“I understand it now.” I sat with that for a moment — my father, gone years before any of this, reaching forward through time to put a shield in my hands I hadn’t known I was holding until the night I needed it.

He had not been able to imagine Marius specifically, or Sena, or the gala.

But he had been able to imagine that the world would one day send someone to try to erase his careful, underestimated daughter, and he had built, against that day, a lock that only she could open and only she could keep closed.

Every safe I’d opened and every clause Sinclaire now read aloud was, in a sense, a letter from him.

It said the same thing on every page.

It said: I saw this coming, and I made sure you would win.