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She doesn’t believe me. I can see it in the set of her jaw, the way her eyes keep moving to the door like she’s planning an escape route. But she nods anyway because she’s tired and scared and out of better options.

“Thank you,” she says, and the words are polite and distant and nothing like what I want from her.

I step back into the hallway, pulling the door almost closed. “Rest. Explore. Whatever you need. We’ll be downstairs.”

She nods again, and I leave her there, standing in the center of a room that’s too big for one person, surrounded by wealth she didn’t ask for and protection she doesn’t fully trust.

I make it three doors down before my phone rings.

The screen lights up with a name that makes my stomach clench. Dad. I knew this was coming…Noah’s text this morning, the meeting he mentioned, the warehouse where our father conducts the business that keeps this house standing. I should have called him first. I should have gotten ahead of this.

I answer.

“Ryker.” His voice is flat, controlled, the voice he uses when he’s already decided someone needs to be punished. “Care to explain why I’m hearing about a girl from Moore’s people instead of from my own sons?”

I close my eyes and step farther down the hallway, away from Fawn’s door and anyone who might overhear. “It’s handled.”

“It’s not handled. Frank’s men are in the hospital, and my sons are playing house with some server.” He pauses, and I can hear him breathing, measured and deliberate, the way he breathes before he orders someone hurt. “I told you to stay away from her. All of you. That was the deal.”

“There was no deal,” I say, and my voice comes out harder than I intended. “You told us to stay away. We didn’t agree.”

“She’s a liability. A weakness that Frank can exploit, and he’s already exploiting it. Do you understand what you’ve done? You’ve painted a target on her back, and now you’ve moved her into our home like she’s—” He breaks off, and I hear something crack on his end, probably a pen or a glass or someone’s fingers. “Like she’s family.”

The word hangs between us. Family. The thing we don’t talk about, the thing we perform in public and deny in private, the hollow shape of a relationship built on blood and fear and nothing else.

“She’s not family,” I say carefully. “She’s under our protection. There’s a difference.”

“There’s not. Not to the men who want to hurt us. Not to Frank, who is right now planning how to use her against me, against all of us.” Another pause, longer this time. “Get rid of her, Ryker. Today. Send her back to whatever hole she crawled out of and forget she exists.”

I think of her standing in that bedroom, touching the dresser as if it might disappear. I think of her hands shaking as she packed her bag, the way she asked about Bailey before herself, the stubborn fire that keeps her standing when everything in her life has tried to knock her down.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and the words surprise me. I don’t apologize to my father. I haven’t apologized to him since I was twelve years old and learned that regret was just another weapon he could use against me. “We should have been honest with you from the beginning. We should have told you what she means to us.”

“She means nothing,” he says, but there’s a note in his voice now, something that might almost be concern if it came from anyone else. “She’s a distraction. A pretty girl in a world that will chew her up and use her bones to pick its teeth. You’re smarter than this, Ryker. All three of you are smarter than this.”

“Maybe,” I say. “But we’re not better than this.”

I hear him draw breath to respond, and I cut him off before he can.

“No,” I say, and the word is final, absolute, the same tone I use when I’m done negotiating with men who don’t understand that the negotiation is over. “She’s ours. By the end of the week, Fawn will carry our last name.”

The silence stretches. I count my heartbeats—one, two, three, four—waiting for the explosion, the threats, the reminder of who holds the power in this family.

It doesn’t come.

“You’re making a mistake,” my father finally says, and his voice is quiet now, almost soft, which is worse than the shouting. “The kind of mistake that gets people killed. The kind I can’t protect you from.”

“I know,” I say. “But I’m making it anyway.”

I end the call before he can say anything else. My hand is steady. My heart is not.

I stand in the hallway of the house I grew up in, the house that taught me every lesson about power and control and the cost of wanting something you shouldn’t have. Down the hall, Fawn is probably still standing by that dresser, probably still planning her escape route, probably still waiting for the other shoe to drop.

I want to go to her. I want to tell her what I just did, what I just promised, and what I just set in motion, in three sentences, to a man who doesn’t forgive mistakes. I want to warn her that the protection she’s getting comes with a price tag she hasn’t seen yet. Safety in our world is just another cage. I am not the hero she needs and never will be.

But I don’t move. I stand there in the silence of the hallway, listening to the house settle around me, feeling the weight of what I’ve just done pressing down on my chest like a physical thing.

She’s ours.