I take a step forward. "This stops right now, Nadiyah. I'm leaving."
She brings her hands around to the front of her.
A gun glints black and compact in her hand.
The wrongness of the weapon—here, in this apartment with the lace curtains and the crocheted doily and the photographs of a family—registers before anything else does. Then the barrel. Leveled at my chest.
"No." Her voice is soft. Almost apologetic. "I'm sorry, Avery. I can't allow that."
Everything stops.
My breath. My thoughts. The blood in my veins turning to something thick and slow. The room narrows to the gun and the closed door behind her and the distance between us—six feet, maybe seven—and the absolute certainty that I will not make it.
My legs want to move. Every muscle is coiled to charge, screaming to shove past her, to run.
But the baby.
The baby stops me. The fragile life inside me. The tiny heartbeat I can still hear after the first time in my doctor’s office. That changes everything.
I can't run. I can't risk a wrong move, a misfire, this woman's finger twitching on that trigger. Not with my child between me and whatever happens next. There has to be another way. Something I can say, some crack in her resolve I can reach.
"Please, Nadiyah." My voice comes out steady. Barely. "You don't have to do this."
Something moves across her face. Sorrow, maybe. Regret. But her grip doesn't waver. She shifts her position, moving with terrible care. Her gaze stays on me as she uses one hand to open the apartment door.
Gesturing with the gun, she directs me to step forward.
"Walk out slowly." Her voice is flat. Resolved. "Do not try to run."
I swallow the knot lodged in my throat and take a step. Then another. Measured. Deliberate. All of my focus on the woman behind me. On her breathing, the soft scrape of her shoes on the floor, the gun I can no longer see but know is there.
Oh, God… Nick. I pray he got my text, that he’ll understand the half-finished message. That he'll know something is wrong. He'll come.
I hold on to that hope. Hold on to him—the way I always have, the way he's always found me, every time the world tried to pull us apart.
I move through the open door. Step into the dim hallway.
Nadiyah follows close behind. The gun presses against my spine, hidden from view but unmistakably there.
I pause once we're outside the apartment, uncertain where she means to take me.
"Through that door," she says, indicating the fire exit stairs. "We're going up."
36
NICK
Beck left my officetwenty minutes ago, and the folder of Roth family dossiers still sits on the corner of my desk untouched. I haven't decided what to do with any of it yet.
Sebastian Roth. My other cousins. My aunt, Madeline. My grandmother, Constance, who shouldn't haunt my thoughts the way she has ever since I learned her name. The weight of it all presses down on me, but I push it aside. Avery will be here soon. We'll have lunch. I'll tell her everything, and she'll help me figure out what the hell I'm supposed to feel about a family that threw my mother away like garbage.
My phone buzzes with an incoming text. Avery's name on the screen. I smile—until I read the words in front of my eyes.
I'm scared. In Chelsea with Na—
I read it again, each word slicing through me.
My eyes follow the cut-off message, while my thoughts speed ahead in rapid fire.
