Chapter 1: Eyes Open

**Prologue**

The bullet hit before the scream did.

Rosalind felt it tear through her side. She dropped to the cold concrete floor of the warehouse, and the lights above her swayed on their chains.

She looked for Kade. She always looked for him first.

He stood ten feet away, gun still raised. His face wasn't proud. It was broken.

"Rosalind…"

He hadn't fired the shot. Silas Cade stood behind her, calm, like a man finishing something he'd planned for years.

"She was never one of us," Silas said. "Just a Vane playing dress up in a dead man's name."

Rosalind tried to speak. She wanted to tell Kade the truth, that Silas had been lying to everyone since before she was born, that her father trusted the wrong brother for twenty years. Nothing came out but blood.

The last thing she saw was Kade falling to his knees beside her.

Too late.

Then nothing..

Fifteen years earlier, 2:30 pm …

Her eyes snapped open.

Not slow. Not soft. One second there was darkness, and the next, sound rushed in, a radio playing through the wall, a dog barking somewhere outside. Rosalind sat up so fast the room spun.

Wrong room. Yellow walls. A bed that wasn't hers.

She looked down at her hands. Small. Smooth. No scar across the knuckles.

"No," she whispered. "No, no, no."

She pushed off the blanket and stood, legs shaking, and caught her reflection in the mirror across the room. A girl stared back at her. Fifteen, maybe sixteen. A face she hadn't seen since her mother hid the old photos at the bottom of a drawer.

Downstairs, a door slammed.

"Rosalind! You're gonna make Silas wait all morning. Get down here!"

Her stomach dropped.

That voice belonged to a dead man.

She gripped the doorframe until her fingers ached, forcing air into her lungs. Fifteen years earlier. That name downstairs. Silas.

She didn't remember walking down the stairs, but her feet carried her there before her mind caught up. The kitchen smelled like coffee and motor oil. Her father stood at the counter, sleeves rolled up, a mug in one hand.

Alive.

Across from him, at the small table, sat a man she hadn't seen since the moment before she died.

Silas Cade. No gray in his beard yet. No cold behind his eyes, the kind she only recognized after it was too late.

He looked up and smiled. "There she is. Sleeping in on a school day. Your old man's gonna have to teach you better discipline than that."

Rosalind's hands curled into fists at her sides.

"Rosalind?" her father said, studying her. "You look like you saw a ghost."

She forced a smile. "Bad dream."

"You've been having a lot of those lately," Silas said, still smiling. "Maybe you should get some real sleep instead of staying up reading those books of yours."

She sat down slowly across from him, careful not to let her face show anything. "Maybe I should."

Her father slid a plate toward her. "Eat something before you go pale on me."

She picked up the fork but didn't eat. Her eyes kept drifting to Silas, to the easy way he leaned back in his chair like he belonged there, like he hadn't already started planning the end of everything.

"You're staring," Silas said.

"Sorry," she said. "You just remind me of someone."

"Yeah?" He raised an eyebrow. "Who's that?"

"Someone I used to trust."

Her father laughed, missing the weight behind her words completely. "She's still half asleep. Don't mind her."

Silas kept looking at her a second too long. "No. I don't think she is."

The room went quiet. Her father glanced between them, confused, but Silas only smiled again and reached for his coffee like nothing had happened at all.

"Marcus," Silas said, turning to her father, "we've got church in twenty. The Grayson deal won't wait."

Her father nodded, already halfway into business mode, and Rosalind watched him stand, sling his jacket over his shoulder, the patch on the back catching the morning light. Ironclad Reapers. Whole. Unburned.

"You good, kid?" he asked her on his way out.

"I'm good," she said. "Go. I'll clean up."

He kissed the top of her head, the way he used to before everything fell apart, and walked out with Silas following close behind him, laughing at something her father said, easy as brothers.

Rosalind sat alone at the table, staring at the door long after it closed.

She had one thing now that she never had before. Time. Fifteen years of it, sitting right in front of her, untouched.

She thought about the ledger Silas kept hidden, the one nobody found until it was far too late to matter. She thought about the night the club burned, and the years her father spent in a cell for a crime someone else committed. She thought about Kade, a stranger to her now, a man who hadn't built anything yet, who didn't know her name.

She could stop all of it. Every death. Every lie.

But if she did, would Kade ever exist the way she remembered him? Or would saving her father mean losing the only man she'd ever loved before either of them knew who the other was?

Her phone, an old flip model she hadn't touched in over a decade, buzzed on the counter.

Unknown number.

She stared at it for a long moment before picking it up.

One text.

*I know what you saw. Meet me tonight. Alone.*

Her fingers went cold around the phone.

Nobody was supposed to know.