Falling for my Brother’s Rival

Buried Memories

Noah’s Pov

Sophia’s voice had been trembling so badly over the phone that I nearly dropped my keys twice trying to get out the door, and by the time I arrived at her apartment, she was sitting on the floor of her living room surrounded by old letters and faded photographs, her eyes red-rimmed, her hands still shaking as she looked up at me with an expression I had never seen on her before, something between devastation and disbelief.

“Noah,” she whispered before I had even fully crossed the threshold, “Tyler was my brother.”

For a moment, I genuinely thought I had misheard her.

“What did you say?”

She repeated herself slowly, carefully, as though saying the words a second time might somehow make them easier to process, and as she explained everything, the letters, the adoption, the article confirming Tyler had left behind an infant sister, I felt the ground shift beneath me in a way that had nothing to do with anything physical.

I sat down beside her on the floor, picking up one of the letters with hands that weren’t entirely steady, reading her mother’s careful, guilty handwriting, and something about seeing the truth laid out in ink made it undeniably real in a way that words alone hadn’t quite managed.

“This changes everything,” I said quietly, more to myself than to her.

“I know.”

“No, Sophia, I don’t think you understand what I mean.” I set the letter down, my mind racing backward through years of memories I had spent so long trying to suppress, memories that suddenly felt less like scattered fragments and more like pieces of a puzzle I had never allowed myself to fully assemble. “The night Tyler died, I saw something. I’ve never told anyone, not even Mason, because I convinced myself for years that trauma had distorted the memory beyond recognition.”

Sophia turned to face me fully, her expression shifting from grief into something more alert. “What did you see?”

I closed my eyes, forcing myself back to that freezing night at the training camp, the noise, the chaos, the desperate confusion that followed once everyone realized something had gone terribly wrong. “Before everything happened, I saw Tyler arguing with someone. An adult. Someone who shouldn’t have even been near the dormitories that late at night.”

“Do you remember who it was?”

“I convinced myself I didn’t, for years. It was dark, and I was young, and everything about that night felt fractured and unreliable afterward.” I opened my eyes, meeting hers directly. “But lately, ever since everything started happening to you, pieces of that memory keep resurfacing with more clarity than they ever had before.”

“Noah, who was it?”

I hesitated only a moment longer before finally speaking the name aloud, a name I hadn’t allowed myself to consciously consider in over a decade. “Victor Kane.”

Sophia’s brow furrowed. “The name sounds familiar, but I can’t place it.”

“He used to own one of the league’s franchises, years before either Mason or I turned professional. His ownership ended abruptly after a corruption scandal, something involving fraud and mismanagement of team funds, though the details were always vague. I never once connected him to Tyler’s death, because at the time, nobody had any reason to.”

“Until now.”

“Until now,” I agreed, my thoughts racing forward, connecting threads I had never allowed myself to examine closely before. “Sophia, if Victor Kane was involved in whatever happened to Tyler that night, and if you’re Tyler’s biological sister, then everything happening to you, the surveillance, the hacked medical records, the break-in, it might not be random at all.”

“You think he’s targeting me because of who I actually am.”

“I think it’s possible someone doesn’t want the truth about Tyler’s death coming to light, and your pregnancy has suddenly put you back in a spotlight none of us anticipated.”

The weight of that realization settled heavily over both of us, and for a long moment, neither of us spoke, the implications too enormous to process all at once.

Finally, Sophia reached for my hand, lacing her fingers through mine with a steadiness that surprised me given everything she had just endured. “We need to find out the truth. All of it. Whatever happened to Tyler, whatever connects Victor Kane to any of this.”

“It won’t be easy. Whoever’s behind this has resources, patience, and enough power to manipulate hospital employees and hire people to monitor you without leaving a trace.”

“I don’t care how difficult it is. I’ve spent my entire life not knowing who I really am, and I refuse to keep living in the dark now, especially with our baby’s safety at stake.”

I studied her for a long moment, admiration mixing with fierce protectiveness as I watched her push past her own grief and fear to focus on the truth ahead, refusing to let uncertainty paralyze her the way it so easily could have.

“There’s something else,” I said slowly, the pieces still assembling themselves in my mind. “My mother left when I was young. I always believed she abandoned us, that she simply couldn’t handle raising a child alone after my father disappeared. But recently, something Ethan uncovered while investigating the hospital breach suggested she might have entered witness protection years ago.”

“Witness protection from what?”

“I don’t know yet. But if my father knew something dangerous, something connected to Victor Kane’s criminal activities, and if my mother had to disappear to protect herself afterward, then maybe everything that happened to my family and everything that happened to yours are connected in ways neither of us ever imagined.”

Sophia’s eyes widened. “Noah, if that’s true, then Victor Kane might have destroyed both of our families for the exact same reason.”

“To protect whatever secret he’s been hiding for over a decade.”

We sat together amid the scattered letters and photographs, the weight of everything we had uncovered settling heavily between us, and though fear still lingered at the edges of every realization, something else had begun taking root alongside it, a fierce, unshakable determination neither of us intended to abandon.