For a while, she stayed crouched in front of Thorfinn’s body and listened to him finish dying.
It wasn’t peaceful. Death rarely was, not really. People liked to soften it afterward, press gentle words over the ugly parts, say things like passed away and went quietly because the truth made them feel too close to their own skin. Thorfinn did not pass anywhere. He choked. He trembled. His fingers twitched once against the wine room floor, reaching for something that wasn’t there, and then even that small rebellion left him.
Mira watched until his eyes stopped trying.
Only then did she let out a breath.
Her hand hurt.
The broken bottle had cut deeper into her palm than she meant to allow. Red slid down between her fingers, dripping quietly onto the floor beside Thorfinn’s leg. Her throat still burned where his blade had opened her. Her ribs ached. Her arm throbbed. Her cheek was swollen, and the borrowed robe hung off her body in blood-stained folds that made her look like some saint in a painting after the artist got bored and decided to ruin the canvas.
She hated him for that.
Not for dying.
That part was fine.
But for making it messy.
For making her messy.
Mira shifted back onto her heels and looked down at the dead boy on the wine room floor. He was not a boy, not really. He was grown. Stronger than her, broader than her, old enough to decide revenge was worth more than survival. But now, with his mouth slack and his green eyes fixed on nothing, he looked young in a way that irritated her.
It made the ending feel less elegant.
“You should have listened,” she whispered.
Her voice scraped.
She pressed two fingers to her throat and winced.
That would take time to sound normal again. Not long. Her body was already working, knitting and correcting with that deep, unpleasant heat beneath the skin, but vocal cords were fussy little things. Her father had always complained about that when their mother came back hoarse.
Mira’s mouth tightened.
No.
Not him.
Not tonight.
She pushed herself up using one of the wine shelves. The room tilted slightly, rows of expensive bottles blurring into dark glass and red-gold labels. She held still until the dizziness passed. There were blood smears on the floor now. On the door. On the edge of the shelf where she had grabbed it. On the brass candleholder she had dropped near Thorfinn’s knee.
Too much evidence.
Too many pieces.
Kane was going to be unbearable about it.
The thought had barely finished forming before the wine room door opened.
Mira didn’t turn.
She didn’t need to.
There were footsteps she would know anywhere, even softened by expensive tile and old rugs. Controlled. Unhurried. Too quiet for someone who had not been raised to move through a house without waking monsters.
Kane stepped into the room and shut the door behind him.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Mira looked at Thorfinn.
Kane looked at Mira.
She could feel the assessment without seeing his face. The robe. The blood. The healing line across her throat. The swollen cheek. The ruined hands. The body at her feet. Kane always counted damage before feelings, as if inventorying pain could make it obey him.
Then he said, “Messy.”
Mira laughed once.
It hurt enough that her laugh broke halfway through.
She turned then.
Kane stood near the door, black hair neat, green contacts still in, dark jacket clean enough to make her hate him a little. He looked like Luca Armani if someone had emptied Luca out and poured Kane into the shape left behind. Polite mouth. Careful posture. Hands clean. Eyes not.
“You’re late,” Mira rasped.
His gaze flicked to her throat.
Something moved across his face.
Not much.
But she saw it.
Good.
He still cared enough to flinch internally.
“How many times?” he asked.
Mira wiped blood from her palm onto the robe, more because she knew it would annoy him than because it helped. “Tonight?”
Kane’s jaw tightened. “Mira.”
“Once.”
His eyes hardened.
The flinch vanished.
There he was.
“You’re getting careless.”
A slow, incredulous smile pulled at her mouth. “He cut my throat.”
“And you let him get close enough.”
For a moment, the room went very still.
Mira stared at him, and something old moved under her ribs. Not grief. Not even hurt exactly. Something from before those things had names. The kitchen floor. Their father’s voice from another room. Kane’s small hands holding hers too tightly, promising he wouldn’t leave while neither of them was old enough to know promises could turn into cages.
“I died,” she said softly.
Kane’s expression did not change.
“You came back.”
There it was.
The Amato comfort.
Not I’m sorry.
Not Are you hurt?
Not I was scared.
You came back.
As if that made the dying less rude.
Kane looked at the body.
“Did anyone see?”
Mira’s fingers curled.
“No.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you want to ask him?”
Kane’s eyes lifted back to hers.
The faintest annoyance passed between them. Familiar. Almost normal. Almost funny, if she had any humor left to spare.
“Madaline knows,” he said.
Mira stopped breathing.
Not because she was surprised.
Because she was not.
Because somewhere beneath the pain and blood and Thorfinn’s dead weight at her feet, she had known the tree would not stay pretty for long.
“How much?” she asked.
Kane’s gaze sharpened at the tone of her voice.
There. He heard it.
The part of her that cared.
“Enough.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“She knows I’m alive.”
Mira closed her eyes for half a second.
Madaline under the old tree. Madaline’s hand at her ruby necklace. Madaline looking at Kane and seeing the dead brother instead of the careful lie he had written himself into.
Mira opened her eyes again. “And?”
Kane hesitated.
Small.
Barely there.
But Mira had learned him before she learned mercy.
“Kane.”
He looked toward the shelves, toward the rows of wine bottles nobody would ever open now without the room remembering them. “She knows Luca was real.”
Mira went silent.
That was worse.
He looked back at her.
“I didn’t tell her everything.”
“You told her enough to make her hate you.”
His mouth twitched faintly.
Not humor.
Pain, maybe.
Good.
Let him have some.
“She already did,” he said.
Mira tilted her head. “Did she?”
Kane said nothing.
Oh.
Mira’s smile returned slowly, despite the blood drying at her throat.
“You care about her.”
His gaze cooled immediately. “Don’t.”
“That was not a no.”
“This is not the time.”
“You wrote to her for a year.”
“Because she had the ruby.”
“Because she had a ruby,” Mira corrected softly. “And because you liked the way she answered.”
Kane’s face closed.
There were very few things in the world that still pleased Mira while she was covered in her own blood. Making Kane Amato uncomfortable remained one of them.
“She matters,” Kane said.
Mira’s smile thinned.
“To the family line?”
His silence was delicate.
Cruel in its restraint.
Mira’s stomach tightened, though she did not let it show.
Of course.
Of course, of course, of course.
Kane could make something tender and still turn it into a tool. He could write honest letters with a stolen name. He could miss her, need her, choose her, and still count the old bloodlines in the same breath. He had survived their house by making love practical. Mira had survived by making it beautiful.
Both of them were rotten in different directions.
“That is not all she is,” Mira said.
Kane looked at her then.
Really looked.
And this time, the hurt was hers.
“No,” he said quietly. “It isn’t.”
The answer should have softened something.
It didn’t.
Because he meant it.
And because he would use her anyway.
Mira glanced at Thorfinn’s body to avoid looking at him too long. “Where is she now?”
“Near the tree.”
“Alone?”
“For now.”
Mira’s gaze snapped back.
Kane’s expression remained calm, but the calm had edges now.
“She has the necklace,” he said.
Mira heard what he did not say.
She is dangerous.
She is useful.
She is not allowed to leave.
A pulse of anger moved through her, so clean and sudden it almost steadied her. “Do not hurt her.”
Kane’s eyes narrowed.
“I don’t plan to.”
“That is also not an answer.”
“I care for her, Mira.”
She laughed.
That one hurt less.
Maybe because it wasn’t funny.
“You care for knives too. You still use them.”
Kane’s expression darkened.
“You’re one to talk.”
Mira looked down at Thorfinn.
Then back up.
“He ruined my wedding.”
“He almost exposed us.”
“That too.”
For one second, something like affection passed over Kane’s face.
Exhausted. Unwanted. Real.
Then it was gone.
He crossed the room at last, but not to comfort her. He crouched beside Thorfinn and checked the body with two fingers against the neck, practical as ever.
Mira watched his clean hands touch the dead man’s skin.
“He’s gone,” she said.
“I know.”
“Then why check?”
Kane looked up at her.
His eyes moved briefly to her throat.
“Habit.”
That one did hurt.
More than she wanted it to.
Mira looked away.
Kane stood. “We need to move him.”
“I need to change.”
“You need to clean the hall.”
“I need to go back before Ethan notices.”
Kane’s face went still.
There.
The name did it.
Not Thorfinn. Not Madaline. Not even the body.
Ethan.
Mira felt the air shift before he spoke.
“We need to talk about your husband-to-be.”
Her fingers curled around the bloody robe.
“No.”
Kane’s gaze hardened.
“Yes.”
Mira stood there in the wine room with Thorfinn dead at her feet, blood drying on her skin, her brother alive in front of her, and the party still glowing somewhere outside like a dream that had not yet realized it was over.
And for the first time all night, she felt truly afraid.
Kane saw it before she buried it.
That was the problem with knowing someone from the beginning. Masks worked best on strangers. They worked on friends, lovers, police officers, doctors, teachers, neighbors with casserole dishes and pitying eyes. They worked on people who looked at Mira and saw what they wanted to see: a pretty girl, a grieving sister, a survivor, a bride.
They did not work as well on him.
Not when he had seen her come back from death on a kitchen floor at seven years old with his hands wrapped around hers. Not when he had held her through bruises that faded too quickly and nightmares that did not. Not when he knew every version of her smile, from the one made for photographs to the one that meant someone was about to suffer.
This was not that smile.
This was fear dressed as offense.
“No,” Mira said again, softer this time.
Kane looked at her for a moment, then down at Thorfinn’s body.
The dead boy had fallen badly, one arm twisted beneath him, blood darkening the wine room floor. The broken bottle rested near Mira’s bare foot. The brass candleholder lay on its side, smeared and dented. Red touched the shelves, the door, the hem of her borrowed robe. Too many places. Too many traces.
Messy had been generous.
“We don’t have time for no,” Kane said.
Mira’s eyes narrowed. “You do not get to walk in here and start giving orders.”
“Someone has to.”
“I handled him.”
“After he killed you.”
Her expression twitched.
There it was. That tiny splinter of hurt she would rather choke on than hand to him.
Kane stepped over the blood near Thorfinn’s shoulder and crouched again, searching the pockets of the dead man’s jacket. Staff badge. Folded schedule. A room key that wasn’t his. Phone. No wallet. No ID on him, which meant he had planned better than Kane wanted to credit him for.
“He came prepared,” Kane said.
Mira stood stiffly near the shelf, one hand braced against the wood. “He came grieving.”
“Those can overlap.”
He checked the phone. Locked. He slipped it into his pocket anyway.
Mira watched him with irritation sharpening her face, but she didn’t stop him. That was how Kane knew she was weaker than she wanted to admit. The resurrection had taken from her. It always did, no matter how many times she pretended her body was an obedient thing.
Her throat had closed, but the bruising was still livid beneath the blood she had failed to wash away. Her cheek had swollen purple beneath one eye. The cut along her arm had stopped bleeding, though the skin remained split and angry around the edges.
She looked like their childhood.
Kane hated her a little for that.
He hated himself more for noticing.
“You need to sit down,” he said.
Mira laughed under her breath. “You just said we do not have time.”
“We don’t have time for you to collapse in the hallway.”
“I’m not going to collapse.”
“You’re holding that shelf like it’s the only thing keeping you upright.”
Her hand fell immediately.
Pride. Always useful. Always stupid.
Kane straightened and looked toward the door. Beyond it, the villa continued breathing around them: distant music, muffled laughter, pipes humming inside the walls. A celebration still in progress. People still believing in flowers and vows and safe endings.
“We move him through the back corridor,” Kane said. “Storage first. Then service stairs. There’s a staff laundry chute near the lower level?”
Mira’s mouth pressed flat. “Yes.”
“Good. We hide him below until after the party clears. The hall needs cleaning before anyone looks for you properly.”
“Ethan is already looking.”
“Simon is looking,” Kane said. “Ethan is worrying. Different things.”
Mira’s eyes flashed. “You don’t know him.”
“I know men in love.”
“No, you don’t.”
Kane went still.
Mira’s chin lifted slightly, satisfaction glinting through the exhaustion.
There were easier things he could say. Crueler ones too. He could remind her that love had never saved them, that love had been the word their mother used before teaching them how to smile through murder, that love had been their father’s fist around her throat and their mother’s praise after the basement stopped screaming.
Instead, Kane looked back at Thorfinn.
“He served his purpose.”
Mira’s face changed.
Not confusion.
Understanding beginning badly.
“What purpose?”
Kane bent, hooked his hands beneath Thorfinn’s arms, and dragged the body two feet away from the widening blood beneath him. Dead weight resisted in a way living bodies did not. Heavy. Ungraceful. Honest.
“He reminded you what happens when you get attached.”
Mira did not speak.
Kane kept his eyes on the floor as he worked, not because he could not look at her, but because the blood pattern mattered. The body had to leave in a direction that could be explained later if needed. Smears needed to be controlled. Drops needed to be cleaned in the order someone might search.
“Attachment makes you sloppy,” he continued. “You wanted the wedding. You wanted the pretty night. You wanted the beach and the fire and all those people looking at you like you were finally being given something good.”
“Stop.”
He didn’t.
“So you missed him.”
Mira’s voice went low. “I noticed him.”
“Too late.”
“He was staff.”
“He was Ymir’s brother.”
“I said stop.”
Kane finally looked at her.
The blood made her look younger and older at the same time. Little girl on the kitchen floor. Bride in a dead boy’s wine room. Sister. Stranger. The only person in the world he had ever loved without needing to learn how.
“We should talk about Ethan again.”
Mira went very still.
Not because Kane had surprised her. In some quiet, ugly part of herself, she had known he would get there. Kane never circled anything forever. He watched it, measured it, waited for the right angle, then cut straight through the softest part.
And Ethan had always been the softest part.
Mira tightened the robe around herself.
“No,” she said.
Kane looked at her with the patience of someone who had expected that answer and had already decided it did not matter. “You don’t know what I’m going to say.”
“Yes, I do.”
His mouth thinned.
The contacts made his eyes the wrong color, but not wrong enough. Beneath the green, beneath the careful expression he had stolen from Luca Armani and worn like a second skin, he was still her brother. Still Kane.
Still the man who looked at her future and saw logistics.
“Ethan has become a risk,” Kane said.
Mira’s laugh came out harsh and broken. “Ethan is busy on the other side of this villa worrying about missing flowers and whether I’m cold at my own bachelorette party.”
“Exactly.”
She stared at him.
Kane’s voice stayed low. “He is looking for you. Simon is looking for you. Madaline is not where she is supposed to be. Thorfinn is dead. You were dead. This entire island is balancing on a lie with too many witnesses and not enough exits.”
“That is not Ethan’s fault.”
“Fault doesn’t matter.”
Mira took one step toward him before she could stop herself. Pain pulled through her side, sharp enough to make her breath catch, but she forced herself upright anyway. She would not fold in front of him. Not now. Not over this.
“It matters to me.”
Something in Kane’s face flickered.
There. That was what she wanted. Not guilt. Kane was bad at guilt unless he could turn it into action. But recognition. The small, bitter awareness that he had found a line and she had noticed him standing on it.
“You’re attached,” he said.
“I love him.”
The words came out before she dressed them up.
Raw. Immediate. Hers.
Kane stared at her for a long moment.
Then he looked almost sad.
That hurt worse than if he had mocked her.
“Mira.”
“Don’t say my name like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’ve already forgiven me for being stupid.”
His gaze hardened. “Then don’t be stupid.”
The words struck clean.
Mira’s fingers curled against the robe. “Careful.”
Kane stepped closer. “No. You be careful. You think because he loves the version of you you built for him, that means he can survive the truth?”
“He doesn’t have to know everything.”
“He already knows too much by existing near you.”
Mira shook her head, slow at first, then harder. “No.”
“He has the rings.”
Her blood turned cold.
Kane saw it and pressed.
“He has Calloway blood. Old blood. The right blood. He was useful before he ever knew your name.”
“Stop.”
“He gave you what we needed.”
Mira’s hand went to her stomach.
She hated herself for it the second it happened.
Kane’s eyes dropped to the movement.
The room changed.
Not loudly. No thunder. No dramatic shatter. Just that one small gesture and the truth standing suddenly between them, alive and fragile and impossible to shove back into hiding.
Mira slowly lowered her hand.
Kane’s voice softened, which made it worse. “How long?”
She looked away.
“Mira.”
“A few months.”
The answer barely made sound.
Kane closed his eyes for half a second.
Relief moved across his face first.
Relief.
Not wonder. Not fear. Not joy. Not the dizzy, delicate terror that had filled Mira when she first understood why she was late, why her body felt strange, why the thought of Ethan’s hand on her stomach had made something inside her ache so deeply she had to sit down on the bathroom floor and breathe through it.
Relief.
Like a plan had finally worked.
Mira felt something inside her go very quiet.
“Don’t look like that,” she whispered.
Kane opened his eyes. “Like what?”
“Like I just handed you a victory.”
He did not answer.
Mira stepped back from him.
The movement was small, but Kane noticed. His face shifted again, some faint frustration appearing beneath the control.
“You knew this was always part of it.”
“No,” she said.
“Yes.”
“No, Kane. I knew what Mother wanted. I knew what the blood wanted. I knew what families like ours do when they find families like theirs.” Her voice began to shake, and she hated that too, hated how much truth made her sound less dangerous. “But Ethan was not supposed to become nothing after.”
Kane’s mouth tightened. “He was never nothing.”
“Then why are you talking like he’s finished?”
Silence.
That silence was the cruelest answer he could have given.
Mira laughed softly, but it broke at the end. “There it is.”
Kane’s expression closed further. “He has served his purpose.”
The words landed like a hand around her throat.
For a second, she was back in the hallway, Thorfinn’s knife opening her, air spilling away, her body dropping, her last smile full of secrets he didn’t understand.
Then she was a child again, hearing their father from the other room.
See? Told you.
Then she was here.
With Kane.
Her brother.
The only person who had ever understood the curse as a cage and still somehow learned to decorate it.
“Say that again,” Mira whispered.
Kane’s eyes narrowed.
“Don’t make this emotional.”
“Say it again.”
“Ethan has served his purpose.”
Mira slapped him.
The sound cracked through the storage room.
Kane’s face turned with the force of it. For one breath, he stayed that way, cheek reddening beneath the false coloring of Luca’s stolen life. Mira’s palm stung. Her body throbbed from the sudden movement, wounds complaining all at once, but she did not lower her hand.
Slowly, Kane looked back at her.
His eyes were colder now.
But there was hurt there too.
“You don’t get to talk about him like that,” she said.
Kane’s voice dropped. “You think he would still love you if he saw this room?”
Mira’s throat tightened.
“Yes.”
The answer scared her because she meant it.
Kane heard that too. His face changed—not softened, not exactly, but altered, like she had spoken a language he remembered and hated.
“Then you’re more lost than I thought.”
“He loves me.”
“He loves what you let him see.”
“That is still more than anyone ever loved before him.”
Kane’s expression sharpened.
Too late, Mira realized what she had said.
His voice came soft.
Deadly soft.
“Anyone?”
Mira’s mouth closed.
Kane stepped closer, and this time she did not step back.
“I held your hand while you came back,” he said. “I lied for you. Killed for you. Buried for you. I wore grief in public for two years so you could have your little life with him.”
“I didn’t ask you to wear grief.”
“No. You only asked me to survive it.”
The words hit both of them.
Mira saw it happen to him. Saw the way his anger turned inward for half a second before he trapped it again.
Her voice softened despite herself. “Kane.”
He flinched like tenderness was worse than the slap.
Then the softness in him disappeared.
“I’m sure our father loved you at some point too.”
Mira stopped breathing.
The room vanished.
Not literally. She could still see him, still see the crates, the dull shadow of Thorfinn’s body, the smear of blood on the floor. But all of it flattened, went distant, pressed behind the roar that filled her ears.
Kane knew immediately.
Regret flickered across his face, sharp and fast.
But he did not take it back.
That was Kane’s particular cruelty. He could regret the wound and still believe in the knife.
Mira’s voice came out barely above a whisper.
“He was not our father.”
Kane went still.
The secret sat between them like a third body.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
Then Kane said, very quietly, “I know.”
Mira stared at him.
Her chest hurt.
Not from the wound.
Not from coming back.
From him.
“Do you?” she asked.
His face tightened.
Mira stepped closer now, shaking with pain and fury and something so much older than both. “Because every time you say family, you sound just like him.”
Kane’s eyes flashed.
“Don’t.”
“You sound like him when you tell me what I’m allowed to keep.”
“Mira.”
“You sound like him when you say love is just another thing to survive.”
“Stop.”
“You sound like him when you look at my baby and see blood before you see mine.”
That did it.
Kane’s composure cracked.
“That baby is Amato.”
Mira’s hand went to her stomach again, but this time she did not hide it.
She held herself there, palm spread protectively over the fragile secret beneath her skin.
“That baby is mine.”
Kane stared at her hand.
Then at her face.
His voice lowered. “And what happens when Ethan finds out? What happens when Madaline tells him? What happens when he sees you covered in blood, standing over another body, and realizes the woman he is soon to be married to was never real?”
Mira swallowed.
Pain moved through her.
Fear too.
Real fear.
But underneath it, stubborn and bright and horribly alive, was the memory of Ethan’s hands at the back of her neck, Ethan’s tired smile over breakfast, Ethan saying we’re getting one when she said she wanted one beautiful weekend.
“Then I will make him understand.”
Kane laughed once.
No humor.
Only heartbreak sharpened into disbelief.
“You can’t manipulate someone into understanding forever.”
Mira’s eyes burned.
“Maybe I don’t want to manipulate him.”
Kane looked at her like that was the saddest thing she had said yet.
“Then you have already lost.”
Mira’s mouth trembled.
She hated him for seeing it.
She hated herself for letting it happen.
“I am not killing Ethan.”
Kane’s face went cold.
Not angry now.
Worse.
Resolved.
“Then I will.”
The words entered her slowly.
One blade at a time.
Mira stared at him.
Her brother.
Her first protector.
Her oldest wound.
The only person who had ever known exactly what it cost her to come back.
And for the first time in her life, she looked at Kane and saw someone she might have to stop.