Silas Keene had imagined finding his wife in a hundred different ways.

One year later.

The summer sun flooded through the floor-to-ceiling windows of a renovated carriage house overlooking the Atlantic in Newport, Rhode Island.

Silas had bought the land where Walter Dain’s mansion once stood. He had paid a demolition crew three million dollars to tear the limestone palace down to its foundations, grinding the stones into dust and replacing it with an open, sunlit sanctuary surrounded by wildflowers, salt marshes, and sea grass.

The smell of turpentine, linseed oil, and fresh ocean salt hung heavy in the warm afternoon air.

Mallory stood before an eight-foot canvas, barefoot, wearing denim overalls spattered with cerulean blue, burnt sienna, and gold leaf. Her hair had grown past her shoulders, glowing rich honey-brown in the sunlight, tied loosely back with a soft silk ribbon.

Her cheeks were full, flushed with health and the heat of the afternoon.

The painting was not of a basement. It was not of darkness.

It was an enormous, sweeping depiction of a storm breaking over an emerald sea, where the black clouds were tearing apart to reveal a blinding, incandescent shaft of golden light striking the water.

A pair of strong arms slipped around her waist from behind.

Silas rested his chin on her shoulder, breathing in the scent of her lavender hair and the oil paint. He was dressed casually in a linen shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows, his eyes soft and contented.

“You’re standing too close,” Mallory murmured, leaning back into his chest with total, uninhibited trust. “You’re going to get titanium white all over your expensive shirt.”

“I have four hundred shirts,” Silas murmured, kissing the soft skin beneath her ear. “I only have one artist.”

She smiled, turning her head to press a quick, sweet kiss to his lips. “How was Chicago?”

Silas had spent the last two days concluding the final liquidation of Julian’s seized assets. Every penny of his brother’s stolen fortune—over one hundred and forty million dollars—had been placed into the Mallory Keene Foundation for Victims of Human Trafficking and Abduction, funding legal defense teams and safe recovery houses across the country.

Julian had been sentenced the week before: forty-five years without the possibility of parole.

“Chicago is behind us,” Silas said quietly. “The trust has been restructured. The board has been replaced. Jonah is running the security division permanently, and Harrison Vance retired to Florida.”

He turned her around in his arms so she was facing him. He looked down into her eyes, which were clear, bright, and completely free of the haunted shadows that had once consumed them.

“There’s only one piece of unfinished business,” Silas said, reaching into his pocket.

Mallory tilted her head, her eyebrows arching. “Oh? And what is that, Mr. Keene?”

Silas pulled out a small, worn velvet box.

He opened it.

Inside lay two rings. Her original wedding band—three carats of flawless oval diamonds set in platinum—and his own simple platinum band, both recovered from Julian’s private safe deposit box.

Mallory’s breath caught. She looked up at him, her eyes shining with unshed tears, but this time, they were tears of pure, unadulterated joy.

“Silas…”

“We had a wedding on a cloudy Saturday in Chicago,” Silas said, his voice dropping into that deep, reverent register he reserved only for her. “There were three hundred guests we barely knew, two dozen photographers, and a reception that felt like a corporate board meeting. I don’t want that wedding anymore.”

He took her left hand in his, raising it between their chests.

“I want to marry the woman who survived the dark,” Silas whispered. “The woman who taught me that love isn't something you keep safe in a vault—it’s something you fight for through every ring of hell until you bring it home.”

He looked out the open French doors toward the sea grass swaying in the summer breeze. Down by the water, Jonah Pike stood near a small white arbor adorned with wild roses, an officiant beside him, waiting under the brilliant blue sky.

“Will you marry me, Mallory?” Silas asked. “Right now. Barefoot. In your overalls.”

Mallory looked down at her paint-spattered clothes, then out at the sunlit ocean, and finally back at the man who had torn the world apart to find her.

She laughed—a clear, ringing sound that carried across the bluffs, riding the Atlantic wind up toward the sun.

“Only,” Mallory said, wrapping her arms tightly around his neck, “if you promise to let me burn dinner tonight.”