I take his hand, standing, feeling the truth of it settle deep in my bones.
One chapter might be closing, but another is just beginning.
By late afternoon, the flat reflects it, stripped down to echoes. Boxes stacked neatly by the door. My life here reduced towhat I can carry forward, and everything that doesn't serve me anymore, left behind.
Jamie wheels the last suitcase into the hallway and turns back to me. “Promise me something.”
“What?”
“Don’t disappear on me again.” His smile softens. “We’ll text, send dramatic voice notes. I expect updates on London.”
“You’re stuck with me.” I promise, and I mean it. Sure, I’m not about to invite him to a Mafia dinner party, but that doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends.
“Good,” he says, pulling me into a fierce hug. “Because you’re going to be brilliant. And I want front-row seats.”
After he leaves, I take one last look around.
Lyon gave me refuge, distance from everything that was holding me back. A version of myself that survived long enough to become something more.
Tomorrow, I go home.
And this time, I won’t change for anyone.
Chapter 51
The past week has been pure chaos.
Between dismantling what’s left of Salvatore’s empire, explaining to Gianna and Vera that Nico and Antonio are gone, and helping reunite the rescued girls with their families, there hasn’t been a second to breathe.
Gianna and Vera took the news without so much as a flinch—no grief, no shock, just a calculating silence. Their only real concern was practical,Where will we go? How will we afford to live?
Jonathan solved that within an hour, proposing they come to live here. A safe house—somewhere for those most affected byAntonio and Una’s actions to find their feet again. A place where no one would be left stranded because of someone else’s sins.
He offered the same to the rescued girls.
Most of them wanted to go home—to families who’d been searching, grieving, hoping—including Rosa, the girl whose file had first led me to suspect Antonio, even though she’ll never know the role she played. But a handful—Alice and Niamh among them—had nowhere to return to. No family, no country that felt like theirs, no safety beyond what we could give them.
So a women’s shelter was born.
In true Helen fashion, the plan took shape in less than a day. Ever since, Helen, Donna, Fiona, and Cora have been taking shifts, helping the new arrivals adjust—setting up bedrooms, teaching them how to ask for what they need, making meals, holding their hands through nightmares.
It’s messy, imperfect, and somehow the most hopeful thing I’ve ever seen.
Every day has blurred into the next—meetings, interrogations, transport runs, paperwork, lawyers, follow-ups, checks on the girls, debriefs with Jonathan, endless phone calls with Logan, looping him until he can get up here for the Table meeting due to take place this week, and then more fucking meetings.
But the worst part?
I haven’t really seen Lily.
Not properly.
Not long enough to look at her and believe she’s actually here. Alive, whole, and healing.
She had to go back to Lyon two days after Liverpool, something about exams, final submissions, and attendancerequirements. I told her we’d sort it, that Jonathan could fix anything, that she deserved time to rest, to breathe, but Lily being Lily?
She insisted she needed to finish what she’d started.
So she went.
