“We weren’t heroes,” Ace says. His voice is tight, the words dragged out of him. “We were paid, but we had a line, Adelaide. We had one, and we kept it.”
Luca pushes off the wall at that, only a step, fingers dug into his own arms hard enough to leave marks. “We walked off jobs when the brief turned dirty in the wrong direction,” he says. “We made enemies over it. Plenty.” His eyes are fixed on her, dark and miserable and hungry all at once. “We’re not clean men. I’m not going to stand here and lie to you, but we were the kind of men who also made goddamn stupid decisions growing up. It’s not an excuse, but that’s not who we are now.”
Adelaide’s head shakes once, then again, slow and disbelieving. “That’s why you wore masks as the Gravesend Brothers.”
“Sometimes we did.” That name in her mouth drags a hard, cold buzz down my spine. “By some people, yeah.”
“I saw a photograph, North.” Her voice breaks on my name. “I saw three men in those masks you had in your basement, walking beside Rebecca Hana after she disappeared.”
“I know you did.”
“Then tell me it wasn’t you.”
Every instinct in me screams to soften it, to reshape it, to spare her. I don’t. “I”m not going to lie. It was us.”
Silence.
The ceiling fan turns overhead. Music hums, obscenely normal. Adelaide stares at me like I’ve just put a knife in her myself.
Clio comes off the wall. “North?—”
“Hear me out,” I say, never taking my eyes off Adelaide. “Please.”
Her face has gone white under the flush of heat. Her breathing is shallow now, anger and fear and the first real grip of her heat tangling together until I can hardly tell which one is hitting her harder. Probably none. Probably all three.
“Why?” she asks, and now her voice rises, shaking. “Why would you let me stay in your house?” She chokes on it, curls forward again, then drags herself back up with sheer rage. “God, I told you things. I trusted you.”
Every word strikes me in the chest.
I can barely breathe around her scent and her pain, and none of that matters next to the look on her face.
“You should be angry,” I say. “You should hate that we let you find it before we told you. You should be furious with us for the timing, for the silence, for all of it. But terrified?” I shake my head once. “No. Not of me or us.”
Her laugh is bitter. “You don’t get to decide that.”
“No,” I say. “But I can give you the truth you need to decide for yourself.”
She’s breathing hard. So am I.
“The photograph,” I say, “was taken the night we moved Rebecca Hana out.”
Adelaide freezes. Clio does too, so I keep going.
“She wasn’t our target but the reason we took the contract…” My pulse pounds in my throat. “Her employer, a corrupt politician, wanted her gone quietly, said she’d stolen from him and insisted she was unstable. The story smelled wrong from the second it touched us, so we researched deeper. We found enoughto know she was about to be buried for what she knew about his dealings.”
Adelaide’s lips part. “What did she know?”
“That he was trafficking girls through shell businesses and private events.” The words come out flat because if I let myself feel them properly, I’ll tear the room apart. “Rebecca found records. Names. Dates. Enough to get herself killed for knowing them. She tried to go to the police, but her boss already had people in the department being paid off, and one of them tipped him off before she could get protection.”
Clio gasps.
Adelaide just stares at me, eyes too wide, pillow crushed against her chest.
“Rebecca Hana was our last job,” I say. “Only it wasn’t really a job. Not the way the others were. The chief, leader of The Breakers gang, came to us directly. Said he needed one favor before we walked away from them for good.”
Her breathing stutters.
“Rebecca is his cousin. Her politician boss was a man tied too deep into the island to move against without starting a war if one his men were caught taking him out. The chief couldn’t protect her openly without lighting the whole place on fire and having it all come back to him and his men. So he came to us. Off the books. No contract. No trace.”
