Minutes later, I found the three-year-old son I had hidden in a hospital supply closet curled on the chest of a mafia boss who had stopped breathing. Suddenly, the heart monitor began beeping again. When the man opened his eyes, he ignored the doctors and armed guards, stared directly at me, and asked, “Do you know who your husband really worked for?”

The rain was coming down in sheets by the time I slammed the hatch of the speedboat shut, locking Logan safely in the cabin beneath the dash.

My lungs burned. My hands were slick with rain and adrenaline. I scrambled into the pilot’s seat, my shaking fingers fumbling with the ignition key Alessandro had promised.

Click.

The engine roared to life, a deep, guttural growl that vibrated through the fiberglass hull.

I threw the throttle forward, cutting the mooring lines, and the boat surged out from beneath the rotting wooden pier into the churning, gray waters of the Patapsco River. The wind howled around me, stinging my face with cold spray, but I didn't care. I had to get my son away from the crossfire.

As I steered the boat toward an abandoned marina down the coast, a heavy, encrypted satellite phone sitting on the console suddenly blinked to life, flashing a bright green light.

Incoming Secure Transmission.

My heart hammered against my ribs. I snatched the receiver off the dash, my hand shaking so violently I almost dropped it.

“Hello?!” I screamed into the mic.

For a terrifying second, there was only static. Then, a voice came through—distorted by encryption software, deep and raspy, but a voice I would know anywhere in the universe.

“Catherine?”

The word shattered something inside my chest. I let out a jagged, broken sob, tears mixing with the rain streaming down my face.

“David!” I screamed, gripping the steering wheel with one hand while holding the phone to my ear. “Oh, God, David! You’re alive! You’re actually alive!”

“Catherine, listen to me very carefully,” David’s voice was frantic, rushed, background noise of a chaotic control room bleeding through the speaker—keyboard clacking, alarms beeping, guns cocking. “Are you safe? Where is Logan? Did Alessandro get you out?”

“He saved us!” I sobbed, looking back toward the burning docks in the distance, where thick black smoke billowed into the stormy sky. “He took the bullets, David! He stayed behind to fight Marcus’s men while I ran!”

A heavy silence hung over the line, followed by a sharp, exhausted curse from my husband.

“He’s still alive?” David breathed. “If Alessandro falls, Marcus controls the entire East Coast pipeline. The feds will descend on you within the hour, and Marcus won't stop until every trace of our family is wiped off the earth.”

“I don't care about the pipeline, David!” I shouted over the roar of the boat engine. “I care about you! You lied to me! You let me mourn you for two years! You let our son grow up without a father while you played soldier for a criminal!”

“I did it so you could live!” David’s voice cracked, full of the same raw, agonizing pain I had carried every single day since the accident. “You think it didn’t kill me every single night, looking at your picture on a secure monitor, watching Logan take his first steps through a hidden camera lens? I was a dead man the second I found Marcus’s ledgers, Catherine. The only way to keep you ghosts was to make you invisible.”

“Well, we aren't invisible anymore,” I cried, the wind whipping my hair across my face. “Marcus found us. Alessandro is bleeding out in a burning warehouse. And I am sitting on a stolen boat in the middle of a freezing river with our three-year-old son! What do we do now, David? What do we do?”