Chapter 335 I didn’t know it was you
Aria’s POV
It was Julian who brought me the name.
He came in person, three days later, and I knew from his face before he said a word that he’d found something. He set a tablet down in front of me and pulled up a still image—grainy, taken from a distance, a black SUV tucked in the shade of a warehouse overhang on the far side of the industrial district.
And a man standing beside it. Light brown hair, the set of his shoulders unmistakable even at that resolution.
"The contract routed through four cutouts before it reached the shooters," Julian said. "It took us the better part of a week to unwind it. But it came from Silver Creek. It came from him."
Ethan.
I stared at the image until the edges of it burned into my eyes.
I don’t know what I’d expected to feel. Rage, maybe. What I actually felt was something quieter and far more dangerous—a kind of clarity, cold and total, like the moment the anesthetic wears off and you finally feel the whole shape of the wound.
I’d given that man two years. I’d let his family grind me down and I’d told myself he was protecting me. I’d stood in his house wearing a title that was never real, playing shield for his mistress and free labor for his sinking pack, and I’d believed—*believed*—that there was something worth all of it underneath.
And now he’d put a bomb on a bus and tried to kill the one person who’d ever seen me clearly.
"I want him charged," I said. My voice was perfectly level. "Not handled quietly. Not settled between packs. I want it done through the courts, in the open, on record, where his mother and his father and his precious Clara have to sit and watch. Every law he broke, I want it used against him. All of it."
Julian nodded slowly. "The Crown will back that. With the King missing and the evidence this clean, no council in the territory will move to protect Silver Creek." He paused, and something shifted in his face—something that had nothing to do with the case at all.
"There’s one more thing." He set the tablet aside, and for the first time since he’d walked in, he looked like he didn’t know where to put his hands. "And I’ve been trying to work out how to say it since before I got in the car."
"Just say it."
"You and I share blood. We’re—we’re brother and sister." He drew a breath.
The words landed somewhere in the room and just hung there.
I heard them. I understood each one. I’d spent my whole childhood in that orphanage building a mother out of nothing but a name and a wound, and here was a piece of her, sitting across from me with grief on his face, offering me a family I’d stopped hoping for a long time ago.
And I felt almost nothing.
Not because it didn’t matter. It mattered. Somewhere far down, under the ice, it mattered more than I could afford to look at right now. But there was only room in me for one thing, and that thing was Damian, gone three days into smoke, and the child neither of us had known about growing quietly under my ribs.
"Okay," I said.
Julian flinched, just slightly. "Okay?"
"I heard you." I met his eyes, and I made myself soften them, because he hadn’t done anything wrong and he deserved better than what I had to give. "I did. And I think there’s a version of me that’s going to fall apart about this in a good way, later, when I’m allowed to. But that version doesn’t exist yet. Right now there’s only the one who has to find him." I swallowed. "I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you were hoping to hear."
Something eased in him and hardened at the same time. He nodded once.
"Then let me help you find him," he said. "As your brother, or as the VP of Sentinel Energy, or as whatever you need me to be this week. Doesn’t matter to me."
I looked at him for a long moment. Then I nodded back.
"Set up the meeting with Ethan," I said. "There are a few things I’ve been waiting a very long time to say to his face. I’d hate for him to go to prison before he hears them."
---
The holding facility smelled like industrial cleaner and cold concrete, and they made me sign three forms and surrender my phone before they let me through the last door.
Ethan was already seated when I came in. Two years I’d known that man, and I’d never once seen him look small. He’d always filled a room, all that easy Alpha confidence, that gentle smile he handed out like it cost him nothing. Now he sat hunched under the fluorescent lights with three days of stubble on his jaw and his hands cuffed to a bar bolted to the table, and he looked exactly like what he was.
A man who’d run out of moves.
I sat down across from him and folded my hands on the table and said nothing.