And now this man—this business rival who's been nipping at my heels for reasons that are only just starting to make sense—has been walking around with this shocking truth. A truth he evidently decided to keep from me.
"How long have you known this?" The words grind out of me.
He hesitates, his intense eyes searching mine. "About five years. Give or take."
Five years.
My fury is white-hot and immediate, and I bank it only because hundreds of donors surround us and my wife iscurrently wending her way toward me through the crowd of effusive gala attendees.
Five years of knowing we shared the same blood. Five years of him holding every card while I played in the dark.
"Is this some kind of joke to you, Roth?" I close the distance between us, not as a threat, but a promise that the civilized veneer I'm wearing right now is costing me more than he can possibly calculate. "You’ve had this knowledge for half a goddamned decade, yet you choose tonight—this moment—to come forward?"
“It’s complicated.” His jaw flexes, the first crack in his armor all evening. "The situation with my family required careful navigation. There were reasons I couldn't reach out sooner. I'm not laying them out at a charity gala."
I want to tear that evasion apart with my bare hands. I want to slam him against a wall and extract every detail. Who else knows? Who decided to keep this buried? What kind of family sits on a secret like this while the person it belongs to lives without it?
But this isn't the time and it sure as fuck isn't the place, so my discipline holds. Barely.
"My mother's parents." The words taste like ash. I can't bring myself to call them grandparents. They threw my mother away. They don't deserve the title. "Are they still alive?"
"Our grandfather passed twelve years ago." A pause. "Our grandmother, Constance, is still living, but her health has been fading for a while. Memory lapses are becoming more frequent. All to be expected, given her age. I’m sorry,” he says, sounding like he means it. “That’s probably not the answer you were hoping for."
"I wasn't hoping for anything." I hold his gaze, refusing to feel anything where he or his family is concerned. "I stoppedexpecting anything from the Xaviers a long time ago. Meeting you like this only convinces me I was right."
He nods slowly. Accepting the deflection without comment or apology. The edge has returned to his eyes, but tempered now, the look of a man who's said what he came to say and is calculating the cost.
“I should go. This is your night, and I can see I’ve already worn out my welcome.”
All I give him is a curt nod. I’m not sure what to make of him or the information he just dropped on me, but I know I don’t want to deal with it here.
A silence stretches between us, loaded, taut, neither of us willing to break it the wrong way. Then Sebastian straightens, adjusting his cuffs, his composure reassembling. The cool mask he’d been wearing when I first saw him slides back into place.
"Congratulations on your wedding, Dominic. I mean that sincerely." He shifts to safer ground, and I let him, because neither of us gains anything by detonating all of our family landmines in a ballroom. "Your fiancée is extraordinary."
"Yes. She is."
He inhales, his dark brows furrowing. "Marriage, though." He says it like it leaves a bad taste in his mouth. "Not something that holds any appeal for me personally. I'm not a one-woman man. Can't imagine anything that would change that." He says it with the absolute confidence of a man who's never been proven wrong. "But hey, to each his own."
I almost laugh. I remember believing that. Knowing it in my bones—the feeling that I'd never tie myself to someone, never hand anyone that kind of power over me, never make myself vulnerable enough to be destroyed. I built walls so high even I couldn't see over them.
And then Avery came into my life and every certainty I'd constructed crumbled like it had never existed at all.
I keep that to myself. Some lessons a man has to learn the hard way, on his own.
Whether he’s my cousin or not.
"Anytime you want to lose to me again, Roth, I'm available."
He smirks. "Noted. Enjoy your evening, Dominic."
With that he turns and cuts through the crowd, his long, unhurried stride carrying him toward the exit. People shift out of his path without being asked, unconscious deference to the man’s extreme confidence and physical authority that naturally commands a room. Then he's through the far doors and gone.
I stand there, processing. The gala noise filters back in again, as though someone just snapped their fingers and the ballroom has come back to life. Laughter, music, the murmur of conversations. I grab my whiskey and down it in one gulp.
The bartender catches my eye and heads right over to pour me another. I empty the glass and push it away on a muttered curse.
"Nick?" Avery appears at my side, still carrying that post-speech glow, but her expression falters the moment she sees my face. “Is everything all right?”
