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“You don’t have to do anything,” Cruz says, low. “We handle this together. He doesn’t get to walk in here and flip our world.” His eyes say the rest. Gerald being here means questions. Attention. Everything we’ve worked to keep buried.

Brady reaches us and his hand finds mine, squeezing hard enough to hurt. The pain helps. It puts me back in my body. I’m not fourteen. I’m not helpless. I spent twelve years cultivating the woman I am, someone no one could make feel small or defenseless again.

Dante arrives on my other side, steady as bedrock. He doesn’t ask questions. He just plants himself, a wall between me and the front of the building. The three of them arrange around me in a formation that probably looks like teammates shooting the breeze. From inside it, it feels like a fortress.

Marco appears at the edge of our circle, troubled. “Dakota. Victor wants you in his office. There’s a man saying he’s your stepfather. Says he’s worried about you. Victor wants your side.”

Stepfather.

The word lands like a knee to the ribs. He’s playing the family card, the legitimate-concern card, and it’s working the way it always works. People believe men in polo shirts with firm handshakes. They don’t believe girls who fight back and run.

“You don’t have to go in there,” Cruz says. “Victor can come out here. There’s no reason you should be in the same room as?—”

“I’m going,” I announce.

He stops.

“He spent fifteen years making me small.” My voice is steady. “Making me think my only options were to take it or run. I’m done running. If he wants to lie about me, he does it to my face.”

The walk to the office feels surreal. My men move with me, not touching or obvious, just a steady anchor for me.

Victor’s door stands open. Gerald sits in a chair across the desk, posture relaxed, radiating fatherly concern so convincingly that for one nauseating second I doubt my own memories.

Eli leans against the wall, arms crossed.

I step inside. Gerald turns, and for a fraction of a second the mask slips. There it is. The ownership. The rage that I dared to leave. Then it’s gone, and he’s on his feet, arms spreading.

“Dakota. Sweetheart. I’ve been so worried about you.”

My stomach rolls.Sweetheart.The same word from Cruz’s mouth means safe. From Gerald’s mouth it means the hallway, the hand on my lower back, the doorknob at 2:17 AM.

I don’t move toward him, staying in the doorway where I can feel the exit at my back.

Victor gestures at the empty chair. “Have a seat.”

“I’ll stand.”

Gerald launches into it. He’s been worried sick since I disappeared. Rebecca’s death hit us both hard, and I wasn’t handling it well. One night I just vanished, no note, no call. He hired a private investigator. Followed leads through three states.He’s not here to drag me home—I’m a grown woman, he knows that—he just needs to see with his own eyes that I’m safe, needs to know I’m getting whatever support I need.

The lies pour out of him smooth as motor oil. I watch Victor’s face. Sympathy, yes. But something skeptical underneath it.

Victor turns to me when Gerald finishes. “Is any of that true?”

“No.”

And then I tell him. Not the sanitized version. Not the vague bad-home-situation summary that lets people feel sorry for me without having to picture anything. The real thing. The comments that started when I was fourteen. The way he looked at me across the dinner table. The touches that began as accidents, though, were far from it. The nights he came into my room—how I froze and stared at the ceiling. The way I learned to leave my own body until the nightmare was over. The day I was seventeen and no longer froze in fear when he grabbed my wrist and I made him let go. And the night this summer, two months after Mom died, when he tried my door one last time and I broke his nose, dislocated his shoulder and left him bleeding on my carpet.

The way my mother chose him anyway. Every single time.

Gerald’s mask cracks as I talk. Not all the way—he’s too practiced—but Victor sees it. The flash of fury at the broken nose. The jaw tightens when I describe him constantly coming to my bedroom.

“I don’t know why she says these things.” He shakes his head, wounded, bewildered. “She’s always had an imagination. Always been difficult. She resented me for not being her real father. I never touched that girl. I loved her mother and I tried my best to love her too, and she made it impossible. She invents stories to punish me.”

Same script. Same tone. Fifteen years of the same performance, and it almost doesn’t hurt anymore.

Almost.

Victor looks between us for a long moment. Then his expression closes like a fist, and his voice drops ten degrees.