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The agreement left me with nowhere to direct the argument. Rurik didn’t defend Sinclair or ask me to understand. He accepted the accusation while continuing to do exactly what the other man wanted.
“And she’s the one who hurt Cian?”
“Yes.”
The dashboard cast a faint glow across his face. Every answer emerged too carefully, as though he was separating what he knew from everything he only feared.
My chest closed around the next breath. “How?”
Rurik checked the mirror again. “Tyran Fitzpatrick.”
Tyran’s face rose inside me with the familiarity of family. He had been there for birthdays, Sunday dinners, and the ordinary moments no one thought to guard from a man they trusted. The silence surrounding his disappearance had remained another sealed place inside our family until Rurik filled it with Sylvia’s name.
“Tyran worked for her?”
“He was loyal to her,” Rurik said.
“No.” The denial rose from somewhere younger than reason. Memories of the giant man from my childhood—my uncle’s best friend—shifted beneath the betrayal. “He was loyal to Uncle Sal.”
“He allowed O’Malley to believe that.”
The betrayal reached backward, staining rooms Tyran had once made safer simply by standing inside them. I remembered his hand closing around mine in crowded places and the way no one lowered their voices when he entered. Trust had made him invisible. He knew every person and secret capable of hurting us, and we called him family for remembering where they were kept.
“What did he do?”
“I don’t know everything that happened.”
“But Tyran hurt him?”
“I don’t have the full story.”
“You don’t have anything.”
Rurik accepted the accusation without flinching. “I know Tyran delivered him to Sylvia. I know she used him to lure you out.”
The message changed inside my memory.
Mom needs you.
Sylvia had placed my mother’s fear beneath those words and trusted love to finish what force couldn’t. She’d understood something about me before I knew she existed. I would run toward the people I loved, even when every step carried me into danger.
“She used him as bait,” I whispered.
“Yes.”
“Why would his own mother do that?”
“Because Cian’s value to her is connected to you.”
That answer made him sound like a possession whose worth had changed when he produced something Sylvia wanted. My father had nearly died without ever being seen as a son.
“That doesn’t answer the question.”
Rurik returned us to the highway, but the signs continued carrying us away from Boston. I watched each one pass, measuring the distance growing between Cian and me while another man decided where I belonged.
“Sylvia St. James is the head of the Society,” Rurik said. “Her family was part of its foundation.”
Eamon’s records rose in my mind. Names and payments. Children recorded beside men who believed money made suffering legitimate. Mom and I had searched those pages for the people still alive, but Sylvia’s name had never appeared.
