MAFIA BOSS WAS SURROUNDED BY ARMED GUARDS INSIDE A ROYAL PALACE—BUT A TODDLER WEARING A SILVER TIARA MANAGED TO TERRIFY HIM WITH FIVE INNOCENT WORDS...

The man across the harbor wore Silas Vane's ring, but his face was unfamiliar. He stood beneath the awning of a closed fish market and watched the bakery with the patient stillness of someone who had been paid to wait. When he noticed me looking back, he touched his ear as if receiving instructions.

Naomi stepped beside me. “Do not go charging across the street.”

“I wasn't going to.”

“Your shoulders suggest otherwise.”

She was right. My entire body wanted to move. But I had spent enough years creating chaos in response to threats. Isabella deserved better than another man deciding her future with his fists.

I called the local police station and gave them our location, a description of the watcher, and the information connecting his insignia to the attack at the palace. Then I told my two security officers to stay visible rather than try to corner him. Within minutes a patrol car rolled toward the fish market. The man saw it, turned, and slipped down a side alley.

He was gone before the officers reached the corner.

“Another missed opportunity,” I muttered.

“Or another avoided trap,” Naomi replied.

The bakery owner, Mrs. O'Keefe, locked the door behind us and poured coffee into chipped ceramic mugs. She was sixty-eight, with bright eyes and flour on one sleeve. The photograph of Isabella lay between us.

“Her name here is Bella,” she said. “She restores old photographs at the museum. Quiet girl. Good with damaged things.”

“Did she mention trouble?” Naomi asked.

“Never directly. But she started checking the street before she came inside. Three mornings ago she asked me to hold that envelope until a man with gray eyes came asking.”

I looked down at the silver star. “Did she say my name?”

“No. Only that she wasn't sure whether the man was going to save her or destroy her.”

That hurt more than I expected. A sister I had never known was right to fear me. The Calloway name had helped build the cage she lived inside.

“Did she leave anything else?”

Mrs. O'Keefe shook her head. Then she hesitated. “She said one thing. If the wrong person came, I was to ask about the little star.”

My pulse quickened. “What did the little star steal?”

Mrs. O'Keefe's eyes filled. “The moon's blue ribbon.”

Naomi and I exchanged a glance. The message was genuine enough to warrant trust, though not enough to explain where Isabella had gone.

“Can you help us reach her safely?” Naomi asked.

“I can tell you where she used to go when things got hard.” Mrs. O'Keefe looked toward the harbor. “The lighthouse.”

We drove there without headlights after the final turn, following a narrow road through grass bent nearly flat by wind. The museum occupied the old keeper's house. Beside it rose a white lighthouse whose lamp had been dark for decades, replaced by modern navigation markers on the breakwater. The building stood against the night like a finger raised in warning.

A local officer checked the grounds before allowing us out. We found the museum door unlocked, the alarm disarmed, and a faint light coming from the restoration room. Inside, photographs lay across tables beneath protective paper. Some showed fishermen, others long-dead families, children in stiff collars standing beside parents who looked too serious to smile.

At the center of the room sat a photograph of my mother.

She was kneeling beside a little girl with dark curls, holding a blue ribbon between them. The child's face was blurred by damage, but the silver star on her sweater was unmistakable.

Naomi photographed the scene before touching anything. We found a note beneath the image.

THEY TOLD ME I HAD NO FAMILY. THEN THEY TOLD ME MY FAMILY WAS THE DANGER. BOTH STORIES CAN'T BE TRUE.

Below it was an address to a derelict chapel on the edge of town, followed by a time: midnight.

I checked my watch. Twenty-two minutes.

“This is almost certainly a setup,” Naomi said.

“Maybe.”

“Which means we notify the police and approach carefully.”

“We'll do it your way.”

She looked genuinely surprised. “That might be the first time a Calloway has said that to me.”

I almost laughed. Then we heard footsteps on the stairs above us.

A young woman descended carrying a canvas bag. Her hair was tucked beneath a wool cap, and she wore a green raincoat that looked too thin for the weather. She stopped when she saw me.

I knew her instantly. Not because of the photograph, but because of the way she braced herself, one hand closing around the banister as if standing upright required courage.

“Isabella,” I said.

Her eyes widened. “Don't say my name.”

I took a step backward. “All right.”

She looked at Naomi, then the uniformed officer by the door. “How did you find me?”

“The bakery. Your photograph. The note.”

“I never left a note about the chapel.”

Cold rushed through me. “You didn't?”

“No.”

Naomi immediately called the officer outside and relayed the address. Another trap, waiting for whoever chased the wrong clue. Isabella's eyes moved toward the window.

“They know you're here,” she whispered.

“Someone followed us, yes.”

“No. They know where I live.”

She opened her canvas bag and showed me a photograph taken through her apartment window. She was asleep on a sofa. A red mark had been drawn across her face. The picture had arrived by hand that afternoon.

“They want the index,” she said.

“Evelyn said you have it.”

“I had it. Until yesterday.”

“Who took it?”

“A man who said he was my father's attorney.”

“Did he give a name?”

“Silas Vane.”

My stomach dropped. Silas had beaten us here. And if he'd recovered the ledger's translation key, he could erase or manipulate the records before they reached investigators.

“Did he hurt you?”

“He threatened to tell the whole town who I was. He said I would lose everything I'd built here if people knew I came from a criminal family.”

“You don't have to leave.”

“I know that now. But yesterday I was afraid.”

She looked down, ashamed. I recognized the expression; I'd worn it after trusting the wrong men.

“Being afraid doesn't make you wrong,” I said. “It means he found something that matters to you.”

Isabella's face changed. She looked at me for a long time.

“You sound like him,” she whispered.

“Who?”

“Your father. He used to say things like that in his letters.”

I stared. “He wrote to you?”

“Every birthday. Until five years ago. The letters were never signed with his real name. I didn't know who he was until I saw his photograph online after he died.”

She pulled an old envelope from the bag. Inside was a card with a drawing of a star and one sentence: You are loved, even when no one can tell you why.

The handwriting was my father's. I felt anger and grief collide. He had reached Isabella, however imperfectly, while leaving me to believe she'd died.

“Why did he never bring you home?”

“Because he thought his own house was compromised,” she said. “He said one day the danger would pass. I stopped believing him.”

I could not blame her.

Naomi asked permission to photograph the letters for the investigation. Isabella agreed, but only after specifying that copies must not be used to expose her workplace or the people who had helped her. Naomi promised to seek protective measures. For the first time Isabella's shoulders relaxed.

“You know what Silas wanted from me?” she asked.

“The index.”

“He wanted me to confirm the location of another file. He said Evelyn had hidden the original witness interviews with the ledger. When I refused, he laughed.”

“What did he say?”

“He said the interviews didn't matter because the only living witness to the first transfer was already inside the palace.”

I thought of Celia. Of the retired nurse. Of Gabriel, who had stood beside my father for years. But Isabella shook her head when I asked if she knew the witness's name.

“Silas called her the queen without a crown,” she said.

My mother had been nicknamed the Uncrowned Queen after she refused the Alliance's ceremonial title. She had died twenty-one years earlier. The phrase might have been a taunt, another attempt to make the living afraid of the dead.

Before I could ask more, the lights in the restoration room went out.

A generator coughed somewhere in the basement. The lighthouse remained dark, but the glass at the top briefly flashed red, as though a signal lamp had been switched on. The local officer shouted from outside that a vehicle had entered the road without lights.

Naomi guided Isabella away from the windows. I called Gabriel to warn him that Silas possessed the missing index and that someone at the palace might be a target.

He answered on the second ring.

“Dean, you need to come home.”

“What happened?”

“Evelyn's medical room was entered using your father's old emergency credentials. She's safe, but the intruder stole something from her bag.”

“The case?”

“No. A family photograph.”

I turned toward Isabella, who was watching me anxiously.

“Which one?”

Gabriel hesitated. “A picture of your mother holding two babies.”

I stared into the dark.

“Two?”

“One was Isabella,” Gabriel said. “We don't know who the other was.”