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“Why not?” he asked, searching my face.

“Because everyone is safer without me.”

Maxim rose behind his desk. “Ms. Kelley, would you kindly elaborate on your concerns?” His gaze shifted toward Rurik and hardened. “You assured me you had everything under control.”

Rurik gave a harsh, exhausted laugh. “It is not easy trying to hold this together. You try it, boss. Every time I think I have a handle on it, something else detonates.”

The word containment passed through me like ice. I looked at Maxim, knowing he had seen my order.

“Nothing is under control,” I said. “My grandfather kept the Society’s books. Eamon O’Malley recorded every payment, every hidden child, every blackmail arrangement, and every alliance built on a lie. When he died, the knowledge passed to Nolan, and Nolan passed it to Tyran Fitzpatrick, who chose someone else. The names change, but the keeper remains.”

Gunner swore beneath his breath. I looked at Rowen because the cruelest secret in the room belonged to him, and I was still the person refusing to give it back.

“Salvatore found pieces of those records,” I continued. “He understood the Society didn’t survive because one person ruled it. It survived because every generation taught another person where the bodies were buried and which children could be used to keep them there. As long as those files exist, my family and my son will never be free.”

Rowen studied me with an understanding that felt too close to grief. “It has to be me,” he said quietly.

My fingers tightened around his. “You do this, Rowen, and there’s no going back. You’ll have a mark on your back until the day you die.”

“I already do, sweetheart.” He rose and faced the other men. “Explain to me how I can keep her secret and do nothing when I have the power to end this now?”

“She’s mine!” Gunner roared, surging forward as Sebastian caught him. “She’s happy, Rowen. You do this and she’ll be marked for life!”

Rowen stood his ground. “How is she any different from Madigan, Remi, or Grace? It falls to us—the men in their lives—to protect them. Do you honestly believe Vladmir would stand idle if his daughter were in danger? Or that Maxim would stop at anything to protect Illyria? King for Grace? Reaper for Remi? The only way this ends is by dragging the truth into the open.”

Sebastian’s eyes widened.

“Duck!” he shouted as he drove Gunner toward the floor.

The first bullet shattered the window behind Maxim.

Rurik reached me before the glass did. His body struck mine and carried me down as gunfire tore through the office. His arms closed over my head, his chest covering my back, and for one unbearable instant, the past replaced him with Salvatore. Another man who loved me had put his body between mine and death.

I screamed Rurik’s name and tried to turn beneath him. He tightened his hold while bullets chewed through the walls and men returned fire around us.

“Don’t die for me,” I begged. “Please don’t make me survive that again.”

“Then move with me.” His mouth was against my ear, his breath harsh but alive. “Choose now, Madigan.”

Rowen cried out somewhere to my left. Blood darkened his sleeve as Gunner dragged him behind an overturned table. I reached toward him, but another burst of gunfire struck the couch where we’d been sitting and filled the air with torn fabric. They knew where I had been.

This wasn’t a warning. No one shouted demands or asked for the files. The shooters cut the room apart with the cold discipline of people completing an instruction. This was containment.

Rurik lifted me when Vladmir opened a path toward the rear door. I wanted to remain with Rowen, to stop one more person from bleeding because he had followed my absence into danger, but staying would give the bullets a reason to keep searching the room.

I closed my hand around Rurik’s and ran.

Salvatore had been given thirty-six hours between the order and the men who came to carry it out. I had been given significantly less.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Gunfire followed me back to the safe house. It lived in every settling board and passing engine, turning ordinary sounds into bullets striking concrete. Whenever I closed my eyes, Rurik’s body fell over mine again. Rowen cried out beside the overturned table, blood spreading down his sleeve while the men who had entered Pier 87 with secrets left carrying wounds.

The attackers vanished before Maxim’s men secured the docks. They left behind shell casings, shattered windows, and two dead Russians whose names I didn’t know until Vladmir spoke them over the radio. Rowen needed stitches, but the bullet had not touched bone. Everyone kept repeating that as if the narrow distance between skin and bone changed the fact that he had bled because he came looking for me.

Before dawn, Rurik moved us to another safe house. This one was smaller than the first, hidden above a closed tailor shop in Queens, with two bedrooms and windows reinforced behind ordinary curtains. He checked every room twice, then a third time after finding nothing, because survival had taught him that absence could be another kind of concealment.

I sat at the kitchen table while he cleaned a cut along his temple. Dried blood stained his collar, and a bruise had begun darkening beneath his jaw where his body had struck the floor over mine. I couldn’t look at it without hearing myself beg him not to die for me.