On the eighth visit, Sophie asked, “Why do you want to see our mom?”

Dante sat on an overturned crate across from them. “Because I loved her once.”

Ava looked down at her hands. “Mom says our dad died.”

Dante felt the sentence open inside him.

Mia watched his face too closely. “Did that make you sad?”

“Yes,” Dante said. “Very.”

“Why?”

“Because I think your mom believed something that wasn’t true. And I think I believed something that wasn’t true. I want to know what happened.”

The girls said nothing for a long while.

Then Ava said, “If we take you to her and she tells you to leave, you leave.”

“I will.”

“And you don’t yell.”

“I won’t.”

“And you don’t bring your scary men.”

Dante glanced toward the street, where Nico waited two blocks away in a parked car.

“No scary men,” he said.

Ava studied him with Elena’s eyes.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

The next morning, Dante arrived early.

He had spent the night walking through his penthouse like a prisoner awaiting judgment. He imagined Elena alive a thousand different ways—angry, terrified, sick, married, hateful, grateful, dying. None of the visions prepared him for the rooming house in Dorchester.

The girls led him through a narrow entry that smelled of damp plaster, burned oil, and old despair. A man coughed behind one closed door. A baby cried somewhere above. The stairs sagged under Dante’s weight.

Room 312 had three locks.

Ava knocked twice, paused, then once more.

A woman’s voice answered, weak but unmistakable.

“Who is it, baby?”

“It’s us,” Ava said. “We brought someone.”

“Ava…”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

The door opened.

Elena Ward stood on the other side.

For several seconds, no one moved.

She was thinner than the woman in the painting. Her hair was shorter, tucked behind ears that looked delicate as porcelain. Dark shadows bruised the skin beneath her eyes. One hand gripped the doorframe because she clearly needed it to stand.

But she was alive.

Dante forgot how to breathe.

Elena’s lips parted.

“No,” she whispered.

“Elena.”

At the sound of his voice, her face changed from shock to terror.

She stumbled backward. “Girls, go to the bedroom.”

“Mom?” Sophie said.

“Now.”

Ava hesitated, looking between them. Mia took Sophie’s hand. The three disappeared through a narrow doorway, leaving Dante and Elena alone in the small room.

Elena’s knees weakened.

Dante moved instinctively, catching her before she fell. She flinched so violently that he released her at once, though it hurt him to do it.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.

Her laugh was broken and bitter. “That’s what Malcolm said right before he told me you wanted me dead.”

The name struck the room like a gunshot.

Dante went still. “Malcolm?”

Elena stared at him.

“You didn’t know,” she said.

It was not a question.

Dante looked at her face, at the fear that had lived there too long to be performed, and a terrible truth began assembling itself piece by piece.

“Tell me,” he said.

So she did.

She told him about the clinic. The pregnancy. Malcolm at her apartment. The photographs. The recording. The rushed escape. The staged accident. The farmhouse in Maine. The locked doors. The birth of the triplets with no hospital and no family. The night she overheard Malcolm speaking to Vincent Caruso about “using the girls when Russo refuses to bend.”

She told him how she ran.

Four cities. Fake names. Cash rooms. Free clinics. No paper trail.

Then came the coughing.

“At first I thought it was stress,” she said, sitting in the armchair by the window because standing had become impossible. “Then there was blood. A clinic in Providence said leukemia. I came back to Boston because big cities are easier to disappear in.”

Dante’s hands closed slowly into fists.

“You should have gone to a hospital.”

“I thought if my name entered a system, Malcolm would find me. Or you would.” Her voice cracked. “I thought you had ordered me killed.”

Dante knelt in front of her chair.

“I buried you,” he said. “I stood in the rain and buried you. Malcolm stood beside me holding an umbrella.”

Elena closed her eyes.

The silence between them was filled with seven stolen years.

Then Dante heard something below.

A car door closing.

Then another.

His head turned toward the window.

Elena saw the change in him. “What?”

Dante crossed to the window and looked down at the street. Two black SUVs had pulled up across from the rooming house. Men were getting out without looking up.

Not police.

Not strangers.

Professionals.

Dante pulled out his phone. “Nico. Rooming house on Langford. Third floor. Malcolm found us.”

He ended the call and turned back to Elena.

“We have to leave now.”

The bedroom door opened. Ava stood there, pale. “Are you our dad?”

Dante froze.

Behind Ava, Mia and Sophie clung to each other.

Elena’s eyes filled with tears. She nodded once.

Dante crouched in front of the girls. There were footsteps on the stairs now, heavy and fast.

“Yes,” he said. “I’m your dad. And I need you to be brave for the next five minutes.”

Sophie began to cry.

Ava wiped her own eyes hard, refusing to let the tears fall. “What happens after five minutes?”

Dante looked toward the door as the first shadow passed beneath it.

“After that,” he said, “I spend the rest of my life making sure you never have to be this brave again.”

The lock exploded inward.

Dante fired twice through the door before it fully opened.

The girls screamed.

He grabbed Elena with one arm, pulling her low, and shouted, “Fire escape!”

Nico’s men hit the front stairs from below at the same time Malcolm’s men forced the hallway. Gunfire cracked through the old building. Plaster burst from the walls. Someone shouted. Someone fell.

Dante pushed the girls through the window onto the rusted fire escape. Elena could barely climb, so he lifted her, carrying her against his chest while Nico covered them from the landing below.

A bullet tore through Dante’s coat sleeve.

Mia slipped on the iron stairs.

Ava caught her.

“I’ve got you,” Ava sobbed. “I’ve got you.”

They reached the alley as a black armored sedan screeched to a stop at the curb. Nico shoved the rear door open. The girls tumbled in. Dante laid Elena across the seat and climbed after her as another shot struck the car with a metallic scream.