My blood went cold. I held the phone up, letting it scan my face, and the screen shifted, no hesitation, like it’d been waiting for me.
A single frame loaded. White background, black text. Simple. Brutal.
I’ve missed you, My Silas. We’ll see each other again soon.
My heart stopped. Not slowed, not skipped—stopped. Like someone had ripped the wires out of my chest.
My Silas.
Two words, hers and hers alone.
Our mother had a name for each of us, a private thread tying her to her boys. Marcus wasMy Lion. Atlas,My Oak. But me? I wasMy Silas.
Her voice echoed in my head, soft but sharp, the way she’d say it when she tucked me in, when she thought I was asleep. Before she vanished. Before Department 77. Before the lies that broke us.
I swiped at the screen, frantic, looking for more. Nothing. No apps, no contacts, no files. Just that message, burned into my retinas.
I tapped again, harder, like I could force the phone to cough up answers. It didn’t. A minute later, the screen went black, the phone powering down with a soft click. Dead.
I pressed the button, shook it, cursed under my breath. Nothing. Like it’d done its job and quit.
I sat there, the whiskey forgotten, my pulse hammering in my ears.
My mother. She was out there. Not a ghost, not a memory—real. Alive. Charlie hadn’t been cracking. He’d seen her, and now she’d reached out. To me. Not my brothers, not the family—just me.
My Silas.
What the hell did it mean? A taunt? A promise? A trap?
My mind spun, chasing threads that didn’t connect. Department 77. Was this them, playing me? Or was it her, breaking free, reaching out?
I paid the tab—five bucks with a hundred-dollar bill, the bartender’s eyes bugging out as I stumbled toward the door. I didn’t care.
The air outside hit me like a slap, thick with humidity and the tang of the harbor. I walked, no direction, just movement, my boots scuffing the cracked sidewalks of Charleston’s fringes. I squinted at every face I passed—an old woman with a grocery bag, a drunk swaying under a streetlight, a couple laughing outside a taco joint.
Was she here? Watching? Waiting around the next corner?
My heart thudded in my chest, urging me to keep going, to find her.
For an hour, I wandered. Past dive bars and shuttered shops, through alleys that smelled of piss and regret.
My mother’s face haunted me—I imagined it older now, lined with years I hadn’t seen, but hers. I’d know her anywhere.
My Silas.
I should’ve gone to my brothers. Should’ve called a meet, laid the phone on the war room table, let Elias crack it open and pull whatever data was left inside. They deserved to know. She was their mother, too.
But I couldn’t. Not yet.
This was personal, a knife slipped between my ribs, and I wasn’t ready to share the wound.
My Silas.
She’d wanted me to see it, me to feel it. Why? To pull me in? To warn me? To break me?
My feet stopped moving, and I realized where I was. The Palmetto Rose loomed ahead, its porch lights soft against the night, crepe myrtles swaying like they knew my secrets.
Portia was here.
