Chapter 57
That’s right, mija. I’m your father.
His words detonate around me, the blast ringing in my ears as I shake my head. Disbelief surges through my veins as I blink furiously against tears, trying to understand.
“My father is dead. I watched him get shot. I watched him die. You are not him.”
I study him. The world called him the faceless, nameless man, but he’s been in plain sight this entire time. The face and owner of Emerson’s Barrel and Sons. I take in his tanned skin, uneven stubble, and crooked nose. The stranger who claims a part of me I never asked for.
His hand reaches out to swipe a tear from my cheek. I recoil immediately.
“Don’t. Touch. Me.”
His hand freezes midair. A smirk tugs at his lips, and he draws back.
“Like you, I once believed Carlos Alvarez was your father. Your mother lied to me, Lucia. And so did my brother,” he says in quiet anger.
“B-Brother?” The word slips out in a whisper, my mind unable to process it.
“That’s right, mija.”
“S-Stop saying t-that,” I bite out. My words shake out of me. “My name is Erin.”
“You should have been Lucia Emerson,” he continues. “If your mother had told me the truth years ago, instead of over a decade later, you would have been raised by me. Not by Carlos.”
Bile crawls at the back of my mouth.
Sebastian steps forward. “I’m going to untie you so we can talk. There’s nowhere for you to run. If you disrespect me, I will punish you. Understand?”
“I stopped running a long time ago.”
Once my wrists are freed, I stretch, allowing my muscles to breathe before lowering back into the chair.
Satisfied with my choice, Sebastian continues.
“Carlos and I were raised together but away from our father’s cartel business.
We each took our mother’s last names as a way to stay hidden from the world and our father’s enemies.
It was rumored he had children, though no one knew who they were or where they lived.
We were raised by my mother. Carlos’s mother died after he was born. ”
The story spills out in pieces, his words laced with recollection and regret. I can hear the strain in his voice as he continues.
“At sixteen, we were introduced to the drug world. However, after learning about Carlos’s seizures, our father couldn’t see him as anything but a liability.”
I shift in the chair. “Publishing still beats drug trafficking.”
Sebastian doesn’t react.
“I never knew of my brother’s love for Clarissa Rose,” Sebastian continues, eyes clouded with memories as he reminisces. A brief, aching expression passes before his gaze turns hard again. “Only Carlos knew we were together. It had to be a secret. My father would never have allowed an outsider in.”
The tension in the room swells, thickening like a storm cloud, his voice gritty with the bitterness of betrayal.
“A few weeks before I turned twenty-five, my father wanted me to run my first operation outside Cincinnati. I was ready, but I couldn’t find a way to tell Clarissa Rose I had to go.”
He pauses.
“I left a letter, telling her I’d come back. That I wouldn’t leave her again.”
“How romantic,” I mutter dryly. “I’m guessing she never got it?”
“I asked my brother to give it to her. Carlos promised me he would. He promised to help me find a way out of the brotherhood. But he lied. He wanted me out of the picture. Permanently.”
Resentment fills his eyes, years of hurt reflecting in his irises.
“I was gone for years. I communicated with Carlos, who told me he was working on finding my freedom, but I began losing hope. I married Gina because my father demanded it. There was no love there.” He shrugs casually as if to say it is what it is.
“I took over her father’s distillery, still operating for my father in the shadows. ”
“Emerson’s Barrel and Sons,” I murmur, the heaviness of the story weighing down on me.
Sebastian’s nod is slow.
“When my mother died, I returned to Crescent Creek Lake for the first time in years. I saw Clarissa Rose again. And for a moment, we were us again. Nothing had changed. We spent the night together.”
“Spare me the details.”
He chuckles when there’s absolutely nothing funny about this at all.
“The bubble didn’t last,” Sebastian continues, his voice bitter. “Clarissa Rose found a text from Gina. Asked me why she was wondering when I’d be home. I told her the truth. I had a wife and kids. She told me to leave. To go back to the life I’d built without her.”
“That’s rich,” I say, arching an eyebrow. “She gets mad at you for having a family? A little hypocritical, considering she was married, too.”
Sebastian shakes his head, a flicker of regret in his eyes. “She wasn’t with anyone at that point.”
I frown, the puzzle pieces shifting.
“Clarissa Rose found out she was pregnant after I left,” he says quietly, words tinged with the burden of his history. “When she discovered the truth about Gina, she wasn’t with Carlos.”
The clogs in my brain turn as it all clicks into place. “He always knew I wasn’t his.”
“When Gina died, I returned again. I thought maybe, just maybe, Clarissa Rose and I could have our chance.” He pauses and shakes his head as if the very idea is ludicrous now that he’s saying it out loud.
“I didn’t keep tabs on her. I feared I wouldn’t be able to stay away.
I had no idea she’d married Carlos after my mother died.
Had no idea she had a child. When I realized she’d named her hotel after the nickname I gave her, I knew she never stopped loving me. ”
His gaze hardens, eyes locking with mine. “And then you saw us.”
The memory. My mother’s warning. The frantic look in her eyes. The phone call outside the hotel.
My breath catches as I realize what it meant. And then there’s the crushing silence.
“She told me nothing,” he continues. “No father’s name. No details. Just that I had no right to be angry when I kept a family from her.”
“She had a point,” I say quietly.
Fury flickers through Sebastian’s eyes. “I thought it was a one-night stand. And if anyone would know, it would be my brother. I went to him and found your picture on his desk. The guilt was written all over his face. He never gave Clarissa Rose my letter, and he let me believe he was your father.”
I stare at him, everything inside me spinning. For a second, I almost believe if he’d known the truth, maybe everything would have been different.
He taps his tattoo. “My father gave me this mark,” he says.
“It resembles your seat in the brotherhood. You want out, you kill the man who branded you.” His eyes flick down to his mark and then back up to me.
“It’s the ultimate betrayal—a death sentence.
You’d spend your life running. No protection.
No loyalty. Anyone from the brotherhood who found you would be ordered to kill you. ”
A cold ripple runs through me. I wait for his confession to hit me.
“So, I burned the mansion with my father, his men, and his drugs to the ground.”
A shiver climbs my spine. “You’re a murderer.”
Silence commands the room.
“That’s why my brother never reached out,” Sebastian continues.
“He didn’t want our father dead because he didn’t want Clarissa Rose to have a life on the run.
And he didn’t want word getting back to our father that you were mine because he’d claim the child.
But if people believed the baby was his…
” He gestures at me. “You’d be safe from the world we came from. ”
Carlos, the man I knew as my father my entire life, protected Clarissa Rose at every turn. And she…put three bullets in him.
My stomach twists. “She never loved him.”
“No,” he agrees.
Air fills my lungs with that heavy truth.
“Before the fire, we talked. He told me if I wanted to run away with Clarissa Rose, he wouldn’t stop us. His only request was that you stay with him.”
I have to swallow twice to get my words out. “If she had the option to leave, why didn’t she?”
“Because Carlos told her what her reality would be.”
I suppress the frustrated growl that’s been building inside of me.
“She didn’t love him. She was leaving. She would have been out of our lives.
It would have been just the two of us. Why did he have to provoke her?
” Confusion, anger, and hurt swirl inside of me as I try to make sense of it all.
My tears begin to well, but I blink them back.
“Pride. Pain. Humiliation,” Sebastian answers. “Take your pick.”
Each word punctures a hole inside of me.
He could have lived.
“She didn’t have to kill him.”
“My brother’s last words that sealed his fate were about me. He asked Clarissa Rose if she truly believed I’d still love her if I knew you were mine, but she’d kept it from me.”
I study him, suspicion twisting in my gut. “The bullets she put in him before she ran say she didn’t think you’d take it well. Is that why you killed her? Did she confess?”
“I knew what she’d done that night, mija.”
“What?”
“She called me. Told me Carlos threatened to expose it was me who set the fire, as well as my work in the shadows. She told me that, despite everything, she wanted to protect me. That’s how deep her love ran for me.
But she didn’t want that life.” He shakes his head.
Sebastian exhales through his nose. “If I’d known you were mine, I wouldn’t have sent you anywhere. ”
“You sent your own niece to grow up with an abusive man,” I bite out. “But if you knew I was yours, it would have been different? You have a funny definition of family, Emerson.” A chill slides down my spine, my bones hollow out. “When did you actually find out?” I ask. “About me.”
“The Secret Roses Hotel,” he says. “I was away on business, but when I returned to Huxley Bay, the hotel had just opened.”
My brows pinch at his words. If he only knew of Clarissa Rose’s arrival after the hotel opened, then he’s not the one that brought her to Huxley Bay.
“Clarissa Rose and I reconnected for the first and last time.”
My mouth feels full of cotton as he stares at me.
We both know what he did.
One single shot to the heart.
“When I saw Clarissa Rose again for the first time in years,” he murmurs, “she was afraid, she thought I’d come to hurt her. Somehow, it was if she knew those moments would be her last, and so, she told me the truth,” Sebastian explains as he looks away.
“About me?” I ask.
“She lied about Carlos. He told her about the fire and the work I did, but he never threatened to expose me. Clarissa Rose only said that to me to hide her secret—you. The secret she thought Carlos would tell me, the one that would end her life. She killed my brother to silence him and told me a lie that I would believe so that I’d protect her. ”
I close my eyes and let the words sink in.
“Carlos was just hurt that after everything he’d done for her, she was still leaving him. Showing his hurt cost him his life.”
So, I was right. The Octopus did kill my mother.
“I loved Clarissa Rose,” he says. “But keeping you from me was an unforgivable betrayal she needed to face the consequences for.”
My blood runs cold. “You shot her and dumped her body in an alley.” I fight away the images of her at the morgue.
“She got off easy.”
“What do you want from me, Sebastian?”
He gives me a deliberate smirk. The kind you’d find in nightmares.
“Emerson blood runs through your veins, mija. I want you with me, with your family, working beside your brother.”
The world tilts violently.
Brother.
“My son seems to think you won’t be persuaded,” Sebastian says and then looks off in the corner.
I follow his gaze and realize a body is standing there in the shadows, arms crossed.
I can’t make out who it is. I turn my gaze back to Sebastian, who rolls his sleeve down his arm again. “For your sake, I hope he’s wrong.”
He turns away again and heads for the heavy door behind me.
“I need to meet with our supplier,” he says casually, as if he’s stepping out to do a grocery store run. The metal groans as he pulls on the door. “I hope to see you soon, mija.”
The door slams with a creak, and the silence that echoes crushes me.
And then footsteps sound from the shadows until his face fills my visions, his lips tipped into a smirk.
“Hey, Little Silver.”
Brodie.
“Surprised?”
My lip wobbles, my lungs burn, and bile rises in my esophagus.
“Is it sinking in yet?” he asks as he watches me.
A knot forms in my chest at his words.
My mother was clear, stating someone blackmailed her. She didn’t come because of Sebastian. Or because of Laurel. Someone else pulled the strings.
Brodie’s still watching me, like he knows exactly where my thoughts are landing. Like he wants them to land there.
The drugs Laurel hid come back to the forefront of my mind. The ones Chase thought belonged to The Octopus.
It wasn’t Sebastian that dragged my mother back into my life. It was someone else. The room hums, and it hits me before I even have time to prepare for it. Hawk wasn’t operating on behalf of The Octopus. Hawk was orchestrating everything himself.
My pulse stutters. Copper fills the inside of my mouth from biting my cheek.
The drugs.
The lakehouse.
The necklace in Brax’s kitchen.
Brodie.
Hawk isn’t a faceless stranger. Hawk’s been in my life. In all of our lives. Laughing. Joking. Dating my sister.
My stomach lurches.
Chase was hunting The Octopus when he should’ve been searching for Hawk. But Hawk is Brodie.
And we’re realizing that all too late.