Half-brothers.
The man who murdered my family is my half-brother.
I close the folder.
The papers feel like poison in my hands. Twenty years of loyalty. Twenty years of killing. Twenty years of believing I owed the Sartoris everything.
All of it built on a lie.
My phone buzzes. The ten-minute mark. I pull it out and type a message to Marina.
Still here. Stay put.
I hit send and slide the phone back into my pocket. My hands are steady now. The shaking stopped somewhere between the DNA results and the medical records detailing my mother's "treatment" at Giuseppe's private clinic.
Treatment. That's what they called it.
I exhale slowly. The sound echoes in the warehouse.
"How did you find out?" My voice comes out flat. Dead.
Alejandro shifts in his chair. "Three years ago, my mother was dying. Cancer. She knew she had weeks left." He pauses. "She called me to her bedside and told me everything. The rape. Giuseppe. The truth about my birth."
I wait.
"She gave me a name," Alejandro continues. "A doctor who worked for Giuseppe in the seventies and eighties. A man who handled... problems. Unwanted pregnancies. Medical records that needed to disappear."
"And this doctor talked?"
"Eventually." Alejandro's smile doesn't reach his eyes. "It took time. Persuasion. But he had kept copies of everything. Insurance, he called it. Protection against Giuseppe."
"He's dead now."
"Of course."
I stare at the folder in my lap. The proof of everything I never wanted to know.
"The doctor had records on multiple women," Alejandro says. "Your mother was one of them. When I saw the dates, thetimeline... I started digging. Found out about the hit on your family. Found out I was the one who pulled the trigger."
His voice cracks slightly on the last word. The first real emotion I've seen from him.
"For twenty years," Alejandro says, "I believed I killed strangers. Enemies of my father's business. I didn't know I murdered my own brother's family. Didn't know I left him orphaned and broken."
I laugh.
The sound is ugly. Harsh. It scrapes out of my throat like broken glass.
"You want absolution?" I ask. "You want me to forgive you?"
"No." Alejandro shakes his head. "I want you to understand. We were both used. Both manipulated. Both turned into weapons by the same man."
Giuseppe.
The Don who saved me from the streets. Who gave me a home. Who treated me like a son.
Because I was his son.
And he knew it the entire time.
