Two weeks before the anniversary.The Morgan family mansion loomed before Ethan like a monument to everything he would never be. Its marble columns, sprawling gardens, and towering windows spoke of wealth so vast that the family who owned it had forgotten what it felt like to struggle for anything.Ethan had never belonged here.He walked through the grand entrance, past servants who barely acknowledged him, into the dining room where the family was already seated. Of course they were. They never waited for him."Finally," Daniel Morgan said without looking up from his phone. "We were starting to think you'd gotten lost. Again."Ethan forced a smile. "Traffic.""Traffic." Daniel snorted. "In a car that probably breaks down every five miles. You should really consider public transportation, Ethan. It might be more your speed."The table chuckled—Richard Morgan behind his newspaper, Eleanor with her practiced social smile, and the various extended family members who had gathered for Sun

Sophia Morgan stood at the window of her bedroom, staring out at the city lights of Westbridge. Her phone was clutched in her hand, her knuckles white from the pressure she had been applying to it for the past three hours, as though squeezing it hard enough might somehow change the messages she had received, the instructions she had been given, the impossible position she had been placed in.The city glittered below. A million lights. A million lives. People going home to families who loved them, sitting down to dinners that were still warm, sleeping soundly in beds where nothing terrible had ever happened.Somewhere out there, Ethan was waiting for her.She knew because she had checked. She had driven to the end of their street at nine in the evening, killed the engine, and sat in the dark watching the light in their apartment window from two blocks away. She could see it clearly from there — the warm glow of candles through the glass. He had lit candles. He had cleaned the apartment

The van moved through absolute darkness.No streetlights. No headlights from oncoming traffic. No glow of a nearby town on the horizon. Just the black of a countryside road in the small hours of the morning, the van's engine a low, steady rumble beneath the floor, and the occasional shudder as the tires crossed uneven ground.Ethan sat in the back with his wrists still chained and his broken ribs protesting every breath. The chains had been extended for transport longer now, threaded through a bolt in the van's floor but not removed. They didn't consider him a flight risk exactly, he understood. They simply didn't consider him worth the administrative effort of loose chains.He was already dead to them. They were simply delivering the paperwork.The man across from him the one who had shown him the videos, whose name Ethan had not been given and had not asked for, who had the pleasant, practiced voice of someone who spent a great deal of time delivering bad news sat with a manila

The motel room smelled of stale tobacco and industrial cleaner. It was cheap, impersonal, and perfect. No one asked questions here. No one looked twice at a man who paid cash and kept his head down.Ethan sat on the edge of the sagging mattress. The photograph of Victor Kane rested on the nightstand beside him. He hadn’t slept. Sleep was a luxury he couldn’t afford. Not yet.Adrian’s warning echoed in his mind: *Be patient. Be smart.*Patience had never been Ethan’s strong suit. But survival had taught him its value.He picked up the burner phone. He didn’t call Adrian. Instead, he dialed a number he had memorized three days ago. A number buried deep in encrypted files."Hello?" A voice answered on the third ring. Young. Female. Wary."Lily," Ethan said. His voice was low. Stripped of emotion. "It’s Ethan Blackwood."There was a long silence. Then, a sharp intake of breath."That’s impossible," she said. "You’re dead.""I’m not," Ethan said. "And I need your help."Lily Carter. Adrian

The tailor's fingers moved with surgical precision, marking chalk lines across charcoal wool."Mr. Thorne prefers a closer cut through the shoulder," Lily said from the corner of the fitting room, scrolling through a tablet. She'd taken to using the alias so often even she sometimes forgot it wasn't real. "And nothing off the rack. Everything bespoke. If a single thread in this wardrobe looks like it came from a department store, someone at that gala will notice, and noticing is the one thing we cannot afford."Ethan stood on the raised platform, watching his reflection multiply across three mirrors.He almost didn't recognize himself.The beard was gone, sculpted down to nothing, revealing a jawline sharper than the one Westbridge had known five years ago. His hair was cut shorter, precise, expensive — the kind of haircut that cost more than the entire wardrobe he'd owned during his marriage. The scars beneath his shirt were hidden, but the ones behind his eyes were not, and that, Ad