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A young woman stared up at me.

I lifted the photograph carefully. I didn’t recognize her, but something about her face reached into a place beneath memory and pulled. My pulse slowed, each beat heavy with an instinct I couldn’t explain. Salvatore had kept her picture with the truth that destroyed everything I believed I understood about his death.

I raised my gaze to Rurik. “Who is she?”

His attention settled on the photograph, and the silence before he answered carried the weight of another life already touched by ours.

“Someone Salvatore was looking for before he died.”

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The young woman in the photograph had become familiar without ever becoming known.

I had studied her until the safe-house windows shifted from black to the bruised gray before dawn. She stood on a crowded street beneath a Cyrillic sign, turned just enough toward the camera to make me wonder whether she knew she was being watched. Dark hair framed a face that might have been beautiful if fear had not trained me to search every feature for evidence. She looked younger than I was, though grief had made me feel ancient enough to mistrust that judgment. Nothing about her clothes, her posture, or the paper cup between her hands should have mattered.

What mattered was that Salvatore had placed her photograph inside a file about me.

NIKITA BELOVA had been written across the back in his hand.

Her name was the only certainty Rurik could give me. He didn’t know who had taken the photograph, whether Salvatore had found her, or why she belonged among the secrets my husband died protecting. The attached pages offered dates, unfamiliar names, and no explanation for why looking at her felt like standing before a door Salvatore had locked from the other side.

Rurik spent most of the night across the room, granting me the solitude of a widow without the privacy of a prisoner. He made coffee I never drank and spread the remaining folders across the table. Some contained only a photograph and a page of notes. Others were organized by cities, surnames, and organizations whose violence had shaped my life long before anyone asked whether I wanted to inherit it.

At first, I thought he was arranging evidence.

Then the same names began appearing in different folders.

I set Nikita’s photograph beside Salvatore’s notes and reached for the nearest folder. Haizley Walker’s name marked the tab. Inside were an altered birth certificate and Salvatore’s notes linking her to Maxim Fedorov and a woman called Veronika Delacourt. Layla Valentinetti’s file carried the name she had always known, but beneath it waited two others: Sebastian Capribella and Dominika Fedorov.

Jessica Banks Keller’s file returned again and again to Cassandra Montclair and William Doherty. Jackson Williams led backward to Kane Baudelaire and Darcy Murphy. Different children. Different names. Different families that had raised them. The same deliberate fractures between blood and identity.

I pulled one file closer, then another. Paper whispered over wood, too soft for the violence recorded on it. The table became a family tree someone had cut apart so no one could see its true shape.

My pulse quickened.

“These aren’t dossiers,” I said.

Rurik looked up from the folder in his hands. Exhaustion had roughened his face, but his attention sharpened at once. “What?”

“The files.” I stood so quickly the chair scraped backward. “They aren’t really about what these people did.”

His brow tightened as he looked across pages he had guarded for years. “They contain surveillance, financial records, family affiliations⁠—”

“Because those were the places Salvatore had to look.” I moved Haizley’s folder beside Layla’s, then added Jessica’s and Jackson’s. “He wasn’t sorting people by what they’d done. He was trying to prove who they were.”

Rurik’s confusion should have made me question myself. Instead, it sharpened the pattern into focus. He understood the Society’s rules, its violence, and the machinery that moved money and bodies through the dark. But Salvatore had been born into one criminal dynasty and married into another. He understood something more intimate: in our world, parentage was never private history. It was territory.

“I need the Valentinetti file Sinclair gave me.”

Rurik went still. “Where is it?”

“In my bag.”

He disappeared down the hall without asking why I had kept it close. A file had already destroyed every certainty I possessed about my father. I had not been willing to let this one out of my sight.

When Rurik returned, he placed my bag on the table instead of reaching inside. The courtesy mattered. He had taken me against my will and brought me to a house I couldn’t leave, but he understood that some violations didn’t become less intimate because men called them necessary.

I opened the bag myself and removed Sinclair’s file.