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My attention moved past her to the five men. They hadn’t relaxed, and the room seemed too small for the amount of violence waiting along its back wall.

Reagan followed my gaze and smirked. “Ignore the brat pack. They seem to think I can’t take care of myself.”

The broadest man growled while the others smirked.

“Who are they?” I asked.

“An annoyance I’ve learned to live with.” Reagan rolled her eyes and leaned forward. “They won’t interfere unless someone does something foolish.”

I placed Salvatore’s page on the table between us, his handwriting visible beneath the restaurant’s red light. REAGAN JESSOP. POSEIDON. Two names separated by years of silence and the grave that had kept him from explaining either.

“How did you know my husband?”

Reagan rested two fingers against the paper without touching Salvatore’s writing. “Through Donatella Stevens. We worked together at Poseidon Innovation before she became part of the Valentinetti family through Lorenzo. Salvatore trusted her. Eventually, she decided he could trust me too.”

“What did you do at Poseidon?”

“At first, I believed I was building something useful. Poseidon presents itself as two companies sharing a name. One side develops military technology—surveillance, drones, battlefield communications. The other is pharmaceutical—genetics, neurological research, targeted treatments.”

“And Sylvia St. James owns both.”

Reagan’s gaze sharpened. “Yes.”

The single word carried more hatred than a raised voice could have held.

“Donatella worked on DNA sequencing. I built the application that compared genetic data against financial, medical, and surveillance records. We were told it would identify inherited diseases and locate missing relatives after wars.”

“But that wasn’t what Sylvia wanted.”

“It was part of what she wanted. Poseidon produced real medicine and defensive technology. It saved lives, which kept good people from seeing the other purpose.” Reagan drew a slow breath. “The lie was that helping people was the only reason Sylvia wanted it.”

Rurik shifted behind me. “What was the other reason?”

Reagan looked at him. “Control.”

The files on Salvatore’s table returned to me: changed birth certificates, concealed parents, and false names placed over stolen lives. I saw Henry asleep in Salvatore’s arms and imagined a machine reducing our son to the organizations carried in his blood.

“The Society didn’t create every secret in those files,” Reagan said. “Families did much of that damage themselves. Men protected power. Women protected children. Governments altered records. The Society simply collected what everyone else was desperate to hide.”

“The children,” I said.

Her eyes held mine. “Especially the children.”

Part of me had wanted the pattern to be something grief had imposed upon Salvatore’s files. Reagan removed that mercy.

“Poseidon’s system preserved those connections. Not in one family tree Sylvia could lose, but in fragments spread across medical archives, adoption registries, military intelligence, bank transfers, and private DNA collections. The application Donatella and I built could assemble them.”

“And you walked away,” I said.

“We ran.” Shame tightened her face. “Donatella recognized it first. I found classified surveillance inside a medical research system. Poseidon wasn’t identifying disease anymore. It was identifying pressure points. We damaged what we could and disappeared.”

“Yet she let you live.”

One of the men behind her gave a quiet, humorless laugh.

Reagan didn’t look around. “Sylvia has tried to correct that oversight more than once.”

I looked at the weapons again and understood the brat pack more clearly.