For years he’d trained himself to catch the smallest flicker of resistance in me — an unexpected question, a held silence, a gaze that lingered a beat too long.

So I lowered my eyes and folded my hands, exactly the way I always had when he talked about money, and I watched the caution drain out of his face.

Hearing him say he wanted to make sure you were protected — from the man who had ordered my death two days earlier — settled a strange, glassy calm over me.

I no longer needed to argue.

The truth was already out of my hands and into safer ones: the burner in a police evidence bag, Constance’s recordings, the tag stitched into my purse, the ruined car in the driveway, the vanished million my father had tracked to the decimal.

Devon wrapped my father’s limp fingers around the pen.