Your father didn't leave you."

Kaius spoke, cutting through the silence, and I looked up at him harshly from the flames I'd been staring into for the past hour. We'd returned from the gala in terse silence, the two of us each lost in our own dismayed thoughts about Viktor's admissions, and I'd been trying to get my head around it.

"What?" I could manage, my voice coarse from held-back tears.

"Antonio Rossi didn't leave his family behind when your mom got sick." Kaius walked away from standing behind his massive desk, cradling a thick folder that made my stomach do this thing of contracting with fear. "He was murdered by Viktor Petrov."

I had the air knocked out of my body. "You're lying."

"I wish I were." He sat across from me, he was tired. "I had my people investigate your history after Viktor's little show tonight. Your father owed a great deal of money to the Russian bratva twenty-five years ago."

My fingers shook as I grasped the file, unwilling to open it but not to look away. There were pictures, documents, reports from the police, evidence of a life I had no idea my dad had lived.

"He was addicted to gambling," Kaius continued quietly, his voice quieter than I'd ever heard before. "He gambled too much on Viktor's business. When he couldn't pay up, they gave him an ultimatum: work for them or let his family suffer."

The photographs were terrible; my father meeting with known criminals, entering buildings then raided by federal agents, always looking haunted and desperate. This was not the man I'd grown up with, the father who'd read me bedtime stories and shown me how to ride a bicycle. This was a person wearing his face.

"How can you work for them?" I asked in a whisper.

"Money laundering, mostly. They manipulated him into using his accounting business to clean dirty money." Kaius's jaw muscles flexed, and I could see he was struggling about whether or not to tell me the rest. "But your dad did have a conscience. He started tracking, writing it all down. I believe he was going to report it to the FBI someday."

There were other photos, further evidence of a double life I never suspected. My father waving FBI agents good-bye in parking lots, duplicating papers in empty offices at night, always looking over his shoulders as if he anticipated someone to shoot him in the head.

How had Kaius taken such close-up shots of my father, even to his office? Had he put up cameras there?

Maybe he had.

"Viktor learned about the records," Kaius said. "Your father tried to escape with them, thinking he could disappear and take you and your mother with him. Viktor caught up to him on the Canadian border."

"How did you learn all of this?" My voice sounded strange and muffled.

"I bought the detective who worked the case. Officially, your father's murder was recorded as a botched robbery. Off the record." He gestured towards the crime scene photos that turned my stomach over.

I pounded the file shut, but too late. The photographs burned into my mind. Photographs of my father's body broken and bruised in ways that spoke of torture, of the perpetrator enjoying themselves taking their time to hurt him.

My father had not been shot in a clean kill like the man I'd seen Kaius kill. Viktor had done it slowly, made it personal.

"The records never existed," Kaius continued, his voice tone guardedly even. "Viktor believed your father had them burned. But what if he didn't. What if he stashed them away somewhere?"

I was sick, because I actually understood what he was saying. "You think that's what this is all about. Not just the money he stole, supposedly."

"A gambling debt, twenty-five years old? Viktor might've stolen that out of your father's will, your mother's inheritance. But a sign of a hand against his organization?" Kaius shook his head. "That's worth killing for."

I closed my eyes, trying to absorb it all. My father wasn't the wretched man who'd abandoned his sick wife and struggling son. He was a victim who'd tried to protect us from damage. He escaped and that's what killed him.

"What does it mean for us?" I asked, opening my eyes to find Kaius regarding me intently.

"Viktor is anxious that there might still be something against him."

"Something that may not even exist."

"But Viktor is in the dark, and that works for us." Kaius stood up, going to get a drink. "The question is, what do we do with it?"

Before I could answer, my phone rang. It was an unlisted number. My hand rested on top of my phone, considering answering it or not.

"Hello?" My voice was barely above a whisper.

"Miss Rossi?" The voice was old, a woman with an Italian accent reminiscent of my grandmother's. "This is Sister Catherine from St. Mary's Orphanage. I am calling about your father's belongings."

I was frozen in place, and I looked up to see Kaius looking at me with a focused intensity. "My father's belongings?"

"Yes, dear. The ones he left with us five years ago. I'm retiring next month, and we're cleaning out the old storage rooms. I found a box with your name on it."

The room started spinning around me. Five years ago. Before he disappeared. Before he got murdered.

Kaius was already moving, signaling me to keep on talking to the woman while he took out his own phone.

"How big a box?" I asked, my own voice a good deal steadier than I had anticipated.

"Oh, just things and photographs. Things that were personal, I suppose. Your father insisted very strongly that they were only to be shown to you when you were twenty-five. You did turn twenty-five recently, didn't you, dear?"

"Yes," I breathed, my heart pounding so hard. "Yes, I did."

"Fine. You can pick them up whenever. We're open until—"

The line broke off.

Kaius was already barking orders rapidly in Italian into his phone. "Enzo, get the car. Full security detail. Now."

"What's happening?" I demanded, although half of me already did know and was dreading the answer.

Someone's been hijacking your calls. They know about the box." His face unsettled me. "We have to be first."

The trip to St. Mary's was a twenty-minute ride that felt like twenty hours. I was rigid as stone in the passenger seat, Kaius driving foolishly, two vehicles full of guarding guns aplenty sandwiching us through city roads.

"What if we're too late?" I demanded, my hands so clenched in my lap that my knuckles were chalky white.

"We won't be. Viktor's men are competent, but they're not that competent." His knuckles were white as they rested on the steering wheel, and I could sense the tension in his shoulders. "Besides, they'll want to examine the contents before they burn them. That gives us a window."

St. Mary's was a small, brick building in one of the city's older sections. It appeared dead and decaying. It appeared just like the sort of place someone would hide something they never wanted discovered.

The lights remained on in the administrative office, which was either a positive sign or an extremely negative one.

"Get close," Kaius ordered as we reached the door, his hand on something concealed under his jacket. "If you hear shooting, you hit the ground and hold position until I get you out."

"If there's shooting?" The possibility that we might be walking into a firefight made my knees turn to jelly.

"When shooting begins," he corrected, his face stern, and I realized he was expecting trouble.

But the hallways were deserted, our footsteps echoing off worn linoleum that had probably been installed in the 1970s and never experienced the replacement of the decades. The walls were covered with artwork done by the children and motivational posters on hope and belief, pleasant things that were obscene given what we were actually here for.

Sister Catherine was exactly as I'd pictured. She was a tiny, old nun with kind eyes and wrinkled hands. She stood no higher than five feet.

"How nice to see you, Miss Rossi," she said, embracing me warmly as if I were an old niece. "You look just like your father. He was such a troubled young man when he brought this to us."

She took us to a tiny cluttered office filled with decades of paperwork and paintings by children. From a locked file drawer, she retrieved a metal shoebox-sized box, the type you put important papers in.

"He said I'd leave it alone in one piece until you were old enough," Sister Catherine explained, her tone soft with memory. "He said it contained things that could be dangerous if they were in the wrong hands."

I accepted the box in trembling hands. It was