Chapter 132

Alina's POV

Adams's words landed like a needle, leaving a sting that spread through me long after the sound had gone.

He stood in front of me with something like pity in his eyes—and something like satisfaction—as though he could already see me reaching for words to fight back with and finding nothing.

He didn't press further. He just put the cigar back between his lips, and the smoke rose up and softened the hard lines of his face.

"Stop lying to yourself, sweetheart. Stay here. Think it over." He said it the way someone might say something obvious and a little sad. "Take your time and decide who it is you can actually lean on." Then he turned and walked to the door.

His footsteps faded down the corridor. The door closed behind him. The lock engaged, and in the quiet of the room the sound was very clear.

I sat on the edge of the bed. My body had gone rigid, and my thoughts were a tangle—memories and doubts and half-formed arguments all pressing at once, each one with enough force to drown out the others.

I closed my eyes, gripped my own hand hard, and made myself be still.

No.

My eyes opened.

I couldn't let him lead me where he wanted me to go. Those so-called documents, that evidence—it was all constructed from his angle, shaped to say what he needed it to say. Adams could dress a lie in the clothes of fact and stand it next to the truth without blinking. If I let myself believe what he was showing me, that was when I would have truly fallen for it.

Lowell would not hurt me. I knew that. I believed it without qualification.

Every night he had been there for me. The moment he stepped in front of me and took a bullet that was meant for me. All of it was real.

Even if he had kept me at the margins of the family later—even if I had questions I couldn't answer—the truth of what he had been to me in those earlier moments could not be argued away.

Those things were real. And that was enough.

I stood up and went to the door. I tried the lock. Still sealed.

I turned back, and my eyes landed on a glass sitting on the floor.

I crossed the room, picked it up, walked to the corner, and brought it down hard against the floor.

The crack was sharp in the silence. Glass scattered in all directions, a few pieces landing near my feet, catching the amber light at their edges.

I crouched down and picked through the shards until I found the right one—long, narrow, with a clean edge. I pinched it between my fingers. Thin as a blade. When I cut it through the air there was almost no resistance at all. The reflected light crossed my palm like a sliver of lightning.

Adams would come back. When he pushed that door open again, I would be ready to show him who the glass was for.

I settled onto the bed and looked toward the window. Time passed, though I couldn't have said how much.

When the lock moved again, I was on my feet before the sound had finished, and I was already behind the door.

Adams stepped into the room.

I threw myself onto his back and brought the shard of glass to his throat.

The edge pressed against the skin just above his carotid artery—that thin, vulnerable strip of flesh. One clean pull and there would be no recovering from it.

Adams went still. But his expression barely shifted, and after a moment the corner of his mouth moved, as though he found the whole thing mildly interesting.

"You want to kill me?" His voice was perfectly even, with that particular brand of amusement that said he wasn't taking me seriously at all.

"Let me out. Now. Or I will."

"You're threatening me with a piece of broken glass." He said it with the patience of someone explaining something obvious. "If you cut me, the guards outside come in, and you don't make it past this door. Go ahead and test that if you want."

My fingers tightened in the fabric of his collar. "I've got nothing left to lose. I'm fine with taking you down with me."

Adams went quiet for a moment. Then he exhaled—long and slow, as though accepting the inevitable with mild reluctance.

"All right. You win." A pause. "But before that—don't you want to see what your parents left behind?"

The words reached something in me before I could stop them.

"What did they leave?" I didn't release the glass. I just asked.

"A tape," Adams said. "A video recording. Made before they died." His voice had gone quiet, almost gentle—each word deliberate, weighted. "Don't you want to know what they said at the end?"

My breathing paused for just a moment.

My memories of my birth parents had grown thin over the years, worn down to almost nothing. The possibility of something they had left behind—something meant to be found—pulled at me in a way I couldn't entirely control. But I knew Adams. I knew what he did with openings.

"You're playing me. What is it this time?"

"If it were a trick, you'd see that the moment you watched it," he said, still in that unhurried voice. "Why would I need to trick you? You're already here. Everything I want you to see, you'll see eventually. Watch the tape. After that—whether you stay or go is your choice. I won't stop you."

This kind of generosity from Adams was not something I was used to. It put me on edge in a different way than his threats did.

The silence stretched.

"Where is it?" I asked at last.

He tilted his head toward the television on the wall. "The tape is already loaded. Press play."

The glass was still at his throat. A thin red line had formed on the skin of his neck where the edge had been pressing—he hadn't flinched, hadn't moved, just waited with the patience of someone who was certain of the outcome.

I bit down on the inside of my lip. Then I made the decision, released his collar, and stepped back half a pace.

I kept the shard in my hand.

"Don't move," I said. "One wrong move and I can still put you down."

Adams raised both hands in a slow gesture of surrender and came with me to the sofa.

I picked up the remote. I pressed play.

The screen flickered once, and then the footage began—the image slightly soft, the way older recordings look. The camera shook briefly and then steadied, settling on two faces.

I knew those faces.

My mother. She looked older than I remembered—her eyes had sunk into her face, and the shadows beneath them were dark and deep, the kind that come from nights of no real sleep. My father sat beside her, one hand resting on her shoulder.

Behind them: a small room, pale walls, half a curtain, the corner of an old table.

My mother opened her mouth. Closed it. Seemed to collect herself. Then she began to speak.

"If you're seeing this, we're probably already gone. We found something—about the money behind the underground boxing operations. There's a company that was used as a channel to launder those funds and distribute them across several different networks. The person who actually controlled that company was a member of the Vadalich family. His name was Sumia."

Sumia.

When I heard my mother say that name, something in my chest seized—and my mind went blank.

There was only one thing left in it.

Lowell's father. The man my mother had just named. They were the same person.