I had seen what happens when leverage like that enters the bloodstream of an organization like mine.

Men who had smiled at my father’s funeral would begin calculating.

Alliances that held only because the balance of power was known would come apart the instant the balance became uncertain.

A hidden heir with a controlling interest was not a family matter in my world; it was a destabilizing event, the kind that gets people killed, and the cold voice in me was already, before I had finished absorbing that I had a sister, mapping the moves required to contain the threat she represented.

That was the arithmetic my fifteen years had trained me to run before any other, automatically, the way another man might calculate a tip.