that freeze the air in my lungs.
I’ve seen these signatures before—they’re the ones that fund us, the ones that are present in every ball and gala, no matter how exclusive.
Our allies.
People who hid us, sheltered us, took risks to tilt the board in our favor. Men and women who stood between us and execution more than once. Their secrets written in black ink, crimes that would drag them into the same spotlight that nearly burned us alive.
I close the file slowly.
“These were part of the ledgers?”
She nods.
“The fragments we uploaded… they were enough to expose Anton and Inessa. Enough to clear us.” Her breath shivers, barely audible over the wind. “But this… this is the rest. The stuff he kept buried. The kind that breaks not just syndicates, but every fragile alignment keeping their world from exploding.”
She steps back, arms crossed against the cold or maybe against the weight of the decision.
“If we release all of it,” she whispers, “we walk free. Completely untouchable. But the fallout… It would destroy everyone who ever helped us. Collapse Mikhail’s faction. Maybe ignite something worse.”
She’s right. I don’t need to run the calculations; I was raised in this world. I can smell the trajectories like smoke.
I inhale, the air catching against something raw in my chest.
“You want me to tell you what to do.”
“No.” She shakes her head hard. “I want you to tell me if doing the right thing still matters when ‘right’ feels like a weapon.”
God, she’s so fucking brave. She’s the only one brave enough to question morality instead of defaulting to survival, to let doubt scrape her ribs without pretending it doesn’t hurt.
I step closer until the cold between us no longer has a place to settle.
“Harper,” I say carefully, “I’ve spent my whole life being told to choose the version of truth that benefits the family. To weigh consequences before conscience.” I reach up, brushing a thumb across the soot smudged along her cheekbone. “I’m not doing that again. Not with you.”
Her lashes tremble.
“I leave the choice to you,” I say. “You decide what goes to the world and what gets buried.” My voice roughens. “You decide the future we walk into.”
She stares at me as if weighing the sincerity, searching for the ulterior motive my family trained me to wield so well. I make sure that she finds none.
The file hangs between us like a pendulum, one sway away from devastation.
She exhales—slow, uneven. “Okay,” she murmurs. “Not tonight. I need… I need to think.”
“You have all the time.”
As the night settles around the estate, Mikhail’s people set up temporary lights along the surviving pathways, generators humming low. We’re offered rooms in one of the guest cottages that avoided the worst of the fire, its stone walls barely touched except for smoke stains around the windows.
Harper sits at the small wooden desk inside, the folder closed beside her elbow. She stares out the window, where the moon hangs sharp and thin above the skeletal remains of the manor.
