Page 52

“Turn around!” I screamed.

He passed two vehicles, slipped between a delivery truck and a van, then crossed three lanes toward an exit with barely enough room to make it. The sedan followed, clinging to us as the highway gave way to restaurants, gas stations, and stores.

People moved beneath the bright signs, carrying drinks and shopping bags, unaware that armed men were hunting the woman trapped inside the black SUV passing them. Their ordinary lives hurt to look at. Somewhere, a woman was deciding what to make for dinner without wondering whether the people she loved would still be alive when she reached them.

“What did Sinclair tell you?” I asked.

“Enough,” Rurik replied as he turned into a gas station.

“Enough for you to lie to me?”

“Enough to know your father was used to draw you out.”

The words stole what remained of my breath. The message lived inside my head even without the phone, three ordinary sentences sharpened by gunfire.

Your mother needs you.

I had obeyed before fear allowed me to question how the message had reached me or why no one had called. Whoever sent it had known my mother’s name would strip reason from me. They had known Cian mattered enough to make every instinct except reaching him disappear.

“Used by who?”

Rurik drove past the pumps without slowing. The sedan entered behind us, but a truck blocked it long enough for him to cut behind the building and emerge onto another street. He took two more turns, carrying us between dark houses and trees heavy with summer leaves.

The headlights vanished.

Relief never came. The empty mirror only gave fear more places to hide. I watched every pair of lights approaching from behind, waiting for one of them to settle into the same relentless distance.

Rurik continued for several miles before easing his foot from the accelerator. He didn’t relax. His gaze kept returning to the mirror as though the darkness might give the men back if he looked away too long.

“Her name is Sylvia St. James,” he finally said.

The name meant nothing to me. It wasn’t among the list in the files my mother had shown me from my grandfather’s office. It sounded respectable enough to be carved into stone above a hospital entrance, the kind of name spoken at charity galas while suffering remained hidden behind locked doors.

“Who is she?”

Rurik drew a slow breath. “She is Cian’s mother.”

The road seemed to shift beneath me. I caught the edge of the seat, needing something solid while his words moved through everything I knew about my father.

“No.” My head slipped side to side with my denial. “I knew his parents.”

Faces moved through my memory, people I had accepted as part of Cian’s history because no one had ever given me reason to question them. Another truth had been living beneath the one my family allowed me to see. I was so tired of discovering that every certainty in my life had a hidden room.

“Cian was adopted,” Rurik explained.

“Adopted?” The word slipped between my lips on a breath barely above a whisper. “Did he know?”

“Not until recently.”

The word carried too many places to hide. My family had taught me that recently could mean yesterday or years ago, depending upon how long they needed the truth to remain theirs.

“How recently?” I asked.

“I don’t know exactly when he learned her name. Sinclair only told me what was necessary to keep you alive.”

“What was necessary according to Sinclair,” I scoffed.

“Yes.”