King’s hand squeezed her shoulder in support.
Reaper was silent for a long moment. “Fine. But I want to know everything Christina wrote about Caroline. Everything.”
“We’ll go through it,” King said. “Anything relevant to the Golden Skulls, you’ll hear about it.”
“And Samuel?” Reaper asked. “What are you going to do about him?”
Grace looked at me, her eyes red and swollen. “I don’t know. I just found out I have a brother. A brother who’s been through hell. A brother who doesn’t know I exist.”
“He deserves to know the truth,” Reaper said. “Deserves to know he has family.”
“He has family,” I said firmly. “He has Matrix. Christina was clear she didn’t want his life uprooted, but...”
“But what?” Reaper asked.
“There’s a chance his father was Titan or one of his sons. If one of them was the kid’s father, he’s a legacy to the Silver Shadows.”
“And what about you, Grace?” Reaper challenged. “Do you want to know your brother?”
“Yes,” Grace said softly. “But not like this. Not by showing up and destroying everything he knows about his life. Not by telling him his mother gave him away and his aunt kidnapped him.”
“So what then?” Reaper asked. “You just... do nothing?”
“I don’t know,” Grace admitted, her voice breaking again. “I don’t know what to do.”
King pulled her closer. “We’ll figure it out. But not today. Today you process. Today you grieve. Today you let yourself feel whatever you need to feel.”
“King’s right,” I said. “This is a lot. Too much. You don’t have to make any decisions right now.”
“But eventually—” Reaper started.
“Eventually we’ll figure it out,” King cut him off. “But right now, my old lady just found out her mother had another child,that her aunt was a psychopath, and that she has a brother who’s been through hell. So back the fuck off and give her space to breathe.”
Reaper was quiet for a moment. “Yeah. Okay. But, King?”
“What?”
“When you’re ready to talk about this again, you call me. Because that kid—he’s been through enough. He doesn’t need any more surprises. Doesn’t need his world turned upside down again. So whatever you decide to do, you run it by me first. Understood?”
“Understood,” King said.
“And, Popeye?” Reaper added.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry. About Christina. My bitch mother—all of it. And I’m sorry about Toxic. If he made a deal with her, if he kept his chapter from going in—” He paused. “That’s on me. I should have known.”
Then the line went dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Popeye
The silence in the office was fucking suffocating. Grace sat in her chair, one hand pressed against her swollen belly, the other covering her mouth. Tears streamed down her face. King stood behind her, hand on her shoulder, jaw so tight I thought his teeth might crack. The weight of what we’d just learned, what Christina had written, what she’d endured, what she’d fucking sacrificed—it hung in the air like smoke.
I looked down at the journal in my hands. Christina’s handwriting. Her words poured onto these pages in desperation and guilt and fear. Words she’d never been able to say out loud. Words that had eaten her alive from the inside out.
And I felt it all crashing down on me at once. The grief. The anger. The guilt. The confusion. The crushing realization that I’d spent over twenty years searching for a woman I’d never truly fucking known. That I’d loved her, or thought I had, but maybe what I’d loved was the idea of her. The quiet woman who’d needed me to protect her. The sweet woman who’d given me a daughter. What I hadn’t expected was for her to disappear with my daughter based on the word of a man I thought I could trust.
