Chapter 13 #2
“His,” Charlie finished quietly. “Whether you want that or not.”
That shut me up.
Levi’s head snapped in my direction, then back. “Stop talking around it,” he said. “What does my father have to do with this place? With you?”
Charlie studied him for a long moment.
Then he glanced toward the doorway.
“Maybe,” he said, voice pitched a little louder, “you should come in now.”
Every hair on my arms lifted.
Footsteps sounded in the hall—measured, unhurried. Not the brisk stride of staff, or the relaxed lope I’d already learned to associate with Charlie. This gait had weight. History.
An older man stepped into the room.
He carried himself like he’d been tall his whole life and never once apologized for it.
Broad shoulders beneath a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled neatly to the forearms, dark slacks, bare feet like he’d abandoned his shoes somewhere between whatever room he’d been in and here.
His hair was mostly silver, still thick, swept back from a face lined in the ways men’s faces get lined when they’ve laughed hard and worried harder.
His eyes were what stopped me.
When they landed on Levi, something in them went bright and wrecked all at once.
For a second, I wasn’t in Dominion Hall.
I was in a canvas tent lit by a rattling generator, listening to Levi describe a man who could field-dress a deer in under twenty minutes and still be home in time to flip pancakes for seven hungry sons.
“Levi,” the stranger said.
His voice was lower than Levi’s, roughened by age and thousands of unfiltered cigarettes, if I had to guess. It threaded into the room like smoke.
Levi didn’t move.
For once, he didn’t hide a damn thing.
Shock flared across his face, then anger, then something that looked a lot like a small boy realizing the monster under the bed was actually the shadow of his own shoes.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked.
The older man flinched. Just enough to register. Then he straightened.
“My name is Byron Dane,” he said. “I’m—”
“My father’s dead,” Levi cut in. The words came out on a ragged exhale. “They brought a flag to our house. They told us. My mother—” His voice cracked on the word. “We buried an empty box.”
Byron Dane’s gaze didn’t waver.
“I know,” he said quietly.
Silence landed in the room with the weight of a mortar.
I couldn’t breathe.
I looked at Levi—at the rigid line of his shoulders, the white-knuckle grip he had on the back of the nearest chair, the way his chest rose and fell like he’d just sprinted up a mountain. The faint sheen in his eyes he wouldn’t blink away.
He’d always, always talked about his father like he was gone.
Grief and resentment in equal measure.
Now that grief was standing in front of him, hands slack at his sides, looking like a ghost who’d gotten lost on the way to the afterlife.
I realized my own hand was shaking and curled it into a fist.
“Levi,” I said quietly, stepping closer, not quite touching him. “Breathe.”
His eyes flicked to me, wild for a second, then back to Byron.
“You let them tell us you were dead,” he said, each word rough-edged. “You let her bury you.”
Byron’s throat worked. “It wasn’t my choice,” he said. “Not at first.”
“Bullshit,” Levi snapped.
“Levi,” Charlie said, voice low. Warning? Plea? I couldn’t tell.
“No,” Levi shot back. “You both knew. You all knew. And you let me spend my entire adult life thinking—”
He broke off, jaw clenched so hard I worried something might crack.
My journalist brain was screaming.
Byron Dane. Alive. Connected to Dominion Hall.
Tied to money moving through continents and a mansion full of ex-military men with his last name.
This was the story behind the story, the missing piece my sources didn’t have, the kind of revelation that could anchor a series of articles, a book, a career.
But another part of me—smaller, louder—was screaming something else entirely.
Don’t exploit this.
Not this moment. Not this man.
I could write about Dominion Hall. About the shell companies, the viper in the glass, the way power pooled under this roof like groundwater. But this—Levi’s eyes on the man who had broken his family by dying and then by not actually being dead—this was not mine.
Not yet.
“You disappeared,” Levi said, voice raw. “You left my mother alone with a house full of boys and a folded flag, and you didn’t even—” His breath shuttered. “What kind of man does that?”
The question hung between them like a rope waiting to snap.
Byron opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“I can explain,” he said finally.
“Then start,” I said. My voice surprised me—steady, cool, too practiced from a thousand interviews with men who thought they could outrun accountability.
Three pairs of Dane eyes swung to me.
I lifted my chin.
“Because if you don’t tell him,” I added, “someone else will. And they might not care if they get the details right.”
For the first time, Byron really looked at me. Not as background, not as the woman at his son’s side in a black dress, but as a variable in an equation he hadn’t accounted for.
“You’re the reporter,” he said.
“Journalist,” I corrected. “But yes.”
He nodded slowly.
“Then I suppose,” he said, gaze returning to Levi, “we should all sit down.”
No one moved.
The room felt tilted, like the floor had shifted a degree to the left and no one had adjusted.
I reached for Levi’s hand.
He didn’t look at me, but his fingers closed around mine like a man grabbing a lifeline.
His palm was damp. Mine probably was, too.
“Okay,” he said roughly. “But you start with this: Are you my father or not?”
Byron took a breath that seemed to scrape through him.
“Yes, son,” he said. “I am.”
The world narrowed to the sound of Levi’s next inhale.
I held on to him and watched the pieces of his past rearrange themselves in his eyes, wondering how the hell any of us were supposed to walk out of this house the same people we’d been when we walked in.