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My stomach drops as if the floor has fallen away beneath me.

Frank is Edwin’s brother.

CHAPTER 37

EDWIN

Iburst into the manor like I’m trying to wake every ghost. The front door slams against the wall hard enough to rattle the old glass in its frame, the sound ricocheting through the foyer that still smells faintly of funeral lilies. This house hoards grief.

Silence is all that greets me.

Zaiya hurries in behind me, hesitant to say anything more after dropping a fucking bomb at my feet and watching it split me open.

Bile crawls up my throat at the thought of Frank Bolton being my brother. There’s no fucking way.

I don’t look at the portraits as I pass, but I feel them. My father’s painted gaze judging every move I make, watching me unravel this family secret they couldn’t bury deep enough.

I cut through the main hallway, shoes loud on polished wood. I don’t slow for corners or Pearl carrying fresh laundry, her startled little gasp trailing behind me. Zaiya’s breath keeps pace at my side. Her presence is the only thing stopping my hands from doing damage.

The office door is open.

Grandpa Wallace sits at the desk, leaning back in his chair without a care in the fucking world, staring down at his tablet as if it’s attached to his hand. This office has entertained men of power and men of violence, often with little difference between them. Dignitaries and gangsters have enjoyed the finest cigars imported straight from Nicaragua, the smoke absorbing into the wood paneling like a second, peppery skin.

And they expect me to drink from the same decanter of bourbon. To make deals with men I don’t give a shit about, all to keep the Serpentium Order alive.

Grandpa doesn’t look up right away.

“I heard you did well at The Breaking,” he says casually.

“Who is Simon Lyle?” My voice comes out hard. I grab the tablet from his hand and throw it against the wall. “Say it.”

That gets his attention. His eyes lift to mine, and for the first time, he looks his age. Nearly a century old. Weighed down with too many secrets he expects to take to his grave.

He pauses, rearranging the pieces in his head into an answer palatable enough to say aloud.

“Someone who was supposed to stay out of our lives.”

“My mother’s son.”

He sits up straighter, the chair creaking beneath him.

“The baby she gave birth to. She was raped, Edwin.”

My chest tightens so hard my ribs ache. My family accepted my mother’s melancholy as just another personality trait. She was always sensitive with an underlying sadness, no matter how happy life looked around her. A woman too delicate for the cruel little kingdom she had married into.

But this?

This is a festering wound kept hidden. There had been no clue she’d endured pain this extreme.

Grandpa Wallace keeps talking while I stand here trying not to detonate.

“That baby should have never been brought into this world,” he says with no softness in his voice. “But Vanessa was adamant he be born. She wanted to keep him, but Barbara wouldn’t allow it. And I agreed.”

Barbara Crotavere. The Seraph everyone feared. My late grandmother’s ruthlessness gave her power. She could smile while handing over a death sentence. When she died, my grandfather stepped down as Sovereign because he saw no point in continuing without her.

But to do that to her own daughter-in-law?

“You made her give up her child?” Zaiya asks. There’s steel in her voice now. Anger she won’t hide.