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If this page exists five minutes from now, it’s a liability, and I have buried better men than me over smaller carelessness than a document like this left sitting in a drawer.

I hold the corner to the lighter’s flame until it catches then drop it in the metal bowl I keep in the second drawer for exactly this.

I watch my own name curl black and vanish into the rest of it, and I don’t look away until there’s nothing left but ash and a thin string of smoke drifting up toward the vent.

The Serbian gets cleared in a week. Maybe less.

Then there’s only one name left on that list.

Mine.

Moving on Russo now is off the table.

I don’t have ironclad information that will neutralize him and besides, even if I did, it tips my hand and accelerates him, and Russo accelerating is what got Dino pulled out of the Hudson.

I am not going to be the reason someone else ends up next to him.

Waiting doesn’t work either.

Russo landing on me doesn’t just mean Russo comes for me.

It means he comes for everybody around me.

It means he figures out where Seraphina is and he eliminates her.

That leaves one option that I immediately don’t like but know it’s the right choice.

I need to bring Seraphina here.

Every time I move her, I widen the net of people who have seen her—drivers, nurses, random people who may be around.

Every one of those people is a target now.

Consolidating her at the estate collapses the whole thing to one location and the people I trust the most are already inside it.

I can easily get all the required stuff a two year old needs.

They still sleep in cribs, right?

And toys. I can get all that stuff.

It also allows Katerina to see Seraphina every day.

Katerina is going to be relieved and that’s the part I keep coming back to.

She has spent the entire time she’s here not sure where that baby actually is, trusting me on my word alone, and now she is going to be able to walk down a hall and see her with her own eyes.

That should feel like a good thing.

It kind of does.

But it also means the leverage is gone.

I built this whole arrangement on the fact that Seraphina’s safety was something only I controlled, something Katerina could not verify except through me—a video every three days, a photograph when I decided to hand one over, my word and nothing else.

That was never just kindness.

It was what was keeping her here and compliant, keeping her from doing something reckless.