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I drove to New York before sunrise.

Maxim insisted on a shadow vehicle, though he kept it far enough behind that I never saw the headlights unless I looked for them. My brothers understood the difference between giving a man solitude and leaving him unprotected. It was another distinction I had once believed I understood better than anyone.

The cemetery lay beyond the city, where the buildings thinned, and bare winter trees pressed close to the road. A cold wind moved across the rows of graves, carrying the scent of wet earth and old snow. Mila’s grave marker stood beneath a maple tree that had been young when Raffaele arranged the burial. Its branches stretched wide now, black against the gray sky.

I stopped several feet away.

Mila Antonova.

The dates beneath her name described a life far too short for the woman who had filled every corner of her apartment and my world with warmth, mismatched rugs, and a kettle she’d always forgotten before it screamed.

I touched the collar inside my coat pocket.

“I’ve needed to speak with you for a long time.”

My voice sounded wrong in the open air. I had spoken to her inside my head for thirteen years. At the grave, silence had always seemed more respectful, but perhaps silence was only another place I hid.

“I used you.”

The wind moved through the dead grass.

“Not your memory. Your death.”

I stepped closer to the stone.

“I made your death into a rule to live by. Love creates targets. Women die. Children die. The man who loves them either controls every danger or fails them.”

The truth had governed most of my adult life. I had built homes, businesses, vehicles, and entire security systems around it. Every plan began with the assumption that affection was a weakness already observed by an enemy.

“I thought sending Alessia away meant I had learned from what happened to you. I thought distance was protection. That if I put an ocean between us, Dmitry couldn’t take her away from me.”

I lowered my hand to the top of the stone. The granite was cold beneath my palm.

“You were not a lesson,” I whispered. “You were a woman I loved.”

The knot in my chest wound tighter.

“I honored you by remembering who you were and how you died,” I said. “I didn’t honor you by abandoning my wife.”

Alessia was alive at Maxim’s estate. She was furious because I’d hurt her. She had done everything correctly.

I was the one in the wrong.

“I love her,” I told the grave. “And loving her means listening to her while she is still here to speak.”

I removed my hand from the stone.

“I’m sorry.”

My apology was for Mila, for the child we never knew, and for Alessia. And right now, only one of them could decide whether it was enough.

* * *

Night had fallen again by the time I reached Maxim’s estate. The canceled flight papers lay on the passenger seat beside Alessia’s passport. Her collar and leash sat inside the black box in my coat pocket. At the front gate, the guard waited for Maxim’s authorization before letting my vehicle through. Then, he met me in the entrance hall.

“Will you ask her if she’ll see me?”

His eyes moved over my face. “And if she says no?”