Gabriel detonated the charges. He vaporized himself and the syndicate’s strike team.

Eliza’s hand flew to her mouth. A physical ache bloomed in her chest. She finally understood the complex, agonizing restraint Dallas showed whenever Gideon pushed him. He was bound by the blood of a dead hero.

Dallas opened his eyes. They were completely hollow.

He told her how Eleanor went into premature labor during the extraction. She bled out in the back of a transport truck.

But before her heart stopped, she placed her newborn daughter into Dallas’s blood-soaked hands. She begged him to hide the child. She begged him to erase her Sterling bloodline so the European oligarchs could never use her as a political pawn.

Eliza’s mind spun. The pieces crashed together with terrifying speed.

She looked up at Dallas, her eyes wide with absolute shock. “Azalea,” she whispered.

Dallas gave a single, heavy nod.

He had taken the child. He had married a dying woman to forge a false birth certificate. He had endured the whispers and the judgment of the Koch family board for eighteen years, all to protect Gabriel’s daughter.

And Gideon wanted that bloodline back under his control.

Tears spilled down Eliza’s cheeks.

She reached up and cupped Dallas’s face. Her thumbs stroked his rough jawline. This man — the one the world called a ruthless, cold-blooded machine — had carried the weight of the world on his shoulders to protect a little girl.

Dallas grabbed her wrists. The darkness in his eyes flared into a violent, protective fire.

He told her that the syndicate in Geneva had never stopped looking for the data. And recently, they had found his weakness.

He looked directly into her eyes.

“That’s why I pushed you away,” Dallas rasped, his voice thick with self-hatred. “That’s why I asked for the divorce. I was going to use myself as bait to draw them out and slaughter them. But you — you walked right into the crossfire for me.” He framed her face with his large hands. “You are my perfect variable, Eliza. And you are the only weakness I cannot survive losing.”

The final wall between them crumbled into dust.

Every misunderstanding, every cold word, every tear she had cried over his rejection — all of it vanished. Eliza pushed herself up and crushed her mouth against his.

It was a fierce, demanding kiss. She poured all her love and all her defiance into it.

She pulled back, her forehead resting against his. “I am not a weakness you need to hide,” Eliza said, her voice ringing with absolute steel. “I am the Koch matriarch. For Arthur, for Azalea, for us — we fight them together.”

Dallas stared at her. The sheer awe in his eyes was blinding.

He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face in her neck. They held each other in the firelight, their souls finally, perfectly aligned.

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