SINS OF MY BROTHER'S BROTHER

THE AFTERMATH

Kieran's POV

She walks out of the room and takes all the oxygen with her.

I don't move. Don't react. Don't allow a single muscle in my face to betray what's happening beneath my ribs — which is violence. Pure, controlled violence directed at no one and everyone and mostly at myself for being so completely unprepared.

Nine years.

I've had nine years to prepare for Irene Morretti to return. Nine years of knowing this moment would come, of constructing walls and protocols and carefully managed distance. Nine years of telling myself that what I felt at that gala — when she was eighteen and looked at me with eyes that saw through rather than at — was a temporary malfunction. A glitch in my system. Something that would fade.

It didn't fade.

It fossilized.

And now she's here, and she's not eighteen anymore, and the girl with the sharp eyes has become a woman who just eviscerated her brother at his own dinner table with the calm precision of someone who has done this professionally.

Dangerous, I called her.

I underestimated.

Dante breaks the silence first. "That went well."

No one responds. What is there to say? His sister just called the pact a cage in front of everyone who agreed to it, and she wasn't wrong.

Cage. The word sits in my chest like a splinter.

"She knows," Roman says. His senatorial composure has cracked slightly — not enough for most people to notice, but I notice everything. "About the pact. She knows."

"She doesn't know specifics," Dante says. "She's guessing. Reading the room."

"She's reading us like case files," Lysander says. He sounds delighted, which is infuriating. "Did you see that? She profiled the entire table in thirty seconds. Overlapping traumas converted into competencies. I feel exposed."

"You should," Ezra says quietly. "She's trained to expose."

I look at him. Of all of us, Ezra is the one I'd expect to be most unsettled by Irene's particular skill set. A woman who reads people for a living, applied to a man who has spent his entire adult life being unreadable by necessity.

But he doesn't look unsettled. He looks... interested.

That's worse.

"Dante." I keep my voice level. Controlled. The voice I use when I'm containing something that wants to be loud. "What exactly did you expect to happen tonight?"

He looks at me. His dark eyes are doing something complicated — anger and guilt and defensiveness all competing for dominance.

"I expected a dinner," he says. "A reintroduction. Something civil."

"You expected her to be grateful. To play the little sister. To sit at this table and let you manage the narrative."

"I expected her to trust me."

"She does trust you." I lean back in my chair. "That's why she's furious. You can only be betrayed by people you trust."

The word betrayed lands harder than I intended. Dante's jaw tightens.

"I didn't betray her."

"You made decisions about her life without her knowledge or consent. In her profession, there's probably a clinical term for that."

"I was protecting her—"

"You were protecting yourself." I stand. The movement is deliberate — not aggressive, but final. "You were terrified of what would happen if she stayed in your world. If she saw what you really are. What we really are. So you sent her away and you made us promise to never look at her the way men look at women they want, and you told yourself it was love."

Dante stands too. We're matched in height, but he's always been broader. The build of a man who came up through legitimate violence — boxing, military training, the controlled kind. My violence was never controlled. I learned it on streets that didn't give lessons, only consequences.

"You don't get to lecture me about my sister," he says quietly.

"No? Then who does? Because apparently she's the only one with the courage to say what everyone at this table has been thinking for years."

"And what's that?"

"That the pact was never about protecting Irene. It was about protecting you from having to watch five of your closest allies want something you couldn't give them. Something that was never yours to give or withhold."

The room goes very still.

I've crossed a line. I know it as soon as the words leave my mouth. Dante and I have circled this truth for years — the unspoken tension beneath the brotherhood, the thing we never name because naming it would require action.

The pact isn't about her, I think. It never was. It's about us. About what we'd become if we let ourselves want her. About what we'd do to each other.

Dante steps closer. Close enough that I can see the pulse in his throat. Close enough that this could become something else very quickly.

"Choose your next words carefully," he says.

"I always do."

"Then hear mine." His voice drops to something barely above a whisper. "She is my sister. My blood. The only family I have left. I watched our father die in front of our house when I was eighteen years old. I held her while she screamed. I raised her. I gave up everything to keep her safe — including relationships, including peace, including any chance at a normal life. So don't you dare tell me the pact was selfish. Don't you dare."

For a moment, I see him. Not the Architect. Not the CEO. Not the man who built an empire from blood money and made it legitimate. I see the eighteen-year-old boy who lost his father and became a parent overnight.

I see the cost.

And I hate that seeing it doesn't change anything.

"I hear you," I say. "But Dante — she's not a child anymore. And the pact you made to protect her is now hurting her. She doesn't want to be protected. She wants to be seen. There's a difference."

He holds my gaze for a long moment. Then he steps back. The tension doesn't break — it redistributes, settling into the corners of the room like smoke.

"This conversation is over," he says.

"For now."

"Forever."

I almost smile. Almost. "That's not how this works. You know that."

He turns away. Walks to the window. Stares out at the city he's spent his life building and controlling.

I look around the table at the other four men. Ezra is watching Dante with an expression I can't read. Roman is studying his wine glass like it contains secrets. Lysander is — typically — refilling his glass, though his usual humor has gone quiet. And Kon...

Kon is staring at the doorway Irene walked through.

His face is doing something I've never seen from him. Not anger. Not aggression. Something softer. Something that looks almost like wonder.

Dangerous, I think again. But this time I'm not thinking about Irene.

I'm thinking about what she's going to do to us.

What she's already doing to us.

---

I find her on the rooftop.

Not immediately — I give it twenty minutes. Long enough for the dinner to dissolve into awkward excuses and departures. Long enough for Dante to retreat to his study and close the door with the particular finality of a man who doesn't want to be followed.

Long enough for me to decide that following his rules is no longer something I'm willing to do.

The rooftop terrace is Dante's private space — a garden in the sky, all structured greenery and expensive outdoor furniture and a view that makes the city look like something you could own. She's standing at the railing, looking out at the rain. It's lighter now, more mist than storm.

She doesn't turn when I approach. But her shoulders shift slightly. She knows I'm here.

"Mr. Blackwood," she says.

"Miss Morretti."

"Did my brother send you to apologize on his behalf?"

"Your brother doesn't know I'm here."

Now she turns. The wind catches her hair — dark strands across her face, quickly pushed back. Her eyes find mine with the same direct assessment from dinner.

"Then why are you here?"

I stop three feet away. Close enough to speak without raising my voice. Far enough to maintain the pretense of propriety.

"Because you asked a question at dinner that no one answered."

"I asked several."

"The important one. About what changed."

She tilts her head. Studying me the way she probably studies her patients — with clinical attention, looking for tells.

"Tell me," she says.

"You came back."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one that matters." I hold her gaze. "The pact worked when you were abstract. A name. A photograph. A memory of a fourteen-year-old girl who followed us around and asked too many questions. We could keep that promise because keeping it cost nothing."

I take one step closer. She doesn't retreat.

"You're not abstract anymore, Irene. You're here. In this city. In this building. At that table. And every man who sat across from you tonight is realizing the same thing I realized five years ago at your brother's gala."

"Which is?"

"That some promises were designed to be broken."

End of Chapter Three