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More footsteps crashed through the house. Mom’s scream reached me before her hands did. She fell beside me and gathered my head into her lap while Rurik kept pressure against my chest. Her arms closed around me with the same strength that had held me when I first entered the world.

Dad dropped to my other side. Behind him, Uncle Sal staggered into the room with Sinclair, Maxim, and Duncan. Sinclair was already on the phone, demanding an ambulance and repeating the address when the operator failed to understand him through the shouting. Maxim barked orders for his men to secure the building and find Sylvia. Uncle Sal sent others toward the rear stairs and the roof, his voice breaking beneath every command.

All those powerful men filled the empty house, and not one of them could make the blood return to my body.

Dad took my hand. His other hand moved my hair away from my face with unbearable tenderness before he bent and kissed my forehead. I felt his mouth tremble against my skin.

“Stay with us, baby,” he whispered. “Please stay.”

I couldn’t look at him. Salvatore stood so close now I could see the familiar scar near his brow and the love that death hadn’t managed to take from his face. He held one hand toward me.

“I see him, Daddy.”

Mom gasped. Her arms tightened until I could feel her heartbeat against my cheek. “No! Baby, don’t leave me. Please.”

Her grief tried to anchor me. For one agonizing moment, I was small again, safe because my mother held me, and certain nothing could reach me through her arms. I wanted to stay for her. I wanted to remain her daughter longer than death would allow.

“I’m sorry, Momma.”

Tears streamed down her face and fell warm against mine. She shook her head over and over, as though refusing the words could refuse everything coming after them. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”

The room dimmed around her. Rurik begged someone to hurry. Sinclair’s voice fractured over the phone. Duncan began to pray. Uncle Sal’s orders ended in a broken sound, while Maxim stood at the door with murder in his face and helplessness in his hands.

None of them could see what waited for me.

“He’s waiting for me, Momma.”

Mom’s crying became uncontrollable. She bent over me, pressing kisses into my hair, my forehead, any part of me she could reach, as though love applied urgently enough might close the hole in my chest.

Dad’s fingers tightened around mine. When he spoke, his voice was broken, each word dragged through the part of him that wanted to keep me and the part that loved me enough not to make dying another burden. “It’s okay, baby. You can go. I’ll take care of your momma.”

I closed my eyes.

Salvatore’s fingers reached mine, warm and certain, and the pain loosened its hold as I went toward the man I had loved in one life and would love for all eternity.

EPILOGUE

Rurik

March 2026

I stood beneath a ponderosa pine at the edge of the gravesite and watched the world come to Montana to bury Madigan.

The sky cleared before the service. Sunlight spread across the mountains without warming them, turning the snow along the ridges silver. Beyond the trees, the cabin still stood with smoke lifting from its chimney, just as it must have when Salvatore and Madigan lived there with their infant son, pretending they possessed more time.

Two graves waited on the slope behind it.

For years, Salvatore’s stone had stood alone. His name was cut into gray granite beside the dates of a life too brief to hold everything he had loved. Now the earth beside him had been opened, and Madigan’s casket rested above it.

She had found her way back to him.

They had waited to bury her.

Not because grief had been able to bear the delay, or because anyone imagined time would make the act gentler. The waiting had been practical at first. Bodies needed to be moved. Roads needed to be secured. Men who had once measured loyalty by borders and blood needed time to cross half a continent without bringing war behind them. Madigan had gathered enemies even in death, and no one would lower her into the ground until Henry could stand at the graveside without becoming another target.

Then Caity had looked at the calendar and refused every other date. Cian did not argue. No one did. Salvatore and Madigan had chosen each other on this day years before anyone learned how violently the world would punish them for it. If she had to return to Montana in a casket, her family would not let death sever what life had failed to break. They would place her beside Salvatore on their anniversary, not as a mercy to the dead, but as the last decision the living could make in the shape of love.

The thought should have comforted me. It didn’t. Love was not supposed to ask the living to be grateful when the dead were reunited. I was glad she had been buried where she wanted to remain, beside the man she had loved beyond reason, beyond anger, and finally beyond life. I was also selfish enough to hate the ground for receiving her when I would have given anything to keep her above it.