Everyone laughed when the little girl claimed my fiancée was wearing her mother’s ring, but one look at my fiancée’s face made me realize the child had just exposed a secret nobody wanted me to know.

"Sofia, stop!" I yelled, dropping my gun entirely onto the parquet floor. It slid across the polished wood, stopping against the toe of her combat boot.

She froze. Her finger tightened on the trigger of her own weapon. The barrel was pointed directly between my eyes.

"You're not a weapon," I said, stepping forward until the cold steel of the silencer pressed firmly against the center of my forehead. "You're Sofia Thorne. You volunteered at the clinic on 8th Avenue. You hated black coffee because it tasted like burnt dirt. You broke your ankle in Vermont because you tried to ski backward just to make me smile."

Her chest heaved violently. A thin bead of sweat trickled down her temple. The muscle in her jaw twitched, vibrating with agonizing tension.

"I... I am Unit Four," she whispered, her voice fracturing, sounding like a terrified girl fighting through layers of concrete. "Arthur said... Julian Vance is the target. Julian Vance must be removed to secure the line."

"Arthur lied to you. He used Chimera to destroy your mind because you were the only person brave enough to stand up to him." I slowly reached into my breast pocket.

Instantly, the remaining tactical operator behind her raised his rifle. "Drop your hands!"

"Wait!" Sofia commanded. The authority in her voice was absolute, stopping the guard in his tracks.

I pulled out the platinum ring—the ring with the crooked star that Rosie had handed me the night before. I held it up between two fingers so it caught the faint light from the burning flashbangs in the corridor.

"You had this made by an old jeweler on 47th Street," I whispered, my voice breaking. "You scratched the star into the inside with a steel compass because you said we didn't need perfect diamonds to have a real life. You gave it to Rosie before they took you. And she wore it on a ribbon around her neck until Victoria stole it from her."

Sofia’s eyes dropped to the ring.

A guttural, animalistic scream tore from her throat. She dropped her weapon, clutching both sides of her head with her hands, collapsing to her knees as if struck by lightning.

"Mommy?"

The tiny, fragile voice cut through the smoke and the thunder.

Rosie had stepped out from behind the mahogany desk. She stood in her flannel pajamas, her velvet rabbit clutched against her ribs, her large, tear-stained eyes locked onto the woman writhing in agony on the floor.

Sofia looked up.

The coldness in her hazel eyes shattered like cheap glass. For the first time in four years, the real Sofia Thorne surfaced from the depths of the chemical prison they had built inside her skull.

"Rosie...?" she gasped, her hands shaking so violently she could barely support herself on the floor. "My... my baby bird?"

Rosie took a tentative, trembling step forward. "You have the ring."

The surviving tactical operator leveled his assault rifle directly at Rosie’s chest. "Target compromised. Scrubbing the child!"

"NO!" I lunged, but I was three steps too far.

In that microsecond, Sofia moved not like a conditioned soldier, but like a mother possessed by divine fury. She threw herself across the floor, shielding Rosie with her own body just as the operator fired.

The bullet tore through Sofia’s shoulder, spraying crimson across the white trim of the library wall.

Before the shooter could cycle another round, Marco lunged from behind the hearth, tackling the man into the glass display cabinets, snapping his neck with a single, brutal twist of his hands.