And I wasn’t walking away from it.
Not now.
Not ever.
I looked down at my hands—still stained with Caroline’s blood, still shaking—and I made a silent vow.
I’ll never run again.
Not from Silas.
Not from love.
Not from family.
Because some kinds of loyalty weren’t just earned.
They were chosen.
And I was choosing them now.
All of them.
For life.
32
SILAS
The blood was gone from my hands, scrubbed clean under Dominion Hall’s water, but my mother’s final words clung to me.He had another family, Silas. Find them.
Her voice, faint and fading in that blood-soaked room at Blackthorn Hollow, echoed as I stood in the war room, my brothers around me, their faces heavy with the same grief, the same shock. My mother’s death had ended Department 77, her father’s empire burned to ash, but her last breath had cracked open a new wound—our father, Byron Dane, a man we’d thought we knew, had lived a double life. Another family, hidden from us, out there somewhere, carrying his name, his blood. Our blood.
A discreet delivery had come that morning, a courier dropping off a sealed package with no return address. I’d opened it alone, my hands steady but my heart pounding, and found a dossier, thick with pages, my mother’s handwriting on a note pinned to the front.
For my boys. I wish I knew more.
I’d called my brothers—Ryker, Marcus, Elias, Noah, Charlie, Atlas—to the war room, and we’d spread the contents across the table, the air thick with silence as we read.
Seven names, seven faces, seven half-brothers in Montana, all roughly our ages, all still in the military. Their dossiers were complete—service records, deployments, commendations—and in every photo, our father stared back, his eyes, his jaw, his fire mirrored in theirs.
It was uncanny, exhilarating, like finding a piece of him we’d thought was lost.
“Seven,” Marcus said, his voice low, his fingers tracing a photo of a man named Caleb, a Marine sniper with Byron’s sharp gaze. “Seven more Danes.”
Elias leaned back, his arms crossed, his brow furrowed.
“They’re out there, living their lives, not knowing we exist. How the fuck did Dad pull this off?”
Noah flipped through a file, his voice quiet. “Their mother—Lila Voss. Another Department 77 operative. Mom’s note says 77 paired her with Dad on ops, over and over. Started as a cover, became real. Lila Voss died six years ago.”
I stared at a photo of Jacob, an Army Ranger, his face a mirror of my own, and my chest tightened.
“A separate life,” I said, my voice rough. “He played house with her, had kids, and never told us.”
Charlie’s jaw clenched, his eyes on a picture of Ethan, a Navy SEAL like Marcus.
“He betrayed Mom, betrayed us. But these guys—they’re our blood. We can’t ignore that.”
