The moonlight makes Harlan's handwriting look carved. I stand at the window in Rhys's shirt and read the letter once, fast, the way you read something that might detonate—then again, slower, because the first pass can't be right.
Retrieve the children—the prophecy-blooded heirs the Adler line hasn't produced in generations. Neutralise the mother. Make it look like a failed flight or a pregnancy complication.
The witness story doesn't exist. There is no investigation, no break-in theory. Rhys was sent to take my sons and make me disappear.
The paper trembles and I realise it's my hands doing it. My teeth find each other so hard my molars ache, and the air in this room—the room that still smells like his skin and mine—goes thin and chemical.
Prophecy blood. I read the phrase twice, and the heat in my belly—the thing that surged the night Callum came at me in the kitchen, the hum I've carried for two years without understanding it—has a name. My children aren't just Adler heirs. They're something Harlan considers worth killing for.
The bed creaks behind me. In the window glass I watch his reflection sit up, watch his eyes find me, watch the exact moment he sees the paper in my hands. His reflection goes the colour of old bone.
"Nell." His voice comes out wrecked, and my whole body jerks sideways like the sound has a physical edge. "Nell, wait—"
"Which part was real?" I turn because cowardice has a time limit. The letter hits his bare chest and falls on the sheets where twenty minutes ago I pressed my mouth to his collarbone. "The fire pit? The creek? Tonight?"
"All of it." He doesn't reach for the letter, doesn't move at all, and his eyes stay on mine like looking away would be a confession. "Every single part."
"That's worse." My voice comes out flat, stripped, a thing I barely recognise. "That's so much worse, Rhys."
He stands and the distance between us shrinks to four feet of cold floorboard. His mouth opens and I hold up one hand, palm out, and the gesture stops him like a wall.
"Did you know what my children are?" The question tastes like metal on my tongue. "Prophecy blood—did you know before you came here?"
"Yes." No hesitation, no flinch, and somehow that's the worst answer in the room. "Since before I left Adler territory."
"Is that why you saved them at the creek?" The silence stretches long enough to hear the crickets outside.
His whole body changes—shoulders dropping, chin pulling back, hands opening at his sides. I watch him absorb the question the way I used to absorb Callum's backhand, from the inside out, the impact arriving seconds after the sound.
"No." The word comes out rough, dragged over gravel, and his hand reaches toward me before he catches it and pulls it back. "Nell, that isn't—"
"I don't believe you." My arms fold tight across my ribs, holding myself together at the seams.
"The mission is dead." He takes half a step forward and I take a full step back, and his foot stops mid-air. "The letters to Harlan are lies—every one of them. I've been sending him south, east, everywhere you aren't for weeks."
"You sound exactly like him." The words leave my mouth aimed to wound. "Reasonable and measured, the perfect words in the perfect order to make me doubt what I read with my own eyes."
He recoils. His back meets the wall and he stays there, and I will remember that look for a long time—a man watching a building come down around him.
"I need to think." I pick up my clothes from the chair where they've been tangled with his. The domesticity of the gesture makes my stomach turn.
"We can talk about this, Nell." His voice follows me across the room. "Please—just sit down."
"There's nothing to talk about." I pull the latch and the night air hits my skin. "You came here to take my children and everything else is decoration."
The compound is dark and my bare feet know the path between his door and mine because I've walked it in my head a hundred times while pretending I wouldn't. Sixty steps, and the calculations start before I reach the porch.
The same ones my brain ran the night Callum died. Money: the pouch under the floorboard, three weeks if we sleep in the car. Route: south through the border markets, then west where the territory lines blur.
I can't tell Oren. Telling Oren means explaining why the Adlers want my children, which means explaining the kitchen and the knife and the body I stepped over on my way out.
I can't fight Rhys—I have no standing here that outweighs his. If I expose him, he exposes me, and the compound picks which liar to believe.
The dresser drawer slides open and I start pulling clothes. Small things first—the boys' shirts, socks rolled tight, the stuffed wolf Rowan won't sleep without. My hands work fast and detached, the muscle memory of a woman who learned that packing in the dark is a survival skill.
"No." One word, and it comes from Sable sitting up in the bed across the room, both boys between her, eyes open and fixed on the bundle in my arms. She doesn't look half-asleep—she looks like she's been waiting for this exact disaster.
"Sable, listen to me—" I take a step toward the dresser and she's already on her feet, planting herself between me and the door.
"Put the clothes down." Her voice is low and absolute, the voice she used the night she drove us out of Adler territory. "We are not running again."
"You don't understand what's at stake." My arms tighten around Rowan's wolf and the pathetic pile of survival I've assembled in three minutes flat. “The prophecy blood, Harlan’s orders, a man in the guest apartments sent to make me vanish—”
"I heard you leave tonight, I heard you come back, and I can read your packing face from across a dark room." She softens, but doesn’t seem surprised about my revelations. “I know I said that we will run the second he turns sketchy. But I’ve thought about it, and we can’t.”
"Running kept me alive last time." My voice cracks and I press my knuckles to my mouth before the sound can follow it out.
"And it will kill you now." She takes the bundle from my arms and sets it on the dresser with a gentleness that contradicts every sharp angle of her voice. "The boys can't live on the road—this place is theirs, the creek, Doris and her terrible ointments. You built this."
"I built it on a lie." The whisper barely clears my teeth, and my knees threaten to make a decision my pride hasn't approved.
"Then we fix the lie." She grips both my wrists and holds them until my hands go still. "We do not let one Adler with a letter burn it down."
"Sable, you don't know what he's capable of—" My throat works around the words and she tightens her grip, anchoring me.
"I understand exactly what's at stake." Her jaw is set, her grip is iron, and between us on the bed Ash rolls over and presses his face into Rowan's shoulder without waking. "That's why we're staying."