This couldn’t be happening. Brennan was dead. The notification had come through official military channels. Uncle Cam and Aunt Eva had been destroyed by the loss. Weston had never been the same. Tessa had thrown herself into healing everyone around her. And Cade...
Cade had gone off the rails.
But what if he wasn’t dead?
“I haven’t told Vivi,” Sabin continued. “I wanted to tell you first because...” He hesitated. “Because it’s your family. Your cousin. I thought you should decide what to do with this.”
Fuck. He needed to tell Davey. And they needed confirmation before they dropped this bomb on the family. Before they shattered Weston and Tessa’s world all over again. Before they gave Uncle Cam and Aunt Eva hope that might be crueler than the grief they’d been living with.
“There’s one more thing.” Sabin’s voice had dropped again. “When I said his name, when he went still... there was a moment, Dom. Just a flash, but I swear I saw recognition. The same kind of recognition I feel when I break through this... fog in my head. Like someone who’s been buried alive suddenly getting a gasp of air.”
“You think he’s like you.”
“I’d put money on it.”
“Thank you,” Dom said and turned to the door.
“Dom?” Sabin called.
He stopped, glanced back. His friend looked suddenly exhausted, as if the brief conversation had drained what little energy he had left.
“I didn’t last long against their conditioning. Brennan’s been with them for two years, if it’s really him. Whatever‘s left of your cousin... it might not be much.”
Dom took the elevator up from the medical facility and found his brothers in Wilde Security’s main war room, the nerve center of their operation. The wall-sized screens displayed satellite imagery, personnel files, and data streams that would have looked like gibberish to anyone outside the family.
Elliot was hunched over his laptop at the oversized conference table, while Davey stood at the window, staring outover Manhattan with a phone pressed to his ear. They both looked up when Dom entered.
Davey muttered a quick “I’ll call you back” into the phone before hanging up. “What happened? Is Sabin having another episode?”
Dom turned to close the door behind him to give himself a second to gather his thoughts. Then he drew a breath and faced his brothers. “No. He’s lucid. Very lucid.”
Elliot closed his laptop. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Jesus, he had no idea how close to the bullseye he was.
How did you tell your brothers that a cousin everyone had mourned for two years might actually be alive?
He finally decided there was no good way to do it, and he just had to spit it out. “Sabin says he saw Brennan. Alive. Working for Praetorian.”
Elliot went completely pale. His mouth opened and closed without sound, before he managed to choke out, “What the actual fuck?”
Davey, though?
His reaction was all wrong. There was surprise there, yes, but not the gut-punch astonishment Dom had expected. Instead, his oldest brother’s face tightened into something closer to grim confirmation.
“How certain is he?”
“How certain is he?” Elliot echoed incredulously. “That’s your first question? Not ‘holy shit, our dead cousin is alive’?”
Dom studied Davey’s face. “You knew.”
Davey didn’t immediately deny it, which was confirmation enough. He ran a hand over his face, suddenly looking older than his thirty-four years. “I didn’t know. Not for certain.”
“But you suspected,” Dom pressed, heat rising in his chest. “For how long?”
Davey moved to the conference table and dropped heavily into a chair. “Back when Praetorian came after Rowan and me, I briefly met an operative codenamed Revenant One. He was masked, but I couldn’t shake the feeling I knew him. I started digging, but never found anything concrete enough to bring to the family. It was just… a gut feeling.”
“Jesus Christ,” Elliot muttered and pushed away from the table to pace the small room. “He’s been alive all this time? What about the body? The funeral?”
