I’ve got you now.” I turned, and I looked one last time at the glowing windows of the estate I had bled to build.

And then I turned my back on it, and I did not look at it again, and by the time my sister’s headlights swung into the drive, a strange, calm certainty had settled over me: that the kingdom Luca thought he had just stolen would, very soon, belong to someone else entirely.

Chapter 5 — The Closing

By midnight I was in Evelyn’s warm living room, wrapped in a blanket with a cup of tea going cold in my hands, watching Lily sleep in a borrowed bassinet beside the couch.

My sister had dried my hair, and warmed a bottle, and asked me nothing I was not ready to answer, and I had felt, for the first time since a red light blinked on a keypad, that my daughter and I were safe.