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“Thanks, Mom,” I said, and she pulled me in for a hug. I squeezed her just as hard, having an out-of-body experience here. I had a mother. I had one and she was taking pictures of me before prom.
I had a father too, and though my dad didn’t look like he loved my outfit, he was definitely too polite to comment about it. Ramses’s eyes warmed. “You do look beautiful, love.”
“Thanks, Dad.” He hugged me too while Brielle gushed over Bru in his tux. Meanwhile, my twin gave me the stink eye over her shoulder.
“He’s going to kill you,” I heard Ares growl before our mom shut him up and made us take a picture together. Ares forced a smile with fake teeth, which dropped the moment the photo was taken. In fact, he’d done it so well something told me he’d probably had to do quite a few of these photo ops before everyone came in here. His eyes narrowed coolly at me. “If he doesn’t, I will.”
“No one’s killing anyone. Jeez,” Brielle stated, her eyes lifting. She forced all three of us in a picture together before getting one with just Ares and Bru in their tuxedos. They stood like a pair of dudes with their hands clasped in front of their tuxes, no smiles, of course, because again dudes. Ares had actually done something with his hair too, his curls up and his undercut freshly buzzed. He also wore his necklace like me, the silver beneath his bow tie. He never took it off, also like me, and I suppose I’d never told him what that meant to me, or what the gift of my own necklace meant. I guess I never had to.
It was unsaid.
I honestly still couldn’t believe I had a twin, and if he hadn’t come at me all aggressive, I might have told him how handsome he looked. As far as I knew, he didn’t have a date tonight, but I’d heard that was by choice. Word through the grapevine was, Legacy didn’t take dates to dances, the arrogant fucks. I, of course, was the exception with Dorian, but that didn’t really count, considering I was Legacy.
I definitely would be giving them all a hard time about that when I saw them tonight. They were all supposed to meet us at the house in a bit. Apparently, whenever Legacy went to a dance, the parents all met up at one of the Legacy homes to do all the necessary pictures with the kids. I thought that was sweet, but Dorian had rolled his eyes when he’d told me about it.
The three of us here now allowed Ramses and Brielle to get their own pictures in, and Ares only grumbled through, well, all of it. This was old hat for him, but I loved every minute of it.
It was fabulous.
It was so nice to have a family, Bru and I really hamming it up and enjoying it. We all broke Ares down a bit too and got him to smile in a few. A real one, not a fake one. Ramses announced the group would probably all get here soon, and I thought we’d go downstairs right away, but we didn’t. Ramses and Brielle actually asked Bru and me to sit because they wanted to talk to us.
Ares chose to stand, his hands in his pockets. He lounged against the wall with what I’d call something of a knowing expression, and when I eyed him, he shrugged.
“We’ve been wanting to ask you both this for a while actually,” Brielle said, taking Ramses’s hand. He squeezed it before Brielle’s eyes warmed in Bru’s and my direction. “And to Bru specifically.”
“We know you’re seventeen, but we wanted to know if maybe you’d like to be an official part of this family,” Ramses said, his smile wide. “On paper and legally.”
“Basically, they want to know if you want to be my sibling in the official sense.” Ares touched his chest, being cocky about it. He grinned. “Because being a Mallick is great, but being my legal brother is obviously the best part.”
“Ares,” Brielle chastised, and I would have said something too if I wasn’t in shock.
Bru was too. His lips parted. “Like adoption? You want to…” He swallowed, glancing at me before his attention returned to the couple. “Adopt me?”
Ramses lifted a hand. “Like I said, I know you’re seventeen, and it probably sounds silly, a technicality, but…” Putting his arm around Brielle, he rubbed her shoulder. “It’s not to us. We’d love for you to be an official part of this family, and if you’d have us, we’d love for that to be the case and for the world to know your place in this family.”
I covered my mouth, no words. We’d really all come a long way since the holidays and everything that had happened. We’d been able to reverse everything with the Mallick shares. Dorian’s father had spotted a provision in everything I’d signed, and with Bru coming back here and moving in, things had started to feel, well, amazing and finally. The scars were still there, and I didn’t think any of us would ever truly move on from what Callum Prinze had done to cast a shadow over our lives, but we were trying. We were all trying.
Bru had been trying too and had been a part of this family. Reaching out, Brielle took his hand. “Of course, we aren’t trying to replace your own parents,” she said, and I think all of us knew that Godfrey and Marilyn Sloane did have a place in all this too. They’d helped Callum steal time, yes, but they had tried to fix things in the end.
And that did mean something.
Ramses put his hand on Bru’s shoulder. “But we’d love to be there for you in their absence.”
Bru looked at me then, his face flushed, but his attention drifted to my twin when he came over. Ares touched his arm too, squeezing it, and if two people had gotten close recently, it was definitely the two of them. Ares had been there for Bru when he’d come forward with the truth, and Bru had trusted him that night. Bru had gone to him instead of against him, and something had happened that night after he had. The two had their own link, a brotherhood, and that went for Bru and the other Legacy boys as well. I always caught them all playing basketball with each other, and in the halls together at school. They all welcomed Bru, along with Bow, the little sister of the group and one of my best friends.
I had too many to count these days.
Bru was in this world just as much as me, and it seemed like now, he knew it. He smiled at Ramses, Brielle, and Ares.
“I’d like that,” he said, scanning the circle. “I’d really like that actually.”
I hugged him, and he laughed when Ares brought the circle in. Ares chuckled. “Another Sloane-Mallick. Definitely like the sound of that.”
Recently, I’d gotten my name changed. I was Noa Sloane-Mallick now, but this was a technicality too. It’d never been about the name.
It’d been about this.
My mother, when she put her arms around her three kids, and my father, when he put his arms around her, embracing us all. That first day Ramses had put us in a huddle the world had seemed so dark, and I wasn’t sure we’d ever get to this point.
