The note didn’t leave Tricia’s hand for the rest of the night.
She barely slept. Every time she closed her eyes, the words echoed:
> Ask your mother.
The words twisted something deep inside her—a pressure she didn’t have the strength to explain. Her mother had died in a car crash when she was barely old enough to understand loss. Her memories of her were like fractured glass—hazy, silent, soft with grief.
But this note wasn’t vague.
It was specific.
And threatening.
She sat in the corner of the safehouse library, flipping through old files Christopher had stashed, her fingertips stained with ink. She wasn’t supposed to be reading these. She didn’t care. She needed answers.
She found the photo in a folder labeled “Legacies - Disavowed.”
It wasn’t of her mother.
It was of her an
