Chapter 27
WYATT
Icouldn't move.
Couldn't speak. Couldn't breathe properly, like my lungs had forgotten their basic function, like my body had shut down everything non-essential to process what my eyes were seeing.
Just stood there staring at a ghost made flesh, at the impossible made real, at the man who'd disappeared when I was a teenager and left a crater in his wake.
My father.
Byron Dane.
Alive.
The word felt inadequate. Insufficient. Like calling a hurricane "windy" or a gunshot "loud."
I studied every detail like I was cataloging evidence for a trial I'd never get to prosecute—the new lines around his eyes that hadn't been there, deeper grooves bracketing his mouth like parentheses around all the words he'd never said, all the explanations he'd never given.
Gray threading through hair that had been solid dark brown in my memories, in the mental photographs I'd replayed so many times they'd worn smooth at the edges, faded like old film.
The same broad shoulders, though. The same way of holding himself—straight-backed, alert even at rest, like a soldier who'd never fully stood down, never fully believed the war was over.
The memories I'd stored, the ones I replayed daily like worn film stuck in a broken projector—they didn't match this.
This version was older, weathered by time and choices I knew nothing about, marked by years I hadn't been part of.
Real in a way that made everything I'd believed feel like fiction I'd told myself to make sense of abandonment, to make peace with being left.
We didn't hug.
Didn't move toward each other with open arms and reconciliation music swelling in the background like some Hallmark bullshit where time healed all wounds and love conquered all.
Just stood there in the morning sun, separated by maybe twenty feet of perfectly manicured grass and too much unspoken shit to ever fully cross, too much damage to ever fully repair.
The distance between us felt permanent.
Micah's voice cut through the silence, gentle and knowing, like he'd witnessed this exact scene before. "I'll leave you to talk."
He walked away without waiting for acknowledgment, footsteps fading back toward the house, leaving me alone with a man I'd buried in my head years ago, a man I'd mourned and resented and tried to forget.
The only thing I could get out of my mouth was: "How?"
One word. That's all I had. That's all my brain could produce from the wreckage of shock.
My father nodded slowly, like he'd expected exactly that question, like he'd been preparing for it for years.
And there was sadness in his eyes—deep, bone-level sadness that I felt echo in my own chest like a tuning fork struck in sympathy, like grief recognizing itself across the divide.
Because that's what this was. Not anger yet. Not rage or betrayal or any of the hot emotions I'd expected.
Just deep, deep sadness.
Like I was looking at what could've been, knowing it never was. Knowing it never would be. No matter what explanation came next, no amount of words could give me back the missing years. No story could return what had been stolen.
"Sit," he said quietly, gesturing to another chair positioned near his, angled toward the water.
I sat. Not because I wanted to. Because my legs wouldn't hold me anymore, because shock was doing strange things to my equilibrium, making the ground feel unstable beneath my boots.
The story that followed ... I couldn't believe it.
Even as I heard it. Even as the words landed one by one like blows. My brain kept rejecting it like a bad organ transplant, kept trying to push it out, label it foreign, impossible.
He started slow, measured, like he'd rehearsed this speech in his head a thousand times.
Talking about being part of a pseudo-government organization, something that existed in the shadows between official agencies and complete deniability, funded by black budgets and operated by people whose names never appeared in congressional hearings.
Said the names didn't matter right now, that he'd tell me later if I wanted to know, if I could handle more information stacked on top of what was already crushing me.
"What matters," he said, his voice rougher than I remembered, aged by whatever he'd been doing for sixteen years, "is that I loved your mother very much.
More than anything. More than this, more than the mission, more than my own life.
And I left to keep you safe. You and your brothers. That was the only reason I ever left."
"Safe how?" I managed, my throat tight, the words scraping out.
He grimaced like he didn't want to tell this part, like it physically hurt to drag it into daylight, to make it real by speaking it aloud.
I braced for impact, shoulders tensing, jaw clenching.
"This is going to sound like science fiction," he warned, meeting my eyes for the first time since I'd sat down.
He wasn't wrong.
He told me about Project Trueborn. About the government—or factions within it, shadow groups with too much money and not enough oversight—wanting to make super soldiers. Captain America shit without the serum, without the comic book morality, without the clean origin story.
About experiments that failed. Over and over. Genetic manipulation that produced nothing viable. Enhanced training protocols that broke people instead of building them, that created monsters instead of heroes.
Until someone figured out the problem.
Until my father figured out the problem.
"They couldn't just breed heroes in a test tube," he said, staring out at the water like he couldn't look at me while saying it, like shame made eye contact impossible.
"They had to make them the natural way. Or mostly natural.
They had to be raised with love, with lessons, with parents who actually cared.
Real childhoods. Real families. Real emotional bonds.
That was the variable they'd been missing.
The thing all their science couldn't replicate. "
I couldn't find words to respond. My mouth opened and closed uselessly, brain scrambling for purchase and finding none.
He continued, relentless now that he'd started, like he had to get it all out before I could stop him. "The next part might come as the biggest shock. I'm sorry. But you have to know. You deserve to know."
I almost laughed—hysterical, bitter, broken. You just told me I was part of a fucking government breeding program and you think there's something more shocking you can tell me? What's left? Aliens? Time travel?
"There were others," he said.
"What others?"
"Other families. Other ... iterations of the program."
I didn't understand. My brain was still stuck three sentences back, still trying to process super soldiers and breeding programs.
He looked uncomfortable. More than uncomfortable. Like he was about to detonate something he couldn't take back, couldn't soften, couldn't make easier.
Then he said it, words I'd never expected to hear, words that rewrote my entire understanding of family: "You and your brothers—the ones in Valentine, the ones you grew up with—they aren't my only sons. There are others."
That rocked me back in the chair, physically pushed me against the backrest like I'd been shoved, like the words had physical weight.
"What?"
My voice came out strangled, disbelieving.
"This place," he gestured toward the mansion looming behind us, elegant and expensive and suddenly sinister in a way I couldn't articulate, "Dominion Hall.
It's ours. All of it. From the studs to the spires.
The land, the yachts, the resources, the operation.
And the men in it—Micah, his brothers, the others you haven't met yet—they're my sons, too. "
Another punch to the gut. Harder this time. Direct hit to something vital.
"They're ... my brothers?" I got the question out somehow, choking on it, on the implications.
He nodded. Simple. Devastating.
"How many?"
The pause before he answered felt like falling, like the ground had opened up beneath me and I was waiting to hit bottom.
"You have fourteen half-brothers here at Dominion Hall. Men I raised the same way I raised you and your brothers in Valentine. Men who are part of this family whether you accept it or not."
My eyes went wide, vision tunneling for a second, everything going dark at the edges.
Fourteen.
Fourteen half-brothers I'd never known existed. Fourteen men who shared my blood, my father, my genetic blueprint.
There's science fiction and then there's fantasy. This was crossing into impossible, into territory my brain couldn't map, couldn't categorize.
"And Mom?" I asked, my voice rough and broken, barely above a whisper. "What about Mom?"
"What about your mother?" He looked confused by the question, like it was obvious.
"Did she know? About the others? About this?" I gestured wildly at the mansion, at everything, at the life he'd apparently been living while we thought he was dead.
He nodded slowly, and that simple movement destroyed something in me. "She was part of the program, too. We both volunteered. Together. It was our choice."
I laughed then. Really laughed. Like a crazy person, like someone who'd finally snapped under pressure, like the sound you make when reality breaks completely and there's nothing left but absurdity, nothing left but the wreckage of everything you thought you knew.
Because this was crazy. Too fucking crazy.
Too big to hold. Too strange to process. Too much to accept.
My mother—my mother who was in a facility in Marfa forgetting my name, forgetting she had sons at all—had volunteered for this. Had agreed to be part of a breeding program. Had known my father had other families, other sons, other lives.
I pointed at the yachts moored at the pier, needing to ground myself in something concrete, something I could see and touch, making a joke because what else could I do when your entire life turned out to be orchestrated. "Those belong to the Dane clan, too?"
"Yes," he said simply, no humor in his voice, just flat honesty. "All of it. Every asset you see. I took money from bad people—very bad people doing very bad things—and I built a fortress. For my family. For my boys. All of them. To keep them safe from the people who wanted to use them."
As if that could fix everything. As if money and property and protection could replace presence, could make up for abandonment, could heal the wounds his absence had carved.
I stood up suddenly, violently, chair scraping against the ground with a harsh sound that split the quiet morning.
I needed to leave. Needed air that didn't taste like betrayal and lies. Needed space to think, to process, to figure out what the fuck any of this meant.
Needed—
Fuck, I needed Sophie.
The realization hit like lightning, clear and undeniable and absolutely certain.
All the past shit—Klein showing up at Mama P's, my cowardice at the hotel, running from Sophie like the emotional cripple I was—suddenly seemed like a molehill compared to this Kilimanjaro-sized pile of shit my father had just dumped on me.
Everything else was manageable. This ... this was world-ending.
And the only person I wanted to see, the only person who could make any of this feel survivable, was Sophie.
I started walking, moving fast toward the house, boots hitting grass with purpose, every step taking me away from my father and toward the only thing that made sense.
"Wyatt!" My father called after me, standing now, alarm in his voice. "We need to talk about the FBI. About Klein. They don't know anything about this—about Trueborn, about Dominion Hall, about what we're doing here—"
Yeah right. You think you can drop back into my life after this many years and tell me anything? You think I trust a single word out of your mouth after learning my entire existence was a fucking science experiment?
Fuck you.
Right now, I needed Sophie.
I'd never known anything so clear in my life, never felt certainty like this—bone-deep, undeniable, the only true thing in a morning full of lies and revelations and impossible family trees.
Fuck the past. Fuck Dominion Hall and its fourteen half-brothers I'd never met, never known existed. Fuck my father and his government breeding program and his fortress built on blood money and justified by protection.
Sophie.
That's all I needed. The only thing that mattered. The only person who'd ever made me feel like I could be something other than damaged, other than a product, other than a weapon someone else had designed.
The rest of the world be damned.
I needed her like air. Like water. Like the only anchor in a storm that was trying to tear me apart.
And this time—this fucking time—I wasn't going to run from her.
I was going to run to her.