“Bullshit,” Levi snapped.
“Levi,” Charlie said, voice low. Warning? Plea? I couldn’t tell.
“No,” Levi shot back. “You both knew. You all knew. And you let me spend my entire adult life thinking?—”
He broke off, jaw clenched so hard I worried something might crack.
My journalist brain was screaming.
Byron Dane. Alive. Connected to Dominion Hall. Tied to money moving through continents and a mansion full of ex-military men with his last name. This was the story behind the story, the missing piece my sources didn’t have, the kind of revelation that could anchor a series of articles, a book, a career.
But another part of me—smaller, louder—was screaming something else entirely.
Don’t exploit this.
Not this moment. Not this man.
I could write about Dominion Hall. About the shell companies, the viper in the glass, the way power pooled under this roof like groundwater. But this—Levi’s eyes on the man who had broken his family by dying and then by not actually being dead—this was not mine.
Not yet.
“You disappeared,” Levi said, voice raw. “You left my mother alone with a house full of boys and a folded flag, and you didn’t even—” His breath shuttered. “What kind of man does that?”
The question hung between them like a rope waiting to snap.
Byron opened his mouth, then closed it again.
“I can explain,” he said finally.
“Then start,” I said. My voice surprised me—steady, cool, too practiced from a thousand interviews with men who thought they could outrun accountability.
Three pairs of Dane eyes swung to me.
I lifted my chin.
“Because if you don’t tell him,” I added, “someone else will. And they might not care if they get the details right.”
For the first time, Byron really looked at me. Not as background, not as the woman at his son’s side in a black dress, but as a variable in an equation he hadn’t accounted for.
“You’re the reporter,” he said.
“Journalist,” I corrected. “But yes.”
He nodded slowly.
“Then I suppose,” he said, gaze returning to Levi, “we should all sit down.”
No one moved.
The room felt tilted, like the floor had shifted a degree to the left and no one had adjusted.
I reached for Levi’s hand.
He didn’t look at me, but his fingers closed around mine like a man grabbing a lifeline.
His palm was damp. Mine probably was, too.
“Okay,” he said roughly. “But you start with this: Are you my father or not?”
