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One word, and that was all it took. Because Yakov has stood beside me for nine years through things I will not put a name to, and I have heard that man report a house full of bodies in the voice he uses to order coffee.

This was not that voice.

No, this was something else.

“Say it.” I practically growled, my jaw tight as I gritted my teeth.

“She’s gone.”

And just like that, the noise came back.

And this time it came back…

Screaming.

24

CORWIN

ANNA

My name is Erin Shaw.

I have been saying it for two weeks, and it still comes out of me like a stone. Because this time, I didn’t even have my first name to rely on and losing that part was harder than I imagined it would be. There are over six hundred thousand people named Anna in the United States, I know because I Googled it years ago. It’s why I felt comfortable still using it.

But not after meeting my ghost.

A man who in just over a week had taken control of a prison, its guards and its warden. Which meant that he must have had the type of connections I couldn’t even fully fathom on the outside, and that was what truly terrified me.

I had been running for over three years from someone I knew was skilled enough to find me but now, it felt like I was up against the master.

A man who in a shower block had put his mouth against my ear and said my name like he owned it.

So, I buried it.

I sat in a diner in the middle of the night only four days after I ran, with a coffee going cold and a napkin in front of me. I wrote down seven names and crossed out six, and the one I didn’t cross out was the one that made me feel absolutely nothing at all.

Erin Shaw.

Twenty-six years old. Registered nurse. No accent worth placing, no story worth asking about, and a face that has never once been interesting enough to remember. And it cost me the last true thing I had left from my past.

Except a name written on a napkin is not a name, it’s a wish. It doesn’t open a bank account, or hold up against a licensing board, or get you through the door of a building with two fences around it. Which meant there was precisely one person on this earth who could make a napkin into a life.

There always had been.

Duke is honestly the only reason I am still alive, and the only person I care about who knows who I actually am.

His real name is Marcus Dukanovic and there are perhaps six people alive who could tell you that. Everybody else calls him Duke, and most of them have never seen his face, and a fair number of them believe he is just a rumor. He was my father’s best friend for twenty-two years.

And despite having my own thoughts about my father’s life choices, he was a good dad. But there was no denying who he was.

He was a criminal.

Not a colorful one. Not the kind you get in movies with a code and a nice suit and a rule about civilians. He was a working criminal in a working town. He did fifteen years across three sentences for things I mostly didn’t know about at the time and found out about later. And he was, without any exception at all, the kindest man I had ever known.

He taught me how to ride a bike. He came to every single school thing he was not in custody for. He cried at my Christmas pageant. But he also came home one night when I was nine years old and washed his hands in the kitchen sink for a very long time. Long enough that I remember standing in the doorway in my pajamas watching the water go pink and telling myself it must have been paint.

He also kept a man off me for a year and a half, without ever once saying a word about it to me. But my father died when I was twenty-three, and I don’t like to think about how or why. It’s easier that way.