“Carlos is the spitting image of my grandfather. My dad never told me he had a brother.”
I stare at him, unable to speak.
“I searched for the girl in the photo for months, but Lucia Alvarez didn’t seem to exist anywhere. It was as though someone made her disappear. I didn’t know that’s exactly what had happened when I first came across it. I learned Carlos was dead, so I looked for Clarissa Rose. I found her, watched her, but there was no one in her life. And I wondered what happened to my cousin.”
Cousin.
The word slices me open.
He was looking for me long before he ever met me.
“I thought if I could find you, maybe we could be partners. Someone to build an empire with. I knew it wouldn’t be Brax. Perhaps it could have been Lucia.”
A sick twist knots my stomach.
“When did you realize I was the girl in the photo?”
“When Bella told me about your reunion with Rudy,” he says. “She told me your real name was Lucia Alvarez, and you were in foster care with him.” His chuckle is humorless. “You were right under my nose, and I had no clue.”
“So why bring Clarissa Rose here? Why send her the picture of me and Griff if you only wanted to find Lucia?”
“Finding outyouwere the girl in the photo, that you grew up in my girlfriend’s home, and then started dating my best friend… Maybe I was paranoid, but it just started to feel more planned than coincidental. It didn’t feel like you being in front of me this whole time was by chance.”
A sudden clarity settles over me, heavy and unyielding.
“You wanted to see my reaction to Clarissa Rose being in town to confirm if what you suspected about this being planned was true.”
“Yes.”
“You sent her more than a photo. What was in the package?”
“A copy of Carlos’s death certificate. And a few photos of Carlos and Sebastian from the album I found your picture in.”
A chill races up my spine as pieces slam into place from the day I was shot. Clarissa Rose’s grip on me, demanding to know who I talked to.
“She thought I knew Carlos wasn’t my father,” I whisper, it finally making sense. “That I told someone and she was being hunted. After I was shot, she fled. And then your father found her and killed her.”
“I sent her that stuff weeks before she showed up. I didn’t think she had taken the bait. Finding out you were in the hospital is how I knew she had and that I was wrong about this being planned. You didn’t tell Bella your mom was in town. If you had, we would have come home. You wanted her to stay in California, away from what was happening.”
I hate that he’s right.
“I had no idea how connected your mother was to my father when I started looking into her. I had no idea the stuff I sent her would reveal as many secrets as it did. My father hid an entire past from me.”
“Like father, like son, I guess. He has no idea what you’ve been hiding, either.”
Brodie scowls. “I’m not the only one that’s been keeping secrets.”
My brows pinch together.
“Our big brother knows all about the DNA that flows through your veins.”
Brax knew?
The information he was keeping from me—was it this?
“A few days after you were shot, my dad called to tell me he had a daughter and it was you. He wanted me to learn about you, wanted you to work with us. He was ecstatic to know we were already acquainted with one another, but I told him you were like Brax. That you’d want no part of our world. He wanted me to try anyway,” Brodie explains, disdained that his father didn’t listen to him.
I don’t know why, but a broken laugh escapes me.
