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“Well,” she says. “Because you gave me the heads up, I’ll return the favor. The other night, Sera was going to tell you how she felt. She was going to tell Saint, too. She was going to admit she’d fallen for a Harrington.”

A flash blooms without warning on the eastern side of the docks.

White-orange fire tears upward, lighting the cranes from beneath and turning the rain to sparks against the glass. The sound hits a moment later, a low detonation that travels through steel, glass and height before shifting the floor beneath my feet.

Another flash breaks across the dock road.

One explosion could be an accident. Two is an attack.

“Is Sera at home?”

“What was that noise?”

Smoke rises beyond the warehouses and swallows the floodlights.

I press my hand to the glass. “Where is she, Eilish?”

“I don’t know. The last I heard, she was going to the docks with her brothers.”

“When?”

“This evening. She said Rafe needed her there for something. Fionn, what’s happening?”

A third detonation punches through the smoke near the southern access road and my lungs cramp. The Tallon docks disappear into red light and shadow.

Sera is somewhere beneath it. If I lose her tonight, she’ll never know I was lying. I spin on my heel and march to the door.

“Fionn––”

I end the call and hit Brennan’s number as I cross the penthouse.

He answers on the second ring, and it rubs me up the wrong way. Graves would’ve been the one calling me.

“Fionn.”

“The Tallon docks are under attack.”

“I’m seeing it.”

“Did my father sanction it?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“It’s not ours,” Brennan says. “If Alasdair planned an attack this size, he didn’t route it through our men.”

That isn’t a Graves answer. He would’ve known before I asked, had a car waiting, men moving and the name of whoever lit the first fuse.

He spent years teaching me how to walk into war, then stood beside me every time I did.

For one hateful second, my breath locks in my lungs, and I come close to fucking tears. This will be the first war I enter without him.

I clear my throat and throw open the door. “The Crowes must be making their next move.” “Get men in there. Those fuckers aren’t going to sabotage our logistics.”

“I’m on it.”

“Three cars.” I look over the armed men forming up around me as one calls the lift. “No Harrington plates near the main gate. We take the old customs road and come in behind the warehouses.”