Chapter 25
PORTIA
I woke with my mouth dry, the taste of something chemical lingering on my tongue. My eyelids felt like they’d been sewn shut with wire, and when I finally forced them open, the world came back in fragments.
Cool sheets. A low hum of distant voices. Dim light.
Then the scent hit me. Not cologne, not artificial. It was him.
Silas.
I shifted, and pain whispered through me. I was in a bed—king-sized, firm mattress, crisp white linens with navy trim. A wool throw half-tucked around me. My dress was still on, wrinkled and clinging to my skin. Someone had taken off my shoes. Someone had been gentle.
My breath caught.
Where was I?
I sat up slowly, eyes adjusting to the dark. Shadows loomed everywhere—tall bookcases filled with leather-bound spines, a decanter half-full of amber liquid, a wall of monitors powered off but still humming. A side table with three phones. Two watches. One gun.
Not a hotel room.
Not my suite at The Palmetto Rose.
Dominion Hall.
I’d been here before—dozens of times now—for wedding planning meetings with the Dane brothers, with the brides.
But this wasn’t one of the common areas.
It wasn’t the east wing, where the security briefings happened, or the courtyard where Hallie Mae insisted the string quartet would play her entrance.
This was somewhere else.
Somewhere off-limits.
Then I saw him.
Slumped in a chair in the corner, chin dipped to his chest, legs splayed out, one hand resting on his thigh—and the other curled around the grip of a pistol. His head turned slightly in sleep, and the movement exposed a cut just beneath his jaw, a faint smear of blood already crusted.
Silas.
Asleep.
Worn.
Beautiful in the way bombs are beautiful—right before they detonate.
I didn’t move. Not right away.
Because it was like seeing a bear sleeping in your room. Dangerous. Unreal. And far too close.
But then my heart started working again, and the questions came fast.
How did I get here? What happened? Why does my chest feel like it’s been carved out and replaced with smoke?
I turned away from him, carefully pushing the blanket aside. My body hurt in odd places—knees, ribs, the back of my neck—but nothing sharp. No bruises I could see in the shadows. Still, the ache was deep, like something had tried to drag me under and failed.
I slid from the bed in silence.
The floor was cool stone under my feet. Slate, maybe. Or polished concrete, stained the color of ash. The whole room was darker than it should’ve been—walls painted a gunmetal gray, the tall windows hidden behind blackout curtains.
This wasn’t just a bedroom.
It was a bunker. A fortress built for one man. And that man was asleep ten feet away from me, weapon still in hand.
I crossed to the nearest wall slowly, passing a sideboard lined with photographs. Not the kind you'd expect from a man like Silas—there were no smiling snapshots, no blurry childhood memories.
These were surveillance images.
One showed a man with a hawkish nose and a cigarette hanging from his lips, boarding a private jet in Prague.
Another—chillingly—was of me.
Taken from above. I recognized the outfit, the posture. It had been the day of the engagement brunch. I’d been standing on the patio outside Verandelle, phone to my ear, waiting for a call from a supplier who’d dropped the ball on floral delivery.
He’d been watching me even then.
I didn’t want to look at the next one.
But I did.
It was Monte.
Sitting alone in the Dominion courtyard, eyes half-closed, like he knew he was being watched but didn’t care. Like he welcomed it.
I backed away, breath catching.
This wasn’t wedding planning. This wasn’t oversight.
This was a war room disguised as a home.
On the far side of the room, I found a glass cabinet built into the wall. Inside were items I didn’t have names for—military- grade tech, knives with inscriptions etched into the hilts, a set of metal vials in a foam casing labeled with Cyrillic I couldn’t read.
And then—beneath all that—a red ribbon.
Silk. Clean. Unfolded and untouched.
But I knew what it was.
Another message.
Another threat.
The drawer below it was cracked open, and inside were folders. I pulled one free, glancing over my shoulder to make sure Silas hadn’t stirred.
He hadn’t.
The folder was unmarked. I opened it anyway.
There were notes inside, in sharp, masculine handwriting. Schematics. Maps. A name scrawled over and over again.
Carolina Dane.
His mother.
I felt something twist in my gut.
Because this wasn’t about Monte anymore. Or weddings. Or even me.
This was bloodline-deep.
Generational war.
I flipped to the last page and found a grainy black-and-white photo. A woman in a sleek coat, standing on the steps of a courthouse. Her face half-turned. But I recognized her.
I’d seen that face once before.
On a screen. In a dossier Bea had hidden from me.
I stepped back, hands trembling. My stomach turned. I nearly dropped the folder.
I didn’t hear Silas move until I felt him behind me.
His voice was quiet. A rasp. “I didn’t want you to find that yet.”
I turned, slowly.
He stood bare-footed, still in the clothes from the night before, hair rumpled, eyes dark and unreadable.
“Then maybe you shouldn’t have left me in your war room,” I said, voice thin with betrayal.
“I brought you here to keep you alive,” he said. “You almost died.”
My throat closed. “Then maybe you should start telling me what the plan is.”
His eyes flicked to the file in my hands.
“You know who she is now,” he said softly.
I nodded. “Your mother.”
He didn’t deny it.
There was a pause. Thick. Heavy.
“Monte?” I asked, breath shallow. “Where is he? He said he was protecting me.”
Silas looked at me.
And didn’t answer.
My stomach dropped. “Silas.”
But his silence told me everything I needed to know.
Just like that, the floor shifted beneath me.
The man who’d stayed. The man who’d fought for me. The man who’d loved me—even if I hadn’t known how to love him back.
Gone.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” My voice cracked. “Why did you let me wake up in your bed, your house, and not tell me?”
“Because I didn’t want the first thing you thought about to be loss.”
I stared at him.
And for the first time, I saw what he was hiding.
Not rage.
Not power.
But grief.
And guilt.
And a kind of darkness that had no name.
He stepped forward, slow.
But I didn’t move.
I couldn’t.
I just looked at him like he was a stranger. And maybe—after everything—I had to admit he was. Because this wasn’t the man I kissed in intimate moments.
This was the man who buried secrets in deep drawers.
The man whose mother started wars.
The man who brought me into one.
I wasn’t sure which side he was truly on.
I moved past him, the folder still in my hands, needing space. Needing distance. The room was too full—of silence, of truth, of him.
He didn’t try to stop me.
I crossed to the tall shelves lining the far wall, scanning the spines of the books. Titles in other languages. Folders marked only by date. A thick volume with the word “Aegis” embossed in cracked leather. Another with no title at all, just a burn mark through the center.
“How long?” I asked without turning around. “How long have you been … whatever this is?”
Silas exhaled like the breath hurt. “Longer than I should’ve.”
I faced him again. “And the others? Ryker? Marcus? Do they know about your mother?”
He shook his head once. “Not yet.”
“Why?” My voice broke on the word. “Why hide it from your own brothers? Don’t you all work together?”
His gaze didn’t flinch. “Because this is personal. Something they’re not ready to know about.”
“What does that even mean?” I demanded. “What the hell could be worth keeping from your family when everything is already falling apart?”
His answer was slow. Measured. “Because I’m not trying to win their war, Portia.”
A beat.
“I’m trying to end it.”
The quiet after that wasn’t peace. It was fallout.
I stared at him like I didn’t know him. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe the Silas I’d kissed and made love to was a fiction, a fever dream conjured by want and desperation and the ache of being needed. Because this man?
This man was strategy wrapped in muscle and sorrow. This man had built a fortress from what—lies? This man had blood on his hands and still thought himself clean.
“I don’t know how to be around you right now,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to be anything but alive,” he said, stepping toward me again. “That’s the only thing that matters to me.”
My back hit the edge of a table. I hadn’t realized I’d been retreating. I clutched the folder tighter.
“I need to check on Bea,” I said, the thought crashing into me like a cold slap. “She was at the cake tasting. If someone put that tracker in my shoe, then maybe?—”
“She’s safe.”
The words hit me harder than I expected.
“She is?” My voice was sharp, hopeful, trembling.
Silas nodded. “Two of my guys found her at the hotel, after Monte. They escorted her here.”
“Here? As in this house?”
He nodded again. “She’s in one of the guest suites in the south wing. Shaken. But safe.”
Relief hollowed me out. I slumped back against the table, knees soft. My eyes burned.
“But why would someone go after me?” I asked. “Why now?”
His jaw flexed. “Because of me. Because I made you a target the moment I touched you.”
“No,” I said, my voice hoarse. “You made me a target the moment you kept secrets.”
He flinched. Just barely. But I saw it.
“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” he said. “To Monte. To you.”
“But it did,” I whispered.
I crossed to the window, peeled the blackout curtain back just enough to see the inked-out sky. Somewhere out there was the city, full of delicate things—lace veils and sugar flowers and champagne towers that glittered under chandeliers. A world I’d built with careful hands and sleepless nights.
And somehow, I’d let this in.
This world.
His world.
I felt him come up behind me again, close but not touching.
“You saw what I have in this room,” he said. “You saw the weapons. The names. The pictures.”
“Yes.”
“And you still haven’t run.”
“I haven’t decided yet,” I said truthfully.
He let out a low breath. “You asked why it’s all here. Why I keep it in this suite and not the actual war room. Why I don’t let my brothers in.”
I nodded.
“It’s because I’m different from them,” he said. “They were born into this war. I was forged by it.”
I turned to face him.
“You’re the most dangerous one,” I said.
He didn’t deny it.
That terrified me more than anything. Because he wasn’t just dangerous to the people hunting him. He was dangerous to me.
To whatever was left of my heart.
To the life I’d built that didn’t have space for guns and ribbons and ghosts named Caroline Dane.
And still …
Still.
I hadn’t run.
Not yet.