I watched a married woman sell the last thing she owned so her little boy could breathe that night. Ten minutes later,

“What is 0117?”

“My mother’s birthday.”

Her expression shifted.

“Marcus—”

“Go.”

This time, she did.

Claire followed.

Nico stayed.

Of course he did.

“You should go too,” I said.

He looked offended. “And miss church?”

We made our stand beneath the broken saints.

Anton’s men came through the smoke wearing masks, expecting panic.

Instead, they found me.

I will not dress violence up as something beautiful. It wasn’t.

It was heat, ash, fists, gunfire swallowed by old stone, and the raw animal need to keep the fire away from the child coughing beneath the floor.

Nico took a bullet through the shoulder and cursed the shooter’s mother.

I snapped one man’s wrist against a pew.

Another fell at the altar rail.

Then Anton entered.

He wore a gray coat and held a pistol with a suppressor. Calm. Clean. Almost regretful.

“Look at this,” he said. “Marcus Vale bleeding in church.”

My side burned.

I looked down and saw red spreading beneath my coat.

I had not felt the knife go in.

Anton smiled. “You see? Emotional.”

“You talk too much.”

He aimed at me.

A shot rang out.

Not his.

Anton jerked.

The pistol slipped from his hand.

He looked down at the blood spreading across his thigh, stunned.

Emily stood behind him through the smoke, both hands wrapped around Claire’s gun.

Ash streaked her face.

Her eyes did not waver.

“I told you,” she said, voice trembling but fierce. “Careful didn’t save my son.”

Anton dropped to one knee.

Nico looked at her and coughed. “Remind me never to charge you late fees.”

The fire roared above us.

I staggered toward Emily.

“You came back.”

She grabbed my arm. “You promised Oliver.”

“He’s safe?”

“For now.”

“Then go.”

“No.”

The roof groaned.

Burning wood crashed near the pews.

Anton laughed from the floor, his voice warped by pain. “You’ll all die in here.”

Emily looked at him.

“No,” she said. “We’re leaving.”

And somehow, because she said it like a mother laying down a rule, we did.

We dragged Nico with us. We left Anton bleeding but alive for the agents already closing around the building, summoned by Claire from the tunnel using my phone.

Smoke chased us down the cellar stairs.

We emerged through the garage into cold rain.

Oliver was there, wrapped in blankets in the back of an old parish van, crying until he saw Emily.

“Mommy!”

She climbed inside and held him so tightly I thought they might become one person.

I stood outside, bleeding under the rain, watching the church burn.

The roof caved inward with a sound like a giant exhale.

For the first time in my life, I felt no anger over losing something that belonged to me.

Because Emily was alive.

Oliver was breathing.

And the flames had nowhere left to go.