"She's had three weeks with nothing but time and a reason to hate us. If she was going to burn us, she'd have done it already." He lifts one shoulder. "I'm in."
Rafael is the one who surprises us all. He leans back in his chair and considers me for a long beat while the morning light from the window behind him throws his shadow long across the carpet. His signet ring catches the light as his fingers unlace and resettle beneath his chin.
"We've all brought our wives into this world." His voice carries the weight of a man who has walked this particular road and found something worth the risk on the other side. "Persia, Katriana, they know what we are and who we are. They carry that knowledge and they've earned our trust with it." His dark eyes hold mine with an intensity that makes my chest tight. "Ilona is one of us now. She deserves to know."
Drake looks between Rafael and Kon, reads the room with the sharp perception that makes him invaluable at a negotiating table, and exhales slowly through his nose. "If she burns us with it, I'm blaming you."
"Noted."
Rafael adds, his voice dropping into the register that means the conversation is over and the verdict is final. "Make it count, brother. You won't get another chance."
That afternoon, I assemble the USB drive at my desk, something that holds all the potential of blowing up in my face.
The office is quiet as the late afternoon sun throws long rectangles of gold across the carpet. My coffee has gone cold for the third time today.
The progress bar crawls across my screen. I watch it the way a man watches a fuse burning toward the charge he lit himself. Every file transferred, every password documented, every access code verified and recorded. The Marchetti dossier, the Syndicate operations, the intelligence networks I've cultivated across three cities, all of it flowing from my secured servers onto a device that weighs less than an ounce and carries the power to end everything I've spent a decade building.
When the transfer completes, I pull two sheets of heavy cream stationery from my desk drawer and grab a pen. This has to be handwritten because I know Ilona. When personal time goes into making something, she notices.
The first note takes three attempts before the words come out right, each discarded draft crumpled into the wastebasket at my feet. The final version is simple because the truth always is when you stop trying to dress it in strategy.
Everything I have. Everything I am. It's yours now. You hold the key to my kingdom in your hand. And my trust.
The second note takes longer. My hand shakes on the third sentence, and the ink bleeds slightly where my grip falters, leaving a small imperfection in the script that I don't correct because perfection is another mask and I'm done wearing those.
I'm outside. If you want me to leave, I will. If you want to scream at me, I'll listen. If you want to destroy me with what's on that drive, I understand. But if there's any chance, any at all, that you could choose me, I'm asking. No leverage. Nogames. Just me, asking to be chosen just one more time. - Your husband.
I seal both notes with the USB drive inside a package that I hand to Marco. Outside of my brothers, he’s the only one I would trust with this task.
"Luna Moone's safe house. Hand it directly to Ilona Valentina. No one else."
Marco nods without questions. I give him a fifteen-minute head start and then follow.
The converted warehouse sits in a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and modest brownstones, a part of the city where the wealth is old enough to be quiet about it and the residents mind their own business with a discretion born of having their own secrets to keep. I park across the street beneath an elm whose bare branches scratch against the roof.
I turn off the engine. The tick of the cooling engine fills the silence, metallic and rhythmic, counting down to something I can't predict.
Hours pass. The sky shifts from pale gold to amber to deep blue, streetlamps flickering to life along the sidewalk as the evening settles in. My hands rest on the steering wheel, the leather cold beneath stiff fingers, the viper's ruby eyes on my right hand catching the streetlight every time a car passes.
Shadows move behind the warehouse curtains. At one point a figure crosses past a second-floor window and my chest seizes. Dark hair, a posture I would know from any distance. She doesn't look down at the street.
I rehearse what I'll say if she lets me in and discard every version. None of them undo the file. None of them are good enough. No words ever will be.
I think about what happens if she doesn't let me in. The drive home to an empty mansion. Custody arrangements. Weekend visits measured in hours. My baby growing up knowing her father as the man who shows up on schedule rather than the one who tucks her in at night.
The front door opens.
Luna stands in the frame, her dark curls wild, her gray eyes hard as flint. Paint streaks her jeans and the oversized flannel she's wearing, which means she's been working, which means she's been coping the only way she knows how with the chaos my choices have brought into her life.
She doesn't greet me. Doesn't invite me in. Just studies me from the top of the steps with a look that says the jury is still out and I'm not helping my case by sitting in the cold like a stray dog.
Fuck it.
I cross the street. The cold air bites through my jacket and the pavement is slick beneath my shoes from an evening mist that has settled over the neighborhood like a veil. I stop at the base of her steps and wait.
"She saw what's on the drive." Luna's voice is flat, stripped of warmth, giving nothing away. A steel wire stretched taut between neutrality and the fury I can see coiled behind her eyes.
"I figured as much. Hoped."