Harry woke up stiff, his shoulder aching under the fresh bandage Dr. Singh had wrapped the night before. Morning light came through the tall windows of the guest room, soft and gold, the kind of light that made a place look peaceful even when it wasn't.He sat up slowly and looked around the room he'd been sleeping in for two days. It was a nice room. Expensive furniture, a bed that probably cost more than his first car, a view of manicured gardens that stretched out toward a wall he couldn't see the end of. Nice, and also a cage. Nobody had told him he couldn't leave. Nobody had to. The two guards posted near the main staircase, the jammed phone signal, the general sense that every hallway led somewhere he wasn't supposed to go, all of it said the same thing without a single word needing to be spoken.He thought about the old version of himself for a second. That Harry would have tried something dramatic. Climbed out a window, maybe, or offered someone an obscene amount of money to l

The house settled slowly that evening. Brandon left around eight, promising to swing by in the morning to check the property himself. Melissa got Rhiannon fed, got a blanket around her shoulders, and finally, close to ten, Rhiannon said she wanted to lie down. Melissa walked her to her room, and Harry heard the soft murmur of her voice through the wall, steady and reassuring in a way that made something in his chest ache with how little he deserved to be watching it happen.He waited until the house was quiet and then knocked gently on Rhiannon's door."Yeah," came the muffled answer.She was sitting up in bed when he came in, knees drawn to her chest again, still wrapped in the blanket Melissa had given her. Her eyes were dry now, but there was a hollowed out look to her that hadn't been there a few days ago."Can we talk," Harry said. "Really talk. About what happened?"She nodded and shifted over, making room on the edge of the bed. He sat down carefully, mindful of his shoulder, a

England did not care who Harry was.That was the first thing that struck him, stepping out of Heathrow into a gray, drizzling afternoon that didn't part for him the way weather sometimes seemed to back home. No one recognized his name here. No family owed him deference, no business partner scrambled to make his day easier, no dangerous, watchful men gave him room because of who he'd survived or who he'd outmaneuvered. He was just a tired American with a bag and a healing bullet wound, standing in a taxi line like everyone else.It was almost a relief, in a strange way, and almost terrifying in another. He'd built an entire life on leverage. Here, he had none.He'd booked a small hotel in a town a few hours outside London, close to the region Osaka had marked as a possibility, and spent the drive out watching unfamiliar countryside roll past the window, green and wet and utterly indifferent to his sense of urgency.The private investigator he'd found through a contact of Susan's agreed

Fiona called him two days later, her voice carrying something he hadn't heard from her yet. Excitement, carefully controlled. "I found her," she said. "Or I found who she is now, at least." Harry sat up straight on the edge of his hotel bed. "How." "School records, mostly. Your cousin lead panned out. There's a woman registered in a town about four hours north of here, moved in right around the time your girl would have left that village. Different name entirely, but the age matches, and there's a gap in her records before that, the kind of gap you get when someone's trying not to leave a trail." Fiona paused. "I can't promise you it's her. But it's the strongest thread we've had yet." She gave him the name. Harry wrote it down on the hotel notepad with a hand that wasn't quite steady, staring at the unfamiliar letters like they might rearrange themselves into something he already understood. "I'll get you the address," Fiona said. "Give me a day." Harry thanked her and hung up,

The house smelled like something baking when Harry walked through the front door, and for a moment that alone almost undid him. Days of gray English weather and cold trails and strangers on doorsteps, and here was cinnamon and butter and Anna's voice somewhere in the kitchen, high and delighted about something. "Harry!" Anna hit him around the knees before he'd even set his bag down, and he laughed, the sound coming out easier than he expected, and scooped her up despite his shoulder's quiet protest. "Hey, trouble. Miss me?" "Carmen let me help make cookies. I put in too much sugar but she said it's fine." "Sounds like the best kind of mistake." Carmen appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping flour off her hands with a dish towel, smiling at him with real warmth. "Welcome home. You look tired." "I am tired." "There's coffee. And cookies, apparently, whether they need the sugar or not." Melissa came down the stairs a moment later, and something in Harry's chest loosened at the