Chapter 16 #2
“It’s not every day you’re seen out in the world without your buff.”
I shrug. “Guess I’m out of fucks to give.”
“Business?” he asks.
“Finished.”
“Mine too.” He drinks. “Well, almost.”
“How’s my sister, Samuel?”
“She’s good. Misses you.” Takes a sip of his drink. “She and Lucas went to join my parents on the island while I’m here.”
Wildfire erupts in my marrow.
“They’re with your parents?”
“Yeah.” He leans back. “Mary hates when I travel. Valeria invited her as soon as my dad told her about their two-week getaway.”
Calculations start doing themselves in my head.
Mary and Lucas are on the Capello island with Rowan and Valeria.
The geometry of it assembles itself in under two seconds.
Mary removed from the equation, placed somewhere controlled, somewhere Valeria can reach her without effort.
Keeping her leash close while Rowan has her cut off from the world.
It tells me two things simultaneously—Valeria has no idea I’m in Brussels.
There’s no way she would run the risk of me running into Samuel, not right now.
Which means she’s not having me tagged or followed—or rather, unable to.
Rowan really doesn’t want her to know I’m here.
Which means Rowan has something to gain from this conversation that Valeria would shut down if she knew about it.
The question is what.
“When’s the last time you spoke to your dad?”
Samuel wraps both hands around his glass and stares at it. “Weeks. I dunno. I don’t keep track.”
“He’s your dad, you work for him, and it’s been weeks?”
“I run the shipping company because it needed running and I’m the most controllable person he can have in the position. Not because we have that kind of relationship.” A pause. “You know as well as I do, Rowan and I have never had that father-son bonding.”
“Yet it’s never stopped you from trying to impress him.”
Samuel scoffs, takes a sip of his drink. “Believe me, I’ve given up on that years ago.”
“When you wanted to be an architect, but your dad decided—”
“I’d be better as a puppet overseeing one of his companies.
Yeah.” You’d have to be a fucking tree to miss the resentment in his tone.
I don’t blame him, though. He’s always been one to work hard at everything.
Grades, languages, sport, an overachiever—not because he loved any of it.
Because excellence was the currency he'd identified early as the thing most likely to purchase what he actually wanted.
His parents’ approval. Especially Rowan’s.
He never got it. Not really. Rowan would acknowledge the grades the way you acknowledge weather—noted, filed, moved past. Samuel would try harder.
Get better results. Rowan would acknowledge those too, in the same flat, distracted way, already thinking about something else before the conversation ended.
I watched it happen for years. The boy who kept raising the bar, hoping eventually his father would clear it with him.
Rowan never did.
What Rowan gave Samuel instead was space.
Autonomy. The shipping company. A life that looked from the outside like trust and felt from the inside like being handed a room in a house you're not allowed to explore.
Samuel decorated his room beautifully—Mary, Lucas, the career, the careful, legitimate life—and learned not to try the doors.
He was the good son. But just never good enough.
He slams back the rest of his drink, orders another, then lights a cigar. “So, why are you here?”
“Told you. Business.”
He lets out a dry laugh. “My father’s business.”
I study him carefully.
“Oh, come on. We both know you’re more a son to him than I am.”
There it is again. The resentment that’s as subtle as a gunshot.
“I've always been adjacent to this family,” he continues.
“Present but not—inside it. My dad has his world and my mother has hers, and somewhere in the middle there's a shipping company and a marriage that functions and a son they produced who never quite fit either side of it.” He says it without self-pity. Just the plain fact of it. “You, on the other hand, you got inducted, didn’t you? I got the company car. You got the approval.”
Something moves through my chest that isn't quite a laugh. If only he fucking knew what that approval cost me and what I’d give to not have it.
“There was a time when it bothered me, all the attention you got from them.” He shoots back the last of his drink, orders a third with a wave of his hand. “Especially my mother.”
“Fuck that.” I turn on my seat to face him. “Tell me you don't know what your mother is.” I hold his gaze. “Tell me you don’t know what the fuck’s been going on in that house.”
The silence is enormous.
Samuel doesn't look away. But he doesn't say it either.
Because he can't.
Because he knows. Not the full picture—he's been careful, deliberately careful, about how much he lets himself see. But the shape of it. The outline. The practiced blindness of a man who understands that what he doesn't officially know, he can't be held responsible for.
His third drink arrives. He doesn't touch it. “I know my mother’s not perfect.”
“No, Samuel. She’s not. Ask me.” I point at my face. “I know all about how fucking far she is from perfect.”
His eyes go to the scar. The one with the lie attached to it.
“Here's a clue.” I lean closer. “It wasn't one of the security dogs.”
Samuel goes very still.
Because he knows what the security dogs look like. He grew up with them, too—the big, silent ones that patrol the estate perimeter, trained to specific commands, loyal only to whoever holds the lead. They don't bite without instruction.
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.