The door of the Maybach slammed, shutting out the damp Manhattan night and shutting in the smell of expensive leather and the low thrum of a precisely tuned engine. Silas didn't look at me. He touched a button on the armrest, and a soundproof glass partition smoothly slid upward between us and the driver. My hands were still trembling. I gripped the Leica in my grip so tightly that my knuckles went white. "The SD card," I stammered, my voice sounding small within the plush interior of the car. "I have to see if the footage looks good, if the curtain didn't blur it-" "Never mind the footage, Elara." Silas's voice was like a razor. He leaned back, his long legs crossing at the ankles as if he hadn't just walked away from a fresh corpse. "In three minutes the NYPD will be swarming the Blackwood, in five, the security feeds will 'glitch' and every frame of you entering the library will be erased. By morning, you won't even exist in their records." I paid him no mind; my heart was

The suite Silas led me into wasn't really a room; it was a gilded prison cell. Velvet curtains, stained the deep, rich color of dried blood, cascaded from the high ceiling to the plush carpet. The furnishings, though ostentatious, had the look of museum pieces-impersonal, frigid, and astronomically expensive. As soon as the heavy oak door clicked shut behind me, the click of the lock felt like the falling of a guillotine blade. I was alone. I collapsed against the door, my legs suddenly too weak to hold my body. The adrenaline that had seen me through the gala, the subsequent pursuit and confrontation with my long-lost, or so I'd thought, "dead" father, finally drained out of me, leaving behind an hollow, soul-destroying exhaustion. "Ten years," I whispered, my voice catching as I met my reflection in the polished obsidian vanity. "Ten years mourning a phantom." My father was alive. He was alive, and more than that, he was a kingmaker in the very underworld I’d dedicated years

The rain was a needlesharp slap against my skin, and the cliff face underfoot was slick with mud and shale, turning the walk into a dangerous slide. Ten feet away, my father stood framed against the orange blaze of the burning house behind us, and an odd peace settled over his features, as if holding the rifle in his hand were no more extraordinary than waiting for a deer to walk into his path. His one child-waiting in the rain for his judgment-was ten feet away."Background, Elara," he repeated, his voice lost in the roar of the thunder. "You were so fixated on the little red dot in the rafters that you didn't notice the shadows on the floor. That shooter was a projection, Elara. A ghost. I needed you to think there was a threat so you'd come running into my arms."I stared up at him, the water blurring my vision. "You used my own training against me? You used my grief to stay 'dead' for ten years? For a throne, Arthur? In a nest of vultures?""For survival," Arthur hissed, a sliver

It was now a torrential downpour, the whole world a blurred slate gray and black. My knees were ground raw, but I barely felt it. I felt only the uncanny stillness of the woman twenty feet away.The tactical vehicles were boxing us in, their high beams slithering through the fog like white knives, but the woman… she was the blade.She wore a sleek, black, tactical bodysuit, her dark hair scraped back into an extreme ponytail. But it was her face… it took the air from my lungs. It was my face. High cheekbones, wide set eyes, my eyebrows. With one exception – the jagged, silver line of a scar ran from the angle of her jaw down to the hollow in her neck."I warned you to be careful, Silas." Her voice was a dead match for my own, the same pitch, the same rhythm, with a brittle, Russian accent that made my own hair stand on end. "You found a stray and you thought you'd hit the jackpot with a queen. But the 'Glass Alibi' belongs to me."Silas didn't lower his weapon. His eyes darted between

The chill of the silver cuff against my wrist sent a shock up my arm, a cold anchor in the stifling heat of Mikhail Petrov's body. I stood pinned between the unforgiving concrete and him, unable to move, the other cuff linked not to a pipe or a chair but to his own wrist. "Now," Mikhail breathed, the metal chain clinking between our forearms. "You go where I go. You breathe when I give you permission." "You're insane," I managed, though my heart was already doing a desperate, frantic drumbeat against my ribs. "I'm a Petrov," he said, pulling me toward the wall of monitors with a jarring yank. "And right now, I'm the only thing between you and a shallow grave. Look." He gestured to a thermal image taken from a high vantage point of the Sterling estate. I saw a single figure, Silas, slithering through the dark grounds like a shadow, moving towards the library wing. But on the adjacent screen, hidden in the treeline, were a dozen heat signatures. They weren't moving; they were waitin