Chapter four:The Devil’s invitation
1085 Words
Chapter four:
Title: The Devil's Invitation
Gianna's POV
I read the note over and over until the words blurred together.
When you're ready to know what your father traded... come and find me.
"I'll never come to you," I said out loud, to no one, my voice shaking with a fury I didn't fully understand. I crushed the paper in my fist and threw it into the fireplace, watching the flames curl around the edges until the ink disappeared into ash.
I told myself that was the end of it. I told myself a lot of things that night, and none of them stopped me from lying awake thinking about the way he'd said come and find me, like he already knew I would.
Rocco found me the next morning sitting in front of the cold fireplace, staring at the blackened remains of a note I had already memorized without meaning to. He sat down beside me without a word, and for a long time neither of us spoke.
"I only read enough of it to know one thing," he finally said, his voice low, careful, like he was choosing each word before he let himself say it. "If what's written there is real..."
He stopped.
"If it's real, what?" I asked.
He rubbed a hand over his face, and when he looked at me again, there was something almost like guilt in his eyes.
"Dad isn't the only one who lied to you."
My chest tightened. "What does that mean?"
"I can't tell you."
"Rocco—"
"I can't," he said again, more firmly this time, like the words themselves were dangerous to say out loud. "Not because I won't. Because I don't think I'd survive telling you."
I stared at him, waiting for him to take it back, to tell me he was exaggerating the way he sometimes did. He didn't. He just looked away, and I understood that whatever was written on those torn pages went far beyond a simple debt between two families.
Breakfast that morning was unbearable. The dining room, usually filled with the clatter of plates and the low hum of servants moving in and out, sat silent. No one touched their food. My father stared at his coffee like it held answers he didn't want to find.
"You have two days left," he said finally, not looking up.
I slammed my fork down hard enough to rattle the plate. "I'm not going."
I expected him to argue, the way he had my entire life whenever I defied him. Instead he simply stood, pushed his chair back, and walked out of the room without another word.
His surrender frightened me more than any order he could have given.
I waited until the house settled into its afternoon quiet before slipping into his private study, a room I had entered maybe a handful of times growing up, always at his invitation and never on my own. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for. Anything connected to the Brooks family. Anything that might explain why a twenty-five-year-old debt could make grown men lower their eyes and guards refuse to lift their guns.
I searched through locked drawers I forced open with a letter opener, old ledgers filled with numbers I didn't understand, a small hidden safe behind a painting that I couldn't c***k. Then, tucked inside a leather folder at the back of his desk, I found a photograph.
A much younger version of my father stood beside another man, both of them laughing at something outside the frame, their arms slung around each other's shoulders like brothers. On the back, in handwriting I didn't recognize, someone had written two words.
Brothers by choice.
Brooks & Monroe.
My world tilted. The families hadn't always been enemies. Somewhere along the way, whatever had once made them close enough to call each other brothers had turned into something that spilled blood for twenty-five years.
I didn't hear the study door open.
"You were never supposed to see this."
My father's voice cracked through the silence, and I turned to find him standing in the doorway, his face pale with something closer to panic than anger. He crossed the room in three strides and pulled the photograph from my hands before I could stop him.
"Who is he?" I asked.
He held the photograph against his chest like it might shatter if he let it go.
Silence stretched between us long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer at all.
"The only man I ever called brother," he said finally.
I stood there, stunned, trying to fit those words into everything I thought I knew about my family's history. If they had once been brothers, something had destroyed that bond so completely it had taken twenty-five years and countless lives to bury it. And somehow, I was the price meant to settle whatever remained.
That night I couldn't sleep. I dug through the cold ashes in the fireplace until I found the note, its edges blackened but the words still legible if I angled it toward the light. I smoothed it flat against my desk and read it one final time.
I made my decision. Not because I trusted Zayden Brooks. Because no one else in this house was willing to tell me the truth, and I was done waiting for permission to have it.
The next evening, I left the estate alone, taking one of the smaller cars my father rarely used, and drove to the address written on the back of the note. It led me to a quiet private restaurant tucked away from the main street, the kind of place that didn't need a sign to announce what it was.
The hostess smiled the moment I walked in.
"Mr. Brooks has been expecting you."
My heart skipped. I hadn't given her my name.
She led me through a narrow hallway to a private dining room, opening the door onto a table set with a single plate and two glasses of wine already poured. Zayden Brooks sat waiting, unhurried, exactly as composed as he had been standing in my family's courtyard.
He didn't stand when I entered. He didn't smile either.
"You're a day earlier than I expected," he said.
I stiffened. "You knew I'd come."
He reached for the second glass and poured a little more wine into it, unhurried, his eyes never leaving mine.
"No," he said.
He set the bottle down.
"I knew you'd want the truth."
- Writer
