Chapter 26 #2
“I’d put money on it.”
“Thank you,” Dom said and turned to the door.
“Dom?” Sabin called.
He stopped, glanced back. His friend looked suddenly exhausted, as if the brief conversation had drained what little energy he had left.
“I didn’t last long against their conditioning. Brennan’s been with them for two years, if it’s really him. Whatever‘s left of your cousin... it might not be much.”
Dom took the elevator up from the medical facility and found his brothers in Wilde Security’s main war room, the nerve center of their operation. The wall-sized screens displayed satellite imagery, personnel files, and data streams that would have looked like gibberish to anyone outside the family.
Elliot was hunched over his laptop at the oversized conference table, while Davey stood at the window, staring out over Manhattan with a phone pressed to his ear. They both looked up when Dom entered.
Davey muttered a quick “I’ll call you back” into the phone before hanging up. “What happened? Is Sabin having another episode?”
Dom turned to close the door behind him to give himself a second to gather his thoughts. Then he drew a breath and faced his brothers. “No. He’s lucid. Very lucid.”
Elliot closed his laptop. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Jesus, he had no idea how close to the bullseye he was.
How did you tell your brothers that a cousin everyone had mourned for two years might actually be alive?
He finally decided there was no good way to do it, and he just had to spit it out. “Sabin says he saw Brennan. Alive. Working for Praetorian.”
Elliot went completely pale. His mouth opened and closed without sound, before he managed to choke out, “What the actual fuck?”
Davey, though?
His reaction was all wrong. There was surprise there, yes, but not the gut-punch astonishment Dom had expected. Instead, his oldest brother’s face tightened into something closer to grim confirmation.
“How certain is he?”
“How certain is he?” Elliot echoed incredulously. “That’s your first question? Not ‘holy shit, our dead cousin is alive’?”
Dom studied Davey’s face. “You knew.”
Davey didn’t immediately deny it, which was confirmation enough. He ran a hand over his face, suddenly looking older than his thirty-four years. “I didn’t know. Not for certain.”
“But you suspected,” Dom pressed, heat rising in his chest. “For how long?”
Davey moved to the conference table and dropped heavily into a chair.
“Back when Praetorian came after Rowan and me, I briefly met an operative codenamed Revenant One. He was masked, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I knew him.
I started digging, but never found anything concrete enough to bring to the family. It was just… a gut feeling.”
“Jesus Christ,” Elliot muttered and pushed away from the table to pace the small room. “He’s been alive all this time? What about the body? The funeral?”
“Closed casket,” Davey reminded them quietly. “The report said the remains were... not viewable.”
“So what, they just sent an empty box? Or someone else entirely?”
“I don’t know,” Davey admitted. “There was a DNA match, but... DNA can be faked if you have the right connections.”
Dom felt like the floor was shifting beneath his feet. “Does Cade know? Is that why he left? Because he found out Brennan was alive and with Praetorian?”
A muscle ticked in Davey’s jaw. “I don’t know what Cade knows.”
“Jesus.” Elliot dragged his hands through his sandy brown hair, then locked his hands behind his head and exhaled in a rush. “We need to tell the family.”
“No,” Davey said.
“No?” Dom and Elliot repeated simultaneously.
“What do you mean, no?” Dom demanded. “Weston and Tessa have been grieving their brother for two years. Uncle Cam and Aunt Eva buried their son. And now we find out he might be alive, and you want to keep it from them?”
“I want to verify before we tear open those wounds,” Davey countered.
“Think about it, Dom. Sabin was in bad shape when Praetorian had him. He was cycling through sedatives and neurological primers. Two broken fingers. Days without real sleep or proper food. The resemblance between Brennan and Cade has always been uncanny—they always looked more like twins than brothers. It could have been Cade that Sabin saw.”
“Sabin knows Cade,” Dom argued. “He wouldn’t mistake one for the other.”
“Under normal circumstances, no. But Sabin wasn’t under normal circumstances.”
“What about the tattoo?”
“A phoenix neck tattoo isn’t exactly unique,” Davey pointed out. “We verify first, then we tell the family.”
Dom opened his mouth to argue, but snapped it closed again when the door opened, and Tessa poked her head in. She eyed the three of them suspiciously.
“Everything okay in here?
“Yeah,” Davey said.
“Uh-huh.” She clearly didn’t believe him, but she let it drop. “Dom, you’re late for physical therapy.”
Shit. The last thing he needed right now was to be poked and prodded by medical staff while his mind was spinning with the bomb Sabin had dropped.
“Can’t it wait?”
Tessa raised an eyebrow. “Sure, if you want that shoulder to heal wrong and spend the rest of your life with limited mobility. Your call.”
Dom looked back at his brothers. “We’re not done talking about this.”
“I know,” Davey replied, and for a brief moment, Dom saw the weight his oldest brother carried—the impossible choices, the constant pressure of leadership. “But Tessa’s right. Go to PT. This can wait.”