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Except there was. There was always a reason. The apartment that had been searched. The drawers that weren’t quite right. The floorboard in the corner. My father spent his last days under surveillance by a wolf who had decided that Marco Marchelli knew too much. And then my father died of a heart attack at sixty-three, alone, on his kitchen floor, and the official story asks me to believe that the timing was coincidental.

I don’t believe it. I will never believe it.

I sit on the bed and hold the notebook against my chest. The weight of it is different. This time I know who, not what killed him. Not how. Who.

Viktor Voronov. Dominic’s father. The man who handles threats the way my father described: with patience and precision and absolute finality.

Viktor killed my father.

Not Dominic. My father was certain of that. D.V. doesn’t know. Written in cipher by a man who spent fifteen years reading this family.

But my father wrote that ten days before he died. That was then. What about now? Dominic didn’t order the killing. But in the months since, in the weeks since I’ve been in his bed, sharing his life, wearing his mark on my neck and his heartbeat in my chest, has he learned the truth? Does he know what Viktor did?

I think about our conversations. Dominic always talks about my father with careful precision, stopping short of the same invisible line. I know parts of it. Ask me another time.

Does Dominic know?

Not whether Viktor was involved. I’m almost certain he suspects that. Does he know his father killed mine? I don’t know.

And suddenly that distinction doesn’t matter as much as it should. Because Dominic knew there was something to know. He knew Viktor was hiding something about my father’s death. He knew enough to avoid the question. And he climbed into bed beside me every night and let me believe there was nothing he needed to tell me.

Maybe he doesn’t know exactly what Viktor did.

But he knows enough.

And he said nothing.

The anger arrives. Not the thin hot wire I felt in the bathroom mirror. A flood. It rises through my chest and fills my throat and burns behind my eyes, and underneath the anger is grief so raw it feels like the wound is new, like my father died today instead of seven months ago, like the phone call from his neighbor is happening right now and the voice is saying I’m so sorry, honey, he’s gone and the world is ending all over again.

And underneath the grief, the bond. Still there. Still warm. Still pulsing with his heartbeat alongside mine, steady and synchronized, a biological connection that doesn’t care about betrayal or murder or the fact that I no longer know what to believe. The bond says: go to him. The bond says: his arms are where you’re safe. The bond says: home is where he is.

The bond is wrong. Or the bond is right and that’s worse, because if the bond is right then the home I’ve found is built on a grave.

I put the notebook in my bag. I wipe my face. I stand up and look at myself in the mirror over the dresser. A woman with red eyes and a silver scar and a rage that has nowhere to go except the man who’s been holding her every night while keeping the truth about her father’s murder locked away.

I take a cab to his penthouse. I have the code. I have the key.

I let myself in. I sit on the couch in the living room. I put the notebook on the coffee table. I text him three words.

Come home. Now.

Then I wait. In the apartment where I’ve been happy, in the space where he cooked for me and held me and whispered my name against the silver scar on my neck, I wait for the man I love to walk through the door so I can ask him about my father’s murder.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Dominic

Three words on my phone.

Come home. Now.

The bond has been sending me signals for the last hour, a rising tide of distress and fury that I felt building while I was in a meeting about the Henderson project. I excused myself twice, both times pressing my hand against my chest where the bond was throwing sparks like a downed power line. I knew something was happening. I told myself it could wait.

The text tells me it can’t.

I leave the office without explanation. The bond is pouring her emotions into me, anger and grief layered so tightly I can’t separate them.

I ride the elevator up. I open the door.