The third day of Cole's deadline arrived gray and ordinary, and it was that very ordinariness that made what happened next so much worse.

They'd spent the previous evening at his father's estate, the three of them working late into the night alongside a security contact Ezra trusted from a life he rarely spoke of anymore, assembling a plan neither of them had wanted to need—a way to meet Cole's deadline not with the research itself, but with enough leverage and protection to buy more time, more room to finish what Elena Ashford had started. Lucien remembered, distinctly, feeling something like hope by the time they'd finished, a clear and...