My mother—my mother who was in a facility in Marfa forgetting my name, forgetting she had sons at all—had volunteered for this. Had agreed to be part of a breeding program. Had known my father had other families, other sons, other lives.
I pointed at the yachts moored at the pier, needing to ground myself in something concrete, something I could see and touch, making a joke because what else could I do when your entire life turned out to be orchestrated. "Those belong to the Dane clan, too?"
"Yes," he said simply, no humor in his voice, just flat honesty. "All of it. Every asset you see. I took money from bad people—very bad people doing very bad things—and I built a fortress. For my family. For my boys. All of them. To keep them safe from the people who wanted to use them."
As if that could fix everything. As if money and property and protection could replace presence, could make up for abandonment, could heal the wounds his absence had carved.
I stood up suddenly, violently, chair scraping against the ground with a harsh sound that split the quiet morning.
I needed to leave. Needed air that didn't taste like betrayal and lies. Needed space to think, to process, to figure out what the fuck any of this meant.
Needed—
Fuck, I needed Sophie.
The realization hit like lightning, clear and undeniable and absolutely certain.
All the past shit—Klein showing up at Mama P's, my cowardice at the hotel, running from Sophie like the emotionalcripple I was—suddenly seemed like a molehill compared to this Kilimanjaro-sized pile of shit my father had just dumped on me.
Everything else was manageable. This ... this was world-ending.
And the only person I wanted to see, the only person who could make any of this feel survivable, was Sophie.
I started walking, moving fast toward the house, boots hitting grass with purpose, every step taking me away from my father and toward the only thing that made sense.
"Wyatt!" My father called after me, standing now, alarm in his voice. "We need to talk about the FBI. About Klein. They don't know anything about this—about Trueborn, about Dominion Hall, about what we're doing here?—"
Yeah right. You think you can drop back into my life after this many years and tell me anything? You think I trust a single word out of your mouth after learning my entire existence was a fucking science experiment?
Fuck you.
Right now, I needed Sophie.
I'd never known anything so clear in my life, never felt certainty like this—bone-deep, undeniable, the only true thing in a morning full of lies and revelations and impossible family trees.
Fuck the past. Fuck Dominion Hall and its fourteen half-brothers I'd never met, never known existed. Fuck my father and his government breeding program and his fortress built on blood money and justified by protection.
Sophie.
That's all I needed. The only thing that mattered. The only person who'd ever made me feel like I could be something other than damaged, other than a product, other than a weapon someone else had designed.
The rest of the world be damned.
I needed her like air. Like water. Like the only anchor in a storm that was trying to tear me apart.
And this time—this fucking time—I wasn't going to run from her.
I was going to run to her.
28
SOPHIE
Lunch tasted better when no one was watching you decide your life.
I sat alone at a small café just off East Bay, a shaded table, iced tea sweating onto a chipped saucer, a sandwich I’d ordered because it sounded good. The kind of lunch you ate when you weren’t rushing back to anything. When you weren’t apologizing for taking up space.
I turned my phone face down on the table.
