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I forced the older Henry away. I couldn’t grieve moments that had not happened yet and still remain strong enough to protect them.

“Baby, what are you doing?” Salvatore’s voice whispered in my mind.

I closed my eyes because answering an empty room felt less frightening than pretending I had not heard him. “What needs to be done.”

“There has to be another way.” His voice held the tenderness he used whenever he already understood the answer but wanted to give me room to change it.

“If there was, you would have found it.” My fingers pressed into the floorboards. “You looked until they killed you.”

“What about Henry?” The question nearly broke the place inside me that still believed resolve could survive love.

“He is safe with your sister. He is protected.” I breathed through the pain before adding the truth I needed Salvatore to know. “Illyria loves him. She promised to live for him.”

“I didn’t want this for you.” Grief gave his voice sorrow because my memories couldn’t imagine him offering approval.

“I know.” I whispered the words into the empty bedroom. “Will it hurt?”

“Only for a little bit, baby.” His answer came with the mercy my frightened mind required.

“Will you stay with me?” I asked. The question belonged to the woman beneath my resolve, the one who had spent years waking alone and still feared death might be another place Salvatore couldn’t reach.

“Always.” His word settled around me with the warmth of arms I could no longer feel.

I knew Salvatore was not in the room. The dead didn’t wait in empty houses or speak from patches of sunlight. His voice came from everything he had left inside me: every promise, every touch, and every morning I had survived because memory told me to live until the next one.

This time, his voice was not asking me to live forever. It was helping me reach the final morning without running.

I remained on the floor until sunlight moved beyond the window. Hunger tightened my stomach, but the empty kitchen held nothing, and eating belonged to a future my body no longer trusted. Outside, the city went on with deliveries, horns, conversations, and children being hurried toward places they expected to return from.

I refused to think about those I would leave behind. I didn’t picture Rurik waking beside an empty room or finding the disabled alarm. I didn’t imagine Mom opening the brownstone door and knowing, before she found the files, that her daughter was gone. I didn’t let myself hear Dad say my name with a father’s right that had reached him too late.

I focused on what my absence would protect. Henry would no longer be leverage because Poseidon’s system had been exposed and its guardians named. My parents would have the proof Uncle Sal needed to destroy whatever remained. Rowen would not have to inherit Salvatore’s burden, and Reagan’s release would place the truth in so many hands that no single keeper could be tortured into silence again.

Sylvia could kill me. She couldn’t return the secret to darkness.

That certainty carried me downstairs as afternoon settled over the bare rooms. I stood in the front parlor where sunlight had begun to fade from the floor and imagined Salvatore beside me one final time. His hand rested at the small of my back while Henry’s laughter moved through the house we should have filled together.

For several breaths, I allowed myself to live there. Then a key entered the front lock.

The imagined laughter disappeared, but my resolve remained. I faced the door with empty hands and a straight spine while the person who had stolen our future entered the house built from my family’s lies. Sylvia St. James had come.

CHAPTER THIRTY

The front door opened slowly.

Sylvia St. James entered as if every lock in the brownstone already belonged to her. She closed the door, peeled one black leather glove from her hand, and studied the stripped foyer with mild distaste. No guards flanked her. She was shorter than I had imagined, with silver hair arranged neatly around a soft face age had rounded rather than hardened. Pearl earrings rested against her ears, and her sensible shoes made almost no sound.

She looked like the sort of grandmother who baked from memory and slipped a child an extra cookie after his mother said no.

For one disorienting second, I wondered whether the wrong woman had come.

Then her gaze found me.

Nothing in Sylvia’s expression changed, yet the air shifted. Warmth had never lived inside those gentle features. She had simply learned to arrange herself into a shape people trusted. The softness was camouflage, and arriving alone was a declaration of power.

“I had hopes for you,” she said, “but like all my other children, you are a disappointment.”

Her voice stripped away the last of the disguise. It was low and cultivated, almost affectionate, with contempt settled beneath every word.