Even in death, we were synchronized.
Reclaiming the empire gave us the privilege of standing against all those who thought their sins would be buried—the associates who’d looked away, the allies who’d switched loyalties, the subordinates who’d served our uncle with the enthusiastic compliance of people who back winners and abandon losers. We found them all. Addressed them all. Made it abundantly and permanently clear that the thing people shouldunderstand about the twins is that we hold deadly grudges, and we never leave a corner unturned.
Never.
Not a single corner.
Not a single name on the list.
Not a single loose end that wouldn’t eventually feel the tension of being pulled tight.
Which is why we’re here now.
Because the grudge didn’t end with the uncle. The list didn’t close with the reclamation. The empire we rebuilt and the lives we reconstructed and the power we accumulated through years of patient, lethal, methodical work—all of it was jeopardized again. Not by an enemy this time. Not by an outsider with ambition and opportunity.
By family.
Again.
Damien’s betrayal wasn’t a surprise in retrospect. The signs were there—the quiet withdrawals, the unexplained absences, the particular way he’d started looking at Dominic when he thought no one was watching, with an expression that I now recognize as the face of someone calculating the market value of their brother’s trust. But Dominic is our Prime. Our anchor. The man whose designation and temperament hold the pack together through the gravitational force of a personality that doesn’t bend. And Damien was his twin.
His twin.
I look at Cassian across the room, cigarette between his lips, smoke curling toward the cracked window, his gray-blue eyes watching the forest with the particular attention of someone who has learned to read landscapes for threat before he reads them for beauty.
His twin.
I cannot fathom it.
The betrayal of a twin is not the betrayal of a brother. It’s the betrayal of a mirror. The betrayal of the person who shares your face and your blood and the fundamental cellular architecture that makes you you. It’s looking at your own reflection and watching it choose to destroy you.
If Cassian ever?—
No.
Don’t finish that thought.
Not possible.
Not in any reality. Not in any configuration of circumstances.
We are two peas in a pod, and the pod doesn’t open from the inside.
Damien sold us. Promised our pack—all four of us—for a deal that went sour, then sold us again for his own salvation when the sour deal turned rancid. Ensured we’d be buried with no Omega, no taste of what love or connection could feel like, while he walked away with a clean slate and a new life in a country where the weather is warm and the bounties don’t reach.
But nothing is free in this world.
Nothing stays clean.
And clean slates have a way of getting dirty when the people you betrayed refuse to stay buried.
Which is exactly why we need this masquerade.
Not just for the freedom. Not just for the clemency and the financial support and the promise of a life beyond these Academy walls that doesn’t end with a bullet or a blade or the particular variety of anonymous death that occurs in the dead forest when someone with a bounty ventures too close to someone with ambition.
No.
The masquerade is where we find him.
