Which means either they were given instruction, or…
I watch it land. Watch him run it back—fourteen-year-old Reth, a scar that came from inside the walls, a lie so unglamorous nobody ever looked past it. Nobody questions a childhood dog story.
“My mother,” he says.
God, this is risky. Too risky. It goes against every grain of my cruel, bloody existence. But some part of me always knew that he knew. You’d be fucking blind not to. And right now, I have too much on the line, like a future with my girl. If that means ripping out the rot and leaving it here on the marble countertop, then that’s what’s gonna happen.
I study him carefully, every micro-shift in his expression. “Since the day Mary and I walked into that house for the first time, I’ve spent every minute of my life protecting her from the truth. And when I knew she was in love with you, it meant keeping the truth from you too, even though I’ve always suspected that you knew.”
“Knew what?”
For a moment I'm second-guessing myself.
Samuel Capello is Valeria's son. Her blood. Regardless of how far outside the family he's been kept, regardless of how much distance exists between him and Rowan, regardless of everything I just watched move across his face—he is still her son. And I've survived thirteen years in this world by understanding that loyalty doesn't always go where love points.
I can tell him the truth right now, and he could walk out of this bar and call her.
He could tell her I'm in Brussels. That I found him. That I said things that can't be unsaid. And Valeria—who already suspects, who is already watching, who has been running me into the ground for three months because she knows something has shifted—would have everything she needs to stop me from finally cutting the leash off my throat.
I run the calculation. Every angle. Every possible outcome.
And then I look at him.
At Mary's eyes in his face. At the hands wrapped too tight around a glass. He might be a man who chooses to turn his back on the truth if the truth is something so evil he’d rather not see it. He might be a son who chooses to be blind to his parents’ sins, a son who believes ridiculous lies because the truth is simply not survivable.
I always thought him a coward. The comfortable kind—the kind that looks like contentment from the outside, like a man who made his peace with things, but is really just a man who chose not to look too closely at anything that might require him to act.
But I never doubted his love for Mary. It was always there. From the first day they met, I could see it—the way he oriented toward her in a room without deciding to, the way her name sat differently in his mouth than anyone else's. I just never understood the full weight of it. Never recognized what I was looking at. Because love like that—the kind that rewires a man's entire architecture, the kind that makes burning everything down feel not just possible but necessary—was a language I didn't speak yet.
Now I do.
I run the calculations again. And again. And again.
Every possible outcome starts with Samuel.
Not me. Not a phone call, not a letter, not me showing up at the estate and pulling Mary aside and telling her what her life has actually been built on. Because Mary loves Valeria the way people love the only mother they've ever known—completely, without the framework to question it, with the blind devotion of someone who has been carefully managed for years without knowing they were being managed.
She knows I hate Valeria.
She's always known that. It sits between us like a splinter neither of us has ever pulled—my obvious, undisguised contempt for the woman who owns me, and Mary's loyalty to the woman who raised her. Years of absence haven't helped. Every time I couldn't come to Christmas, every birthday I missed, every time Valeria made sure I was on the other side of the world when Mary needed her brother—the distance accumulated. Became its own kind of evidence.He was never really there. He was always difficult. He always hated her.
If I go to Mary directly, there's a sixty-forty chance she doesn't believe me.
I hate those odds.
Samuel, she'll believe. Samuel, she has no reason to doubt. Samuel is the man she chose, the father of her son, the person who has been present in all the ways I haven't been allowed to be.
Samuel is the better bet.
And I'm out of time.
In two days, I fly back into Valeria's world, and this window closes and doesn't open again. Maybe ever. I can sit here second-guessing a man who loves his wife and his son and has spent his entire life being kept just far enough outside the truth to be useful—or I can use the window Rowan handed me and trust that Samuel Capello loves Mary Elizabeth more than he fears his mother.
It's the only chance I have.
I take it.
Dear Nazareth,
