Chapter Eighteen
Damon
The apartment was small, sparse, the home of a man who had spent nine years trying to take up as little space in the world as possible, and Damon sat across from his brother at a scarred wooden table, unable to fully process the reality of him — older, thinner, marked by a scar and by something behind the eyes that spoke of years Damon couldn't yet imagine.
"Tell me everything," Damon said, and his voice came out rougher than he intended. "From the beginning."
Marcus's hands wrapped around a cup of coffee he wasn't drinking, and when he spoke, the words came slow, careful, the account of a man who'd rehearsed this confession a thousand times in his head and never once expected to actually deliver it.
"I found out about Concord two weeks before the fire," Marcus said.
"Father was terrified — more terrified than I'd ever seen him.
He told me he was going to end it, go to the authorities, and he asked me to help him gather everything he needed as proof.
" A muscle worked in his jaw. "Victor found out.
I don't know how — maybe Father confided in him too, thinking he had an ally.
Two nights before the fire, Victor came to me alone.
He told me Father's plan would destroy the company, destroy the family name, destroy everything three generations had built.
He asked me to help him convince Father to reconsider. "
"And you refused," Damon said, already knowing, somehow, what was coming.
"I refused." Marcus's voice cracked. "So Victor changed the offer.
He told me the fire was already arranged — that our parents wouldn't survive it regardless of what I did, that the only choice left to me was whether I survived it too.
He told me if I disappeared quietly, let the world believe I'd died alongside them, he would let me live, funded, protected, in exchange for my silence.
If I refused, or if I ever tried to come forward, he promised you would be next.
" His eyes, wet now, found Damon's. "I chose to disappear because I thought it was the only way to keep you alive, Damon.
I have spent nine years watching you build an empire from a distance, unable to reach you, believing every single day that the moment I resurfaced, Victor would make good on that threat. "
The silence in the small apartment stretched long and terrible.
"Nine years," Damon said finally, and his voice had gone somewhere hollow, somewhere Elena had not heard him go even at Ashcombe. "Nine years I mourned you. Nine years I stood at a grave that had nothing of you in it, believing I was the last Castellan left standing, entirely alone—"
"You weren't supposed to have to know," Marcus said, tears finally breaking loose. "I was supposed to protect you from this, and instead I've just handed you nine more years of grief to carry, except now it comes with the added weight of knowing I chose this. I chose to let you believe I was gone."
Elena watched Damon's face war between the fury of nine wasted years and the overwhelming, disorienting relief of a brother returned from the dead, and understood that whatever healing came from this reunion would not come easily or quickly.
"Victor's in federal custody," Damon said finally, quietly. "He can't hurt either of us anymore. Not the way he has been."
Marcus's face went through something complicated — hope, disbelief, the specific fragility of a man who had spent nine years not allowing himself to hope for anything at all.
"Then I can come home," he said, barely a whisper.
"Yes," Damon said, and reached across the table to grip his brother's hand, the first physical contact between them in nine years, and something in both men broke open at the touch — grief and relief tangled together so completely that neither of them could separate one from the other.