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“I haven’t stopped looking for your brother,” I said after a silent minute. “Several leads out of Graham’s operation remain unresolved. My people are tracing movement patterns across three states now, following captives who were relocated before the raids happened. I can’t promise you he survived. I won’t insult you by pretending certainty I don’t have.”

Yuri had briefed me earlier before the reception ended. I hadn’t wanted to color the wedding with the grimness of that conversation.

She tensed slightly against me.

“But I will find the truth,” I continued. “Whatever it costs, wherever it leads. You deserve to know, one way or another, and I intend to be the one who finally gives you that answer.” I traced my thumb along her shoulder. “I’ve spent years chasing Graham for my own reasons. Now I have yours as well.”

I felt something loosen in her at that moment.

“Thank you,” she whispered, her voice thick with tears she was too exhausted to fully let out.

I simply held her tighter, tracing the curve of her shoulder in the dark, thinking about everything Graham had already cost her and how I intended to make him pay for it.

She fell asleep before I did, breathing slow and even against my chest, one hand resting protectively over her stomach, even in sleep. I lay there a long while afterward thinking about the shape of my life the way I thought about a ledger—one that had finally, unexpectedly, balanced.

I had spent years thinking that attachment created weakness. Lying there with Camila asleep against my chest and our unborn child settled somewhere beneath her hand, I understood I had never once been more exposed in my entire life. Graham already knew her name. He would learn about this soon, and the knowledge sat cold in my chest even as I refused to regret a single decision that had brought us here.

I found I didn’t care about the exposure. I had decided I would burn down anything and anyone who ever threatened the family we’d accidentally built between the wreckage of betrayal and revenge. Not out of duty or strategic calculation, but simply because I refused to imagine a version of my life now that didn’t include both of them in it.

I fell asleep with that certainty settled in me, more dangerous than any promise I’d ever made in my life—and more sacred than any of them as well. Whatever came next, I intended to meet it with both of them safely behind me, and nothing short of my own death would change that arrangement.

Chapter Nineteen

Camila

I handed in my apron on a Tuesday, the same tray I’d carried a thousand nights set down for the last time, and the manager who’d trained me barely blinked when I told him I was moving on to my real career. Camila was out of town, and we both knew that it made it easier for me to have this exit. A few of the girls I’d worked shifts with hugged me on my way out, one of them tearing up a little, and I promised to keep in touch even though I already knew that world was closing behind me for good. I walked out through the same employee exit I’d used a hundred times before, past the same slot machines and the same neon, and felt little nostalgia for any of it.

My days looked entirely different now. My mornings were spent at my own desk in an office Nikolai had quietly arranged in the penthouse, a room two doors down from his home office. The office surprised me the first time I walked in—it was not lavish, just a proper desk, good light, and a lock on the door that only he and I had the code to. A framed photo of Mateo sat on the corner of the desk within the first week, the one thing I’d insisted on bringing from my old apartment, and Nikolai never once commented on it beyond a quiet nod the first time he noticed it there. My afternoons were spent cross-referencing whatever new folder Yuri’s team had dropped into our shared drive overnight, from shell corporations to shipping manifests.

Publicly, everyone assumed my focus had simply shifted toward Graham after marrying into the family I’d once tried to destroy. Privately, every single hour I spent chasing Graham’s networks was really one hour closer to finding out what had happened to Mateo, and Nikolai understood that distinction better than anyone else alive.

Nikolai never once tried to steer my reporting toward safer ground. He brought me raw intelligence, financial trails his people had traced through states I’d never have gained access to alone, and let me decide entirely for myself which threads were worth publishing and which needed more time before going public. He’d only intervene when the pregnancy made him nervous, insisting I wasn’t taking enough water or had spent too much time sitting still. Once, catching me at my desk past midnight, he simply set a blanket over my shoulders and a mug of tea beside my laptop without a word, then went back to his own work like the gesture was ordinary.

It was, against every expectation, a genuinely balanced partnership. I brought instincts he respected. He brought resources I could never have accessed on my own. In the middle of all that work, without either of us marking the exact moment, trust had simply become the ordinary texture of our days instead of something either of us had to fight for. Some evenings we barely spoke beyond the shorthand of shared work—a name circled, a document slid across the table, a nod that meant keep going—and I realized I preferred that quiet and functional intimacy to almost anything else in my life before him.

Each new article chipped away visibly at Graham’s remaining infrastructure, a shipping company here, a shell casino license there, creating enough federal attention that his operation had started bleeding from a dozen small wounds at once. I knew every piece I published pushed a dangerous man closer to something reckless. Stopping now would have made everything already sacrificed for this fight meaningless, and I refused to let that happen.

The public cost of all this landed harder than I’d expected. Online, speculation churned constantly about why the journalist who’d once built her entire reputation exposing the Golovin family had gone suddenly quiet on that front the moment she married into it. Comment threads accused me of selling out. A media columnist wrote an entire piece questioning whether I’d ever actually believed in the story or had simply been chasing access the whole time, quoting anonymous sources who claimed to have always suspected my original reporting was manufactured for exactly this outcome.

I told myself none of it mattered. I told myself the work spoke for itself, that anyone paying real attention could see exactly where my reporting had been redirected and why. Some nights, scrolling through the ugliest of the comments longer than I should have, I felt the accusations more. I’d close the laptop eventually, tell myself I was done reading for the night, and open it again twenty minutes later anyway.

I never told Nikolai how much it bothered me. My pride refused to let me give him one more thing to feel responsible for, though more than once I caught him watching me after I’d closed a browser tab too quickly and thought that maybe he probably suspected more than I ever admitted out loud.

*****

Graham called again on a Thursday evening, the same blocked number lighting up my screen. I answered it standing in the kitchen, Nikolai two rooms away on a call of his own. I felt my stomach drop the second I heard that same unhurried voice.

“Camila. I trust married life suits you.”

“What do you want?”

“Merely to share some news.” Amusement colored every word, unhurried and cruel in a way that made me uneasy. “I’ve recently had a very productive conversation with some federal friends. Shared some interesting documentation confirming you were the anonymous source behind those early articles targeting the Golovins. And, of course, the rather convenient timing of your reporting drying up the moment you married into the family.”

My whole body went cold. “You’re lying.”

“Am I?” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I imagine they will be very interested in discussing exactly why a journalist who spent months building a case against organized crime suddenly stopped the second she became corrupted, compromised, manipulated—I’m sure they’ll find the right word eventually. Doesn’t matter which one they choose. Your credibility burns either way, and so does whatever thin trust you’d built.” He paused, letting the silence stretch just long enough to make sure I understood he was enjoying it. “I do hope the ring was worth it.”

“Why would you do this?” I asked, though some part of me already suspected the answer before he gave it.