Page 118 of Pucked Around and Found Out

“Yeah.”

The elevator doors open, revealing a long concrete corridor lined with cells.

“Welcome to your temporary accommodations,” Fiona says. “I thought you'd both appreciate some time to process this new information.”

She walks away, her heels clicking on concrete.

“When this is over,” she calls back, “you'll both understand that loyalty means nothing in this world. Family, friendship, love—it's all just leverage waiting to be exploited.”

The cell door slams.

Silence.

Not the useful kind, not the kind I occupy by choice when I want someone to understand the weight of what I'm about to do. This is the silence of a room where something irreversible just happened, the particular deadness of air after a detonation when all the pressure has already moved outward and there is nothing left to fill the space.

I don't look at Cas.

I look at the wall. Concrete block, damp at the seams, the kind of surface that has absorbed decades of everything that gets said in rooms like this. I stare at it and I think, very carefully about nothing. I have been doing this since I was fifteen years old, the deliberate emptying, the methodical clearing of every thought and feeling until what remains is just function, just the mechanical operation of a body that knows what it is doing even when the person inside it doesn't.

It doesn't work tonight.

I hear him breathe.

Cas breathes differently when something has hit him somewhere real. Most people wouldn't notice. I have spent the past couple of years noticing everything about Caspian Vought. Cataloguing him the way I catalogue everyone who gets close enough to matter, not out of warmth but out of survival, and I know the difference between the breath he uses when he's controlling anger and the breath he uses when he is genuinely undone.

This is the second one.

I turn my head.

He's sitting against the far wall with his casted leg stretched in front of him, his head tipped back and his eyes closed. He looks for just this moment, in this half-dark cell with the fluorescent light buzzing somewhere down the corridor, like someone who has been carrying something very heavy for a very long time and just dropped it on the floor.

I don't say anything.

Neither does he.

Alex Denver is his brother.

I turn the fact over the way you turn a coin, looking for the seam where it stops being real and becomes something I can dismiss. I can't find it. The evidence was there even before Fiona said it. I see it now, the things I should have noticed. The way Alex positioned his people around Cas from the first day. The way the Denver Kings extended protection that made no tactical sense, protection that cost them and gained them nothing unless the motive was personal. The scholarship at Somerset that Cas always said he earned on merit. I believed him because I had no reason not to and because believing my closest friend had been placed near me by someone else's design was a thought I didn't want to follow to its logical end.

Alex Denver has been managing Cas's life from the shadows for years.

Protecting him without his knowledge.

From me.

From me!

I sit with that for a long moment. The full shape of it. Not just the betrayal of finding out, which is Cas's to carry, not mine but the specific texture of what it means that the man who has stood beside me through two years of war is the biological brother of the man I have been orbiting in a three-way power standoff for months. That the loyalty I tested and nearly destroyed over KennaDee and Fiona was never singular. That Cas has been standing in a doorway between two worlds and he didn't even know it.

He didn't know.

I believe him. I hate that I believe him immediately and without qualification, that the certainty arrives before I can even interrogate it, but I believe him. I have always been able to tell when Caspian Vought is lying. He is good at it, better than most but there is a specific quality to his silences when he is hiding something, a particular tension in the jaw that doesn't come from anger but from suppression. I catalogued it the first year I knew him and I have read it accurately every time since.

He didn't know about Alex.

Which means Fiona just handed him a grenade with the pin already pulled.

The question is what he does with it.