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Rurik leaned back and crossed his arms. Around us, laughter and clinking glasses receded until our booth seemed suspended inside a silence too heavy for an ordinary bar.

Rowen held my gaze. “I have to know, Maddie. Whatever it costs.”

He meant it, and that was what frightened me.

People spoke of cost as if determination gave them the right to choose who paid it. Rowen was willing to suffer, but the truth would not stop with him. He couldn’t volunteer Nicoletta, Brian, the Valentinettis, the IRA, or Henry. He couldn’t pay the price on behalf of Salvatore, who had already died trying to keep these secrets from being used.

“She said no,” Rurik said, low and sharp.

The words were aimed at Rowen, but they reached something in me that had spent years believing men only respected a woman’s refusal when another man enforced it. Rurik didn’t explain my reasoning, soften the rejection, or suggest I owed Rowen more compassion. He didn’t turn my decision into his command. He simply stood behind the boundary I had drawn.

Rowen sat back, frustration tightening his mouth. When he spoke again, the question was for Rurik. “Where can I find Jasper Michaels?”

Rurik let out a low chuckle. “He does seem to be the man of the hour. I told you to make sure he was dead, but you didn’t listen.”

“Fuck you, Rurik.”

Rurik’s smile remained untouched by Rowen’s anger. “You should know you aren’t the only one looking. The Italian Council wants him too.”

Rowen’s eyes narrowed. “And let me guess—you’re looking for him as well.”

Rurik’s grin widened without reaching his eyes. “Jasper Michaels has a gift for making powerful enemies, and some debts refuse to stay buried. But yes, I have been tasked with finding him. Unlike you, when I do, I’ll make sure he stays dead.”

The threat settled over the table without needing explanation. Jasper belonged to another current of violence circling us, but the Italian Council’s interest made my skin tighten. Every path seemed to bend back toward the organizations Salvatore had linked through the genealogies. Men hunted enemies while the Society preserved the private truths that could decide where they looked—and who they killed when they arrived.

Rowen pulled out his wallet, counted several hundred-dollar bills, and tossed them onto the table with more force than necessary. Disappointment weighed visibly on him as he slid out of the booth, and guilt moved through me when his eyes met mine one last time.

I had known him most of my life. I knew the man who would leave Calloway’s still searching, and I knew the boy inside him who had once deserved an honest answer. Refusing him didn’t feel like protection. It felt like becoming another person who looked at Rowen and decided he couldn’t be trusted with the truth of himself.

The resemblance to Nolan’s methods sickened me. He had called control protection and treated ignorance as care. I needed to believe my silence was different because it claimed nothing from Rowen, but intention couldn’t erase the wound. Salvatore had understood there was sometimes no innocent choice—only a decision about which harm might leave everyone alive.

But Salvatore had trusted me to understand the file once it reached my hands. He had not preserved Rowen’s genealogy so I could ease my conscience by revealing it at the first sign of pain. He had guarded the truth because everyone connected to it remained alive only while it was handled with care.

Rowen walked out of Calloway’s and disappeared into the night, no closer to the answers he had come to find.

I remained in the booth, staring at the money he had left behind as the bar slowly reclaimed its sound. Rurik’s arm still rested along the seat behind me. He didn’t touch me, congratulate me, or tell me I had made the right choice.

“He hates me now,” I whispered.

“No,” Rurik said. “He hates that you know.”

The distinction offered no comfort. Maybe it was not meant to.

I looked toward the door and understood something terrible about Salvatore’s silence. Protecting innocent people didn’t always look like rescue. Sometimes it meant allowing someone you loved to believe you were cruel. Sometimes it meant carrying the answer while another person begged for it and accepting that their pain was safer than what the truth might unleash.

I still had not forgiven Salvatore for making that choice for me.

For the first time, I understood what it must have cost him to keep making it.

Understanding didn’t absolve him, and it didn’t make the loneliness of our marriage less real. It only placed me inside the impossible space where he had lived: loving people enough to wound them with silence because the alternative might bury them. I had spent years mourning the man I believed had never lied to me. Now I was mourning the reasons he had.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Nikita’s photograph lay beside Salvatore’s file, her dark eyes turned toward the ceiling. The other genealogies remained spread across the table. Rowen’s file sat at the center, and the sight of it brought back the night at Calloway’s so sharply I could still hear him asking for the names of his parents. Names I’d been determined to deny him.

Rurik locked the door behind us, checked the alarm panel, and moved through the house in a silent circuit before returning to the table. I didn’t ask whether he thought someone had entered. His suspicion no longer felt excessive. Salvatore had spent years teaching me that vigilance was the shape fear took when a man refused to call himself afraid.

I removed my coat but didn’t sit. Rowen’s face stayed between the papers and me: hurt disguised as anger while I told him his marker meant nothing. I had protected Henry, but protection had not made the decision clean. It had only allowed me to choose which person went home wounded.