“Liam,” he says quietly. “Liam is mine.”
“He’s yours,” Parker confirms, and now she’s definitely crying, tears streaming down her face even though she’s smiling. “He has your eyes. Your way of thinking. Your—everything.”
Jace’s hands are shaking where they’re gripping the chair. “I have a son.”
“You have a son,” I agree, and my own voice is thick with emotion. “We both do.”
We sit with that for a moment. The weight of it. The reality of it. Two men who never thought they’d have children, who’d made peace with that loss, suddenly became fathers to two perfect five-year-old boys.
It’s overwhelming.
It’s terrifying.
It’s the best thing that’s ever happened to us.
Parker’s looking at the third file now. The one with all three names. Noah, Liam, and Silas.
She looks at Silas, and something passes between them that I can’t read.
“You don’t need to open it,” Silas says, his voice rough. “We already know what it’s going to say.”
“Silas—” Parker starts.
“I was eighteen,” he interrupts, and the words come out flat. Clinical. Like he’s reporting tactical data instead of sharing something that’s clearly been eating at him. “My parents had me meet them at a clinic. Had a vasectomy performed. Permanent sterilization. They said—” He stops, and I watch him struggle with whatever memory is attached to this. “They said I was too violent. Too damaged. That I’d hurt any child I had. That the world didn’t need more monsters like me.”
The rage that floods through me is instant and overwhelming, even though I’ve known about this for seven years.
But hearing him say it out loud now, hearing the clinical way he describes his parents deciding he wasn’t worthy of having children, makes me want to resurrect them just so I can kill them again. Slower this time. More painfully.
“I know,” I say, because he needs to hear it. Because keeping this particular secret doesn’t help anyone anymore. “I’ve known for seven years. Since you spent those three days in the infirmary, I got curious about why routine bloodwork required that much recovery time.”
Silas’s head snaps toward me, his storm-gray eyes wide with something that might be shock or might be betrayal. “You knew? This whole time?”
“I hacked the clinic records,” I admit. “Found the file. Read what they did to you.” I hold his gaze. “And I never told anyone because it wasn’t my secret to tell. But yeah. I knew.”
Parker’s face has gone pale. “Aria told me. When she had me. She said—” Her voice breaks. “She said you couldn’t have children. That you’d been sterilized. I thought she was lying. Thought it was just another way to hurt me, to make me think?—”
“She wasn’t lying about that part,” Silas says quietly. “She was telling the truth.” He looks at Jace now, and there’s something heavy in that look. “Jace knew too. He’s the one who drove me to the clinic that day.”
My head snaps toward Jace. He’s staring at Silas with an expression that’s equal parts guilt and grief, and suddenly a lot of things about Jace make more sense. The way he’s always been protective of Silas. The way he carries himself, like he’s atoning for something.
“You knew?” I ask, even though Silas just said it. “This whole time?”
Jace nods slowly. “I drove him. Your father and Silas’s father called me, told me to pick Silas up, take him to an address, wait, and bring him home. Didn’t tell me what it was for.” His voice is raw, scraped clean of its usual control. “I waited in the parking lot for three hours. When he came out, he could barely walk. They’d sedated him for the procedure, but it was wearing off, and he was—” He stops, swallows hard. “I drove him home. Got him settled. And I’ve felt guilty about it every day since.”
“So you all knew,” Parker says slowly, looking between the three of us. “Everyone knew except me.”
“We all knew, and none of us knew the others knew,” I clarify. “Classic dysfunctional family communication.”
“Don’t,” Silas says, and there’s steel in his voice now, cutting through the moment of dark humor. He’s looking at Jace specifically. “Don’t carry that guilt, Jace. You were following orders. If you’d refused, if you’d tried to stop it, Dominic would have made it worse. Would have done it anyway and then punished you for the disobedience. Probably would have madeyou watch. You did what you had to do to protect me from something worse.”
“There’s nothing worse than what they did to you,” Jace says quietly, but there’s doubt in his voice. Like he’s not sure he believes his own words.
“There is,” Silas counters. “And we both know it. So don’t carry that guilt. It was never yours to carry.”
The tension in the room is suffocating. I want to say something, do something, but what do you say to that? What do you say to the fact that Silas’s parents were so convinced he was a monster that they sterilized him before he was old enough to have a say?
What do you say to the fact that Jace has been carrying the guilt of that day for thirteen years?
