I came home early and nearly fired the young maid I found sitting on my kitchen floor, making my three daughters laugh for the first time since their mother was murdered. But before I could throw her out, my eldest daughter grabbed my coat, looked me straight in the eyes, and spoke her first words in fourteen months: “Daddy killed Mommy.”

Forty-eight hours after our raid in Zurich, our private jet touched down back in New York under the cover of a freezing midnight drizzle.

We didn't take Marcus to a federal holding cell or a police precinct. We brought him straight back to the Long Island estate—to the exact study where his treason had begun.

The room was dimly lit. Rosa stood near the doorway, her hands clasped tightly together, while Chloe stood by the window, watching the rain streak down the gothic panes. Sitting in a small chair near the fireplace, wrapped in a heavy wool blanket with her favorite stuffed rabbit clutched in her arms, was Lucia.

When Viktor shoved a bruised, handcuffed Marcus Vale into the center of the study, Lucia flinched, shrinking back into the cushions of her chair.

Marcus stumbled, catching his balance against the mahogany desk, his eyes darting wildly around the room before landing on the little girl.

“Dominic, this is insane,” Marcus hissed, turning toward me. “You’re bringing a child into a confession? She won’t even understand—”

“Shut your mouth,” I growled, stepping forward and grabbing him by the collar of his ruined suit jacket, shoving him down onto his knees directly in front of Lucia’s chair.

Marcus gasped, gasping for air against the polished wood floor.

I knelt down beside my daughter, my hands gentle as I pulled the wool blanket slightly tighter around her small shoulders. For fourteen months, I had been a stranger to her—a dark, brooding figure who smelled of gunpowder and vengeance.

“Princess,” I whispered, my voice cracking slightly as I looked into her wide, solemn hazel eyes. “Look at me.”

She slowly raised her head, looking at me with that heartbreaking mixture of fear and sorrow that had haunted my dreams for over a year.

“You said Daddy killed Mommy,” I said softly, tears burning behind my own eyes for the first time in a decade. “I need you to know... Daddy didn't do it. Daddy was blind, and Daddy made terrible mistakes, but I would never, ever hurt the woman who gave me you.”

Lucia’s lower lip quivered. She didn't speak, but her eyes shifted from my face to the man kneeling on the floor beside us.

Marcus, realizing his life hung by a thread and desperate to save his own skin, looked up at the little girl with a pathetic, oily smile.

“L-lucia,” Marcus stammered, his voice shaking. “It was... it was a mistake. Uncle Marcus didn't mean to—your daddy, he’s a good man, he didn't do it, it was just business—”

“Shut up!” I roared, slamming my fist against the floorboards so hard the coffee cups on the side table rattled.

Chloe stepped out from the shadows near the window, walking calmly across the room until she knelt down on the other side of Lucia’s chair, right beside me.

“Lucia,” Chloe said, her voice like cool spring water in a desert of fire. “You heard something scary a long time ago, didn't you? You heard a bad man talking about breaking things. But your daddy fought the shadows to find the truth. You don't have to carry that secret anymore. You are safe.”

The room held its collective breath. Viktor stood by the door like a marble statue. Rosa pressed a handkerchief to her mouth, tears streaming down her weathered cheeks.

For ten long seconds, there was only the sound of the rain lashing against the glass.

Then, Lucia slowly turned her head back to look directly into my eyes. The cold, impenetrable wall of silence that had guarded her soul for fourteen months seemed to crack, splintering apart from the inside out.

“You... you didn't do it?” she whispered.