ALESSIA
I stared at the message for eleven full seconds before I made myself open it.
It's Mia. Please don't block this number. I know I don't deserve you reading it but I need you to know something before tomorrow.
My thumb hovered over the screen. Every instinct Carter had built into me over three weeks said forward this immediately, don't engage, don't respond, this is exactly the kind of variable we discussed an hour ago. But underneath the training was something older and messier — the memory of a seventeen-year-old girl braiding my hair in a kitchen three years ago, before any of it, before the gifts and the betrayal and the version of Mia that existed only to please a man who terrified her into it.
I forwarded the screenshot to the number Carter had given me, then, against every
