Not because Yvette wanted Julian. She had sorted through that particular inventory in the weeks since everything happened and had found, at the bottom of it, that what she had wanted was not Julian specifically but the version of herself that had existed before the losses accumulated.

Before Leo. Before the choices that had led her, somehow, to a hospital in Verenza with babies she had not known how to protect.

Three babies.

She had three children in the world and she had held two of them today and the other one was somewhere she could not reach, and that was the thing that was real, that was the thing underneath the jealousy and the bitterness and the complicated feelings about watching Julian kiss his wife at a sea coast on a Thursday evening the thing that was simply the truest available fact of her life.

She needed her child. She turned the car around.

She found Kalian’s address in four minutes.

This was not difficult, the Kalian Vales of the world believed their power made them unfindable, which was a mistake that only people who had never needed to find anyone made.

Yvette had grown up in the Alcantara family, which meant she had grown up understanding that information was a resource like any other and the people who had it were not always the people who deserved it. She had learned to look for things.

She drove.

She did not think too carefully about what she was doing, because thinking too carefully about it would have introduced the kind of hesitation she could not afford.

She drove the way she had driven toward every difficult thing in her life with the specific, forward momentum of a woman who had already absorbed the worst and had therefore run out of things to be afraid of.

The house was large. Of course, it was large. Men like Kalian expressed everything through scale.

She rang the bell.

He answered himself, which surprised her.

She had expected staff, a butler, a housekeeper, the layered domestic architecture of a man of his position.

Instead, the door opened, and there he was, in the particular at-home version of himself that people like him only showed in their own spaces, jacket off, a glass in one hand, the faintly irritated expression of someone whose evening had been interrupted.

He looked at her. She looked at him.

"What do you want, young lady?"

His voice had the texture of someone who had already made a decision about this interaction before it began, the tone of a man who had opened a door expecting a minor inconvenience and was committed to treating it as such.

Yvette did not move from the doorstep.

"I know what’s happening," she said. Not loudly. Not with the trembling anger of someone who had been crying in a car, though she had been crying in a car.

With the flat, clear delivery of someone who has decided that composure is the only available currency and is spending it carefully.

"One of you... You or Julian has my baby girl. And I want her back." Kalian looked at her for a long moment.

"I don’t have time for this," he said. "You need to leave."

"That call," Yvette said. "The one about Leo. That was you, wasn’t it?" Something moved on his face. Very small. Very brief.

"I don’t know what you’re talking about."

"You lured me here," she said. "To Verenza. You used Leo’s name because you knew I would come, you knew I would go anywhere, do anything, follow any thread that might lead me back to him." She looked at him steadily.

"And I came. And now I’m standing at your doorstep, and I want to know why. What did you need me here for?"

"Don’t ruin my mood, girl." His voice had dropped into something lower, something that was meant to be a warning and had the practiced quality of warnings that had worked before.

"I am not someone you want to challenge. Your father would tell you the same thing, if he had any sense, and I know for a fact that he does."

"My father," Yvette said, "is not here."

She held his gaze.

"The Alcantara name is nothing," she said.

"I know you know that. I know exactly the kind of man you are, which means I know that you’ve already calculated what it costs you to have me as an enemy versus what it costs you to have me as someone you’ve managed." She tilted her head slightly.

"I’m not here to be your enemy. I’m here because I have three children somewhere in this world, and one of them I cannot find, and I have run out of people to trust."

She paused.

"Julian, I cannot count on," she said. "Not for this. Not anymore."

Something shifted in Kalian’s expression barely, the micro-adjustment of a man receiving information and filing it without showing the filing.

"So," Yvette continued. "You will either tell me where my baby is. Or you will help me find her. Those are the options I’m offering you."

A long silence.

Kalian looked at her, really looked at her, perhaps for the first time since he opened the door, with the assessing attention of a man recalculating a situation.

"You’re a spoiled girl throwing a tantrum at my doorstep," he said. "Go find your baby somewhere else. I have nothing to do with..."

"You know they’re pretending," Yvette said.

The sentence arrived in the space between them differently from everything else she had said, quieter, more precise, carrying the specific weight of a key fitting a lock.

Kalian went very still. The silence that followed was a different quality of silence from the ones before it.

Kalian stood in his doorway, and he looked at Yvette Alcantara, and his face did what faces do when the architecture of a certainty begins to develop a crack, not collapse, not yet, not in a man like him, but the first almost imperceptible shifting of something that had been load-bearing.

He had seen the news himself.

He had watched the ticker. He had received the report from his contact in the Pedro mansion, the fight in the hallway, the words, and the door closing behind Julian.