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I left without another word, walking past his guards with the same measured pace I’d entered with, even though every part of me wanted to burn the entire building down on my way out.

I stood beside the car for a moment before opening the door, letting the cold air do what it could to steady me before I had to face the drive home and everything waiting on the other side of it.

Mateo Alvarez had been dead for years. Camila had spent four years hoping, several weeks building an alliance with the man she initially believed was responsible, chasing a truth that had already been buried in some anonymous grave beside a fighting ring years before she’d ever walked into my office.

I would have to tell her. I would have to watch whatever fragile hope she still carried collapse entirely, and there was no version of that conversation I could brighten enough to make it bearable.

Graham had made his position clear. There would be no negotiated peace, no quiet containment, no version of this ending that didn’t conclude with one of us destroyed. He had threatened Camila directly. He had threatened our child. Whatever restraint I’d shown him until tonight, whatever careful patience I’d brought to dismantling his operations one piece at a time, ended the moment he’d made that threat plainly enough that I could no longer pretend it was posturing.

There was no peaceful resolution left.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Camila

I finished the article at my desk this time, not in Nikolai’s home office where I’d started it. It contained financial trails connecting three entertainment companies to Graham’s laundering routes, dates confirmed against shipping manifests Yuri’s people had verified twice. The pregnancy made the long hours harder than they used to be—my back ached some days, and I’d started keeping crackers in my desk drawer for the nausea that still hit at unpredictable moments.

I drove to the newspaper office myself to oversee the publication, security detail trailing at a discreet enough distance that most people wouldn’t have clocked them for what they were. Months ago I’d have found that arrangement suffocating; now it felt like the cost of doing the work that mattered.

The newsroom had changed its relationship with me completely since those first anonymous submissions. Reporters who’d once glanced past me without a second thought now nodded when I walked in, a few stopping at my desk just to say they’d read the latest piece, that it mattered, and that work like mine was the reason half of them had gotten into this business in the first place. A younger reporter I barely knew once asked me how I’d first got access to the account numbers, and I found myself giving her an honest answer instead of deflecting the way I once might have.

My editor pulled me aside near the layout desk.

“You should think about laying low for a while,” he said quietly. “Now that the marriage and the pregnancy are public, Sylvester Graham knows exactly who you are and exactly where to find pressure points. I’m not telling you to stop. I’m telling you to be careful about how visible you make yourself while doing it.”

“I appreciate the concern,” I said, “but even pausing isn’t really an option for me anymore.”

“I know.” He squeezed my shoulder once, which I saw as an oddly paternal gesture from a man who usually kept his distance from sentiment. “Golovin or not, you’re still the most exposed person in this building.”

One of the security men Nikolai had assigned to me—a quiet, broad-shouldered man named Dmitri, not to be confused with Nikolai’s brother, something I’d only sorted out after an embarrassing day of confusion—waited by the elevator when I finally headed out. He nodded once in greeting before falling into step a respectful distance behind me. I’d stopped noticing him most days, the way one stops noticing their own shadow, though his presence felt considerably more reassuring than usual today.

A junior reporter named Priya caught me on my way out, lowering her voice the way people did when they wanted to say something without the whole office overhearing. “There’s talk that Graham’s been more unpredictable lately. Erratic, even by his standards. A source told me two of his own people disappeared last week, not federal witnesses, his own men, gone without explanation.” She hesitated, glancing back toward the newsroom like she wasn’t entirely sure she should be telling me any of this at all. “Just be careful. Whatever you’re chasing, he sounds like he’s coming apart at the seams a little.”

Her warning settled heavily in my chest alongside everything else I was already carrying. The exhaustion of being afraid constantly, every single day, for months on end, was something no one had really warned me about before I’d started any of this.

I made it as far as the parking garage before my phone rang, a blocked number lighting up the screen the same way it always did. Dmitri had already stepped a few paces off, giving me the small measure of privacy he always granted for calls, though I noticed him glancing back the moment my posture changed.

“Camila.” Graham’s voice carried none of the mockery from our last conversation. “Congratulations are in order, I understand. A baby. How wonderful.”

My whole body went cold. “How do you know that?”

“I know a great many things, Camila. I make it my business to know things about people who matter to my interests.” Something almost warm colored his voice. “Family is precious, don’t you think? Legacy. The particular fragility of something small and new, brought into a world as dangerous as the one you and your husband have chosen to occupy.”

“Say what you actually mean, Graham.”

“I simply mean that happiness is rarely as secure as people believe it to be.” His voice dropped lower, and I knew it was deliberate. “You and Nikolai have built something rather lovely together, considering how it started. It would be such a shame to watch it come apart because of choices you’ve both continued making against my interests.”

“Is that a threat against my child?” My voice shook despite every effort to hold it steady, my grip tightening around the phone until my knuckles ached.

“I don’t make idle threats, Camila. You’ve learned that about me by now, I’d think. I’m simply pointing out that wars have casualties. Sometimes those casualties are entirely unintended. Sometimes they aren’t. I haven’t decided yet which category applies to your particular situation, and I find the uncertainty rather entertaining, if I’m honest.”

“You’re a monster,” I said, the words feeling inadequate the moment they left my mouth, too small for the horror of what he was implying.

“I’m a businessman who understands leverage. Give my regards to your husband. Tell him I look forward to whatever he decides to do next.”

I ended the call before thinking, my hand shaking hard enough that the phone nearly slipped from my grip.

“I’m fine,” I told Dmitri, who was beside me instantly, though the words came out thinner than I meant them to. “Just get me home.”