Sebastian’s face had gone the color of ash, but when he spoke, his voice did not break.
“The FBI has the mechanic’s confession too.”
For a heartbeat, the room seemed to lose oxygen.
Malcolm Rourke’s eyes flicked from Sebastian to the officers, then to Angela Brooks, then finally to Grace. In that instant, something old and ugly surfaced in him—something cornered, feral, stripped of the expensive suits and polished manners that had made him look civilized for so many years.
He lunged.
Not at Sebastian.
At Grace.
She saw him coming as if through deep water. Her body reacted before her mind could. One hand flew protectively over her belly. Her knees locked. A thin, strangled sound caught in her throat.
Sebastian moved faster.
He intercepted Malcolm with a force that cracked through the church basement like a gunshot. His hand seized the back of Malcolm’s collar and drove him hard into the wall. Plaster dust burst from the impact. Malcolm grunted, his cheek crushed against peeling paint, his arms flailing once before Sebastian pinned him there with a violence so tightly controlled it was more terrifying than rage.
Every officer in the room shouted at once.
“Rourke!”
“Step back!”
“Hands where we can see them!”
Grace flinched, not because Malcolm had almost reached her, but because for one blinding second she feared Sebastian would cross the line. That he would become the very man she had spent months being afraid he was. That all the restraint, all the promises, all the trembling attempts at change would shatter under the weight of blood and history.
But Sebastian stopped.
He held Malcolm there, breathing hard, shoulders heaving beneath his torn dress shirt. His eyes blazed with something that looked like hatred, yes—but not only hatred. Grief. Disgust. Recognition. A son’s fury at a family that had taught him cruelty and called it legacy.
“For years,” Sebastian said, his voice low enough that everyone else fell silent to hear it, “you taught me power meant deciding who could be hurt.”
Malcolm twisted, his mouth opening for a curse.
Sebastian pressed him harder against the wall.
“My daughter,” he said, each word carved from him, “will learn something else.”
Then he released him.
He stepped back with his hands open, palms visible, breath ragged but controlled.
Angela Brooks moved in immediately. She caught Malcolm’s wrist, wrenched it behind his back, and snapped one cuff into place with ruthless efficiency. The federal agents closed around him, reading his rights while Malcolm spat threats that sounded smaller by the second.
Sebastian did not watch his uncle being taken.
He turned toward Grace.
All the force drained out of him as he crossed the basement. He slowed before reaching her, stopping two feet away as if there were an invisible boundary around her he no longer had the right to cross. His gaze moved over her face, her arm, the way she still held her stomach.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
Grace tried to answer. Her arm throbbed where Malcolm had grabbed her earlier. Her back ached from the struggle, and her body was trembling with delayed terror. Dust clung to her hair. Her lungs burned. Every bruise seemed to announce itself at once.
But beneath her palm, Lily moved.
Alive.
Furious.
A rolling, indignant kick that made Grace press her hand more firmly to the curve of her belly and almost laugh from the shock of relief.
“I don’t know,” she said honestly.
Sebastian’s face changed at once.
“Hospital,” he said. “Now.”
This time, Grace did not argue.
By the time they reached Mercy Lake, the sky had darkened to the bruised purple of late evening. Police lights still flashed red and blue in Grace’s memory even after they were gone, turning every passing streetlamp into an echo of danger. Sebastian sat beside her in the back of the ambulance because she had not told him to leave, but he did not crowd her. He kept one hand braced against the bench, the other fisted against his knee, as if every instinct in him wanted to touch her and every lesson he was trying to learn told him to wait.
At the hospital, Dr. Patel was already waiting.
Grace had never been so grateful to see another human being in her life. The doctor’s calm face, practical hands, and quiet instructions wrapped around Grace like a net.
“Let’s check the baby,” Dr. Patel said. “One thing at a time.”
One thing at a time.
Grace clung to that.
They strapped monitors around her belly. The elastic bands felt too tight, too clinical, too impersonal after everything that had happened. For a moment, all Grace could hear was her own pulse hammering in her ears.
Then the fetal monitor found Lily’s heartbeat.
Fast.
Steady.
Insistent.
Grace closed her eyes and broke.
Sebastian made a sound from the corner of the room, something that might have been a breath or might have been a prayer. He had retreated there as soon as the nurses began working, his suit jacket gone, sleeves rolled to his forearms, dust and bloodless scrapes marking his hands. He looked like a man who had walked out of a collapsed building and still expected the roof to come down.