Barrett had just given his men their final order for the night — anyone shows up anywhere near Vivienne’s house, he hears about it first — and was planning to grab a little sleep before tomorrow’s list of tasks, when his phone started ringing.He didn’t even know why he hadn’t put the thing on Do Not Disturb all this while. He grabbed it to hang up on the call.His hand stopped on the screen.He answered instead.“Hello, angel.” His tone changed instantly, a smile spreading across his face.“Nah. That’s not your angel talking,” said a voice on the other end.Barrett’s skin prickled. He crossed the room in three steps to the monitor sitting on the large table — the feed connected to another house entirely — and scanned the CCTV. He found his adopted daughter. Sleeping. And in the next room over: more than five men.His hand trembled.“Oh — did she drop her phone somewhere?” He worked his tone as smooth and casual as it would go, so these people would n

The night air outside the house was cold enough to bite, and neither of them moved toward the cars yet. Behind them, muffled through the walls, the Cataract team had begun conducting its lesson — and both men had heard enough lessons in their lives to feel no need to supervise this one.Barrett kept his eyes down. Lombard kept his eyes on Barrett. The question was standing right there between them, wearing its coat, waiting to be asked.“Thank you for tonight,” Barrett said instead — sliding past it.“I told you you’d come with me to the hospital and we’d figure things out together. You didn’t agree to it. You see what’s happening now?”“I’ve already made peace with myself. And none of it has anything to do with getting tired—”“I hate it when people talk like that, and you know it.” Lombard’s voice came down flat. “You have a kid. And you’re this eager to give up?”“This eager?” Barrett smiled. “No. I’m not giving up. Since I met you — you have no idea how much better you’ve made my

Cassian had sent the message to Lombard — the picture of the kid, the invitation. And now he was waiting for him to arrive.He went over to where Sylvie was. If she had learnt her lesson, he was willing to let her leave tonight. But by the time he got there, he didn’t see her.He thought it was a joke at first. There was no way she could have left this place. He had tied them down well — and not with rope.Then he raised his head and looked up.The roof of the house was gone.A clean rectangle of night sky sitting where his ceiling used to be, stars looking down into his own house at him.He rushed outside. Looked at the driveway. His car was gone too.Back inside, he pulled up the CCTV — and watched, frame by frame, exactly how the impossible had happened.His mistake had a name, and the name was Finn.He had sealed Sylvie’s voice — of course he had; her screaming would have filled the estate. But the boy — the boy had been unconscious when they

Cassian’s head cracked against the floor as he went down, and unconsciousness took him before the pain could file a report.By the time he opened his eyes again, his entire back was aching him — deep, structural aching, like the pain of furniture rather than the pain of a man. He tried to stand up. It cost far more than it had ever cost him.He made it upright on the third attempt, using the wall the way old men use walls — as a colleague.Then his face found the mirror.The face staring back at him was not the face that had fallen unconscious.The face in the mirror belonged to a man of a hundred years and more — sunken, spotted, folded in on itself. It was, in fact, the exact face he should have been wearing all this while. The face he had been owing the world for decades.Because here was the truth under everything: Cassian had stopped aging the year he locked a six-year-old girl away. Abigail’s youth — hers, and her family’s ruin — had been the anchor hol

Drake warned Vivienne several times before leaving her house: not one word to Lombard about what he was about to do.Because he had been turning it all over in his mind, and he had arrived somewhere. What his father-in-law did — it was right. The man had done it to scare him, to teach him that his daughter was not some cheap person Drake could simply walk out on. That was all it had ever been.And now that he really examined it — all these rebellious thoughts he’d been having — where had they even come from? He could date them precisely. They had started the day he met Lombard. That was where the rot began.He knew himself. The Drake from before Lombard would have called his parents-in-law and humbly asked why they’d done it. Nothing in that man would have concluded that the answer was to leave.But look what he’d done instead. Run from his wife. And his father-in-law — bless that man — had gone to all that trouble just to knock some sense back into him.He held