Chapter 30 Those Two Things
Chapter thirty
Those Two Things
Lira sat across the table from her brother. Her dead brother. Her mind refused to process what her eyes were seeing.
Brooker. Alive. Breathing.
The world around her seemed to blur at the edges, the voices planning at the table becoming distant and muffled as if she were underwater.
Her brother, whom she’d mourned, whose absence had torn a hole in her family, sat there with a slight smile pulling at the corner of his mouth.
The same smile he’d worn when they were children and he’d successfully pulled a prank.
Only this wasn’t a childish trick—this was an earthquake shattering the foundation of everything she thought she knew.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, could barely breathe as he shifted in his chair, leaning back casually like he hadn’t just been resurrected.
Callum’s hand tightened around hers beneath the table, his thumb stroking reassuringly across her knuckles, but even that familiar touch couldn’t anchor her to reality.
Brooker’s hair was longer now, dark strands falling to his shoulders, the length something their father would never have permitted.
A thin scar bisected his right eye and brow, puckering the skin in a way that made his face seem sharper, more severe.
But it was his eyes that had changed the most—those blue Serel eyes that now held shadows she couldn’t begin to fathom.
Lira watched Brooker reach beside him, his fingers intertwining with Farrow’s in an easy, intimate gesture that spoke of history, of trust. Farrow’s expression remained neutral, but her grip on Brooker’s hand tightened fractionally, a silent communication passing between them.
The clearing of Jaeger’s throat drew her attention back to the matter at hand.
“. . . We need to be ready to strike in two days,” he continued, as if the return of a dead man was minor.
“The night of the Vow ceremony provides our best opportunity. Security will be focused on keeping Shade and Greyson secure after the broadcast. They will be expecting a disturbance during the ceremony, so we wait until after.”
Jaeger spread the maps across the table, his finger tracing routes through the Heart.
“Mikel and Brooker have Veyra officers on the inside, their teams will secure the plaza, monitoring and relaying any information back to the rebels that will be waiting with Ghost to flood the Heart when Farrow and my team fry the electricity powering the checkpoints. Lira will make sure the media drones are creating blind spots for us to navigate.”
Lira heard the words, saw Jaeger’s finger moving across the paper, but they made no sense. Nothing made sense.
Her brother was alive.
Her brother was alive and had been working with the rebellion all along. Her brother was alive and holding hands with a rebel leader while Greyson was being held prisoner by their father.
“What the fuck.”
Brooker laughed, the sound achingly familiar. “There she is.”
“How dare you.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, trembling with rage. “How dare you sit there and laugh.”
The smile faded from his face.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” She leaned forward, her body vibrating with fury. “Do you know what it did to us? What it did to me?” Her voice rose with each question. “To Greyson?”
She pulled her hand from Callum’s, needing to feel unanchored, untethered in her anger.
“What have you been doing all this time, Brooker? While we were trapped with him? While we were living with the monster day after day, knowing exactly what he’s capable of?” She swallowed back the tears threatening to spill. “Did you even think about us while you lived free?”
Brooker’s expression sobered, the playfulness evaporating from his eyes as he leaned forward. “I know.” He shook his head, swallowing hard. “I’ve thought about you every day, Li. Believe me, there has not been a second where I haven’t wished this could’ve been different.”
The gentleness in his voice only fueled her rage. “No, you don’t know. You weren’t there. You didn’t have to see Father getting worse, becoming more paranoid, more cruel. You didn’t have to watch Greyson take your place on that platform, become the thing he never wanted to be.”
“There was no other way,” Brooker said, his voice low and urgent. “He needed to believe I was dead. The Heart needed to believe I was dead so I could continue my work.”
“Your work?” She spat the words. “What work could possibly be worth letting your family think you were murdered?”
His eyes hardened. “Saving thousands of lives. Building a resistance that could actually challenge Father’s power. Creating an escape route for people trapped in the Heart.” He squeezed Farrow’s hand. “Finding people I could trust with the truth.”
Lira gasped as the words tore like a bullet through flesh. He couldn’t trust her. Didn’t trust her.
“I see,” Lira answered, her own voice going hard.
Guilt flashed across Brooker’s face, a genuine emotion cracking behind his eyes. But before he could speak again her gaze shifted to Mikel, her fury finding a new target. “What do you mean Greyson is your son? How is that possible?”
The Veyra captain’s face remained impassive, his military bearing not faltering under her scrutiny. She’d known this man her entire life—had seen him standing at her father’s right hand at every official function, had watched him carry out her father’s orders without question.
“Your mother and I have known each other all our lives.” He paused, a shadow of sadness passing over his features. “We had planned to take the Vow together, but then she was betrothed to your father.”
He leaned forward, tipping back the rest of the liquid in his cup and clearing his throat.
“Elara is the only woman I have ever loved, and I had to watch while she was forced to marry the devil.” He took a long breath, forcing his voice to remain steady.
“There is no love to be found in your father’s bed, only pain.
It didn’t matter to us that we could be killed for it, we weren’t afraid of death knowing we would die together. ”
He refilled his glass as Lira opened her mouth to snap back, but Jaeger’s fist found the table first, cutting her off.
“Enough,” he growled, his gaze pinning on her. “Your family drama can wait. We have—”
Lira moved, her hand snatching the gun from her thigh.
They saw her as a simple girl, a princess, a woman not capable of violence.
They were so wrong. That was their mistake.
That was the reason she was able to train the barrel of her gun on the center of Jaeger’s skull before being shot down in a room full of assassins.
In the next breath every Daggermouth in the room had their weapons trained on her back, readying to fire. Time seemed to tilt around her as she watched Brooker’s eyes widen, as she felt Callum slowly move his own hand to his gun, as she watched Jaeger’s back straighten.
“Tell your men to stand down,” Lira snarled, flicking off the safety in warning.
Jaeger didn’t hesitate as he signaled to them. She could feel the weight lift off her back as the guns lowered but remained ready.
“Now, Miss Serel,” Jaeger started slowly. “I believe it is your turn to stand down.”
Lira only raised her gun. “How dare you mock me when you’ve facilitated this. You accepted contracts on both of my brothers. What’s to stop you from accepting one on me next?”
Brooker stood slowly. “Lira, please. Put down the gun.”
“No.” Her eyes never left Jaeger. “I want the truth. All of it. And I want it from him.”
Jaeger’s eyes met Lira’s over the barrel of her gun, his expression unreadable. “You want the truth?” he asked, his voice low and even. “The truth is rarely a comfort.”
“I don’t want comfort,” Lira replied, her finger steady on the trigger. “I want answers.”
“Fine.” Jaeger leaned back in his chair, seemingly unconcerned by the weapon pointed at his head. “My partnership with Farrow didn’t start until after I accepted the contract on a man named Levi Pierce.”
Lira’s brow furrowed at the unfamiliar name, but she remained silent, letting Jaeger continue.
“I didn’t know back then that Brooker was working under that alias in the rings.
The evidence supplied in the purchased contract was sufficient to show that Pierce was selling Cardinal secrets to the Heart.
” Jaeger’s gaze flicked briefly to Brooker before returning to Lira.
“I didn’t know what Brooker had really been doing for the rebellion, that he was working with Farrow. ”
Lira’s mind raced, trying to piece together this new information with what she already knew. Her brother, living a double life under a false name, caught between two worlds.
“Shadera’s part of the contract was to kill him,” Jaeger went on, his tone matter-of-fact. “I would handle the rest with my contacts to complete the contract, which was to display his body in the center of the Heart as a warning to others who might consider informing on the rings.”
Lira’s stomach turned at the thought, bile rising in her throat. The cold brutality of it, the callousness with which her brother’s life had been bargained away.
“Farrow watched Shadera’s attack on Brooker from their meeting place,” Jaeger said.
“She found him barely alive and was able to stop the bleeding, get a medic to him in time to save his life.” He paused, his eyes meeting Farrow’s across the table.
“That’s when she called me and told me the truth about what was really happening in the Cardinal rings.
That’s when we decided we needed to start working together, to share information so things like this wouldn’t happen again. ”
Lira’s arm began to tremble, the weight of the gun pulling at her muscles.
“We were able to save his life,” Jaeger continued, “and he told us the contract most likely came from your father. But we needed to complete the rest of it to make sure he believed he was dead.”
Every word he spoke was a hammer against Lira’s already fracturing reality.