Her answer cracks something open in me—anger, yes, but also the stubborn, desperate hope that she’s come back on purpose,not by accident. She chose her timing. She chose her partners. And now that she’s here, standing in the doorway of my hidden room with her smirk like a promise, all my old certainties collapse into one clean, terrible thing—we have to be worthy of her trust.
She clears her throat, a small, controlled sound that somehow cuts through the static in the room. Her eyes skim between the three of us, landing on each face long enough to catalog the shock, the guilt, the hope, the ugly pieces we all carry. When she finally speaks, her voice is steady—no tremor, no pleading—just hard truth wrapped in calm. “I don’t want your pity,” she says. “I want you to help me take their entire empire down. Make them suffer for what they did to us.” She leans forward a beat, the light catching the split in her lip, and then her gaze finds mine, sharp and unapologetic. “And when I say ‘us,’ I mean all of us. They stole from every one of us. Each of us deserves to watch them burn.”
The room goes quieter than I thought possible. My chest tightens until I can hardly breathe. Relief—real, stupid relief—wants to rise and choke out everything else, but it’s tangled with the memory of her face in that basement and the way my hands shook and did what they did. Before I can even form a shape to protest, she continues, softening in a way that makes my lungs ache.
“I don’t hold a grudge,” she confesses. “I get why you did what you did.” For a sliver of a second, she smiles, not warm, but amused—like somebody rolling their eyes at a minor annoyance. “Let’s be honest: you hit me twice. That’s not the part of this that broke me.”
My growl rips out before I can stop it. “Bullshit.” The word is a raw thing. “I split your lip. I—” My throat closes. The memory of the sickening thud, the sight of blood—fuck—burns through me. I can’t let that slide.
She only shakes her head, the motion almost pitying. “In the end, it doesn’t matter,” she says, and the words land like a challenge and a blessing at once. “I forgive you. You didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know if I could trust you yet. I didn’t know about… Reign.” Her voice thins, the admission raw as an open wound.
When she says our sister’s name, the air in the room shifts. Confusion flickers across Em’s face, then mine; it’s Ronan who moves first—just a whisper at first, a rasp low enough I almost don’t hear it. “Dad told us she killed herself,” he says, voice flat, the old hurt shuddering through him. “Left a note. It was the weekend after the fire.” His hands ball into fists so tight his knuckles go white.
The way she looks at him—no accusation, just the patient cruelty of someone who’s been cataloging lies for months—doesn’t make it easier. “They silenced her,” she says, each word slow, deliberate. “Just like they tried to silence me.” Her eyes narrow for a heartbeat, hot. “But she didn’t die by her own hand. They did this to her.”
The room rocks. It’s like falling through a floorboard we didn’t even know was there. I feel every stupid moment stacked against that truth: the way I swallowed our fathers’ words because I wanted something simple to hold on to; the way I let their explanations settle into my bones. Rage coils cold and tight throughme, but it isn’t clean or focused. It’s a furious, aching force that wants to tear down the systems that allowed this to happen.
Emerson steps forward, jaw working, eyes wet but furious. “They lied to us,” he says, the statement small and enormous at once. “They lied to keep us docile.” He looks at Berkley—at her forgiveness—and his face breaks in a way that makes my chest split open. He swallows like he’s tasting iron, then the dam breaks—half a sob, half a laugh—and the apology pours out of him raw and urgent. “You didn’t have to forgive us,” he says, and he looks at Berkley like he’s seeing her for the first time, really seeing her. “But thank you.Fuck—thank you for saving Kimber.” The words land heavy in the room, and I feel it like a physical shove—relief, gratitude, and a shame so sharp it makes my teeth ache.
Berkley’s face is unreadable for a beat, then softens. She tells him quietly that she didn’t work it out until the last minute—didn’t realize the papers would be signed so quickly or she’d have ripped Kimber out of there ages ago. She didn’t know how stacked Bryce’s little chessboard was, how quickly they’d try to move. Hearing it, Em’s shoulders slump like someone gave him permission to fold, and he buries his face in his hands for a long, ugly second. We all did this in different rooms—carrying pieces of the puzzle and never laying them together. We didn’t compare notes properly, so missed things. Important things.
That admission—simple, brutal—opens a wound and then presses salt into it. The scattered screen of truth we’ve been living on could’ve been whole if we’d just talked more, looked closer, trusted sooner. Emerson lifts his head slowly, eyes rimmed, voicethin when he says, “We let them write the story for us. We believed the chapters they handed us and never checked the margins.” Then he looks straight at Berkley, and there it is—some incandescent blend of thankfulness and apology. “You getting Kimber out… you saved her. From them. From Bryce.” His voice falters, the rest catching in his throat—because there aren’t words big enough to express his gratitude.
Before the grief can swallow us, Ronan cuts across the room like a blade. He’s been quiet until now, letting us unravel, but now he slides in sharp and determined. “Speaking of notes,” he says, clipped and controlled, “we need to lay it all out. Right now.” The tone leaves no room to dodge. It’s the Ronan I know—when he locks in, the chaos falls into line around him. He jerks toward the coffee table, sweeping pens and a grocery pad with a speed that makes my hands want to move without asking. We all gather around like conspirators on a war map.
We dig in while the kitchen still smells like roasting chicken and the rice has swollen soft with broth. For a beat we eat in near-silence—metal spoons clinking, the low roar of the oven cooling—each of us letting the food anchor whatever ragged piece of ourselves still wants to be human. Ronan moves like a shadow between us, grabbing a pan, scooping a generous portion and crossing the room in long, easy strides.
He kneels beside Berkley without ceremony and presses a plate into her hands. “You don’t have to serve yourself, Pixie,” he says, voice flat with a grin that’s half relief and half feral pride.
She accepts it without fanfare, tucking her knees under herself on the couch, the plate warm in her lap. The sight of them—Ronan’s guard down enough to do something small, caring—scabs an unfamiliar ache in my chest.
The conversation is halting at first—staccato bursts that feel like we’re fishing for the right strand of truth—but once one detail drops, the rest tumbles after it. Trent’s name keeps cutting across the room like a blade. It keeps spiking through our conversation until his role in the hit on Ronan snaps into place with a clarity that tastes like copper. Berkley says it out loud—what none of us have had the courage to name. They were going to trade Kimber for the hit on Ronan.
The truth doesn’t announce itself. It assembles. Dates stack beside names. Shell companies bleed into one another. Money moves where it shouldn’t, vanishing just long enough to resurface clean. Kimber wasn’t an outlier—she was leverage. Currency traded the same way as the drugs funneled through ports we were warned never to question, the same way men disappeared when they stopped being useful. Trading her for the hit on Ronan wasn’t a gamble; it was standard practice. This wasn’t protection or power earned. It was an empire engineered on silence, cruelty, and the certainty that broken people don’t get believed.
Ronan writes like he’s building a kill list—names, dates, deliveries, fires, payouts—lines cutting across the page until the paper becomes a web of cause and consequence. Berk fills in what we missed without hesitation: a mismatched accent, a delivery window that didn’t align, a face that lingered where it shouldn’thave. She’s been mapping this in the dark while we were still pretending not to see it. The scope is sickening, but it’s also clarifying. When we finally lean back, the room hums with a hard, brutal focus. This isn’t chaos anymore—it’s intelligence. A ledger. A map. And for the first time, we’re not reacting. We’re aligned, armed with the truth, and ready to turn their own machinery into the weapon that takes them down.
Chapter Ten
Berkley
They all stop and turn toward me like I’m the last page in a book they’ve been dying to read. I’ve spilled everything—the plans, the holes in the stories, the men’s faces, the shipments, the little lies that stitched the big ones together. I lay it out so plainly they can’t possibly miss it. But my head is a bruise. The last few weeks have gnawed at me until the edges of me are raw and frayed, and I am so close to breaking that I can taste it on the back of my tongue. I don’t know which way I’ll crack. Maybe I will unleash a fury that chews through everything in sight. Maybe I will dissolve into sobs so ugly and loud they’ll have to hold me upright. The not-knowing makes my stomach a tight fist.
My lower lip trembles, and I press my tongue to it because the motion steadies me in the smallest, most animal way. The room narrows to my pulse and the sound of their voices as they make promises one by one. Emerson’s voice is steady as he pledges, Rowan’s words tremble with apology and purpose, and Ronan’s vow is rough and simple. I feel each promise like a weight settling onto my ribs. It’s heavy, and it’s real. Deep down, I trust them with my life. They love me the way I love them. We were all robbed by the same monsters, not by each other. That truth lands like an anchor and, impossibly, I feel something like belonging take root again. Right here. Right now. With them.
Ronan watches me wrestling with whatever’s inside and does that thing he always does when he can’t stand the fracture in someone he loves. He stretches, long and languid, like a cat that’s finally found a patch of sun. Then his grin shifts, half relief and half that dangerous mischief that makes my pulse stutter. “It’s been a long night,” he says, and the words are almost teasing. He leans forward, voice softened to something private and sharp, “So what do you think, baby girl, you ready for bed?”
I nod because the simplicity of the answer feels safer than thinking. He grunts like that’s approval and then he watches me take a step toward my hole in the wall like it’s some small private kingdom I’m about to retreat to.
The warmth in his eyes curdles into something possessive, and his words come low and certain. “Don’t think so, love. From today, you’re sleeping in one of our beds. No more running. No more hiding. You’re mine, ours, and we’re yours.” His voice is the kind that stakes a claim and stitches it into the air. He says the practical things too, the part he knows I’ll need to hear. “We’ve all got shit to sort out. We will. But you won’t be alone again. Not while the world’s burning.”
I open my mouth to argue, having them ready, rehearsed and sharp. I could tell him I’ll manage, that solitude keeps me safe. But his glare cleaves the words from my throat before they form.
“No arguments, Pix,” he says, and the softness at the end of the nickname is almost unbearable. “For me. Please.” It’s not a demand—it’s a plea knotted with danger and love. It melts me quicker than any logic ever could, and before I know it my head dipsand I’m nodding. My resistance, whatever little thread of it remained, snaps.
He doesn’t bother making it pretty for anyone. He spins around and cocks a crooked grin that says keep your hands off and good luck. “Sucks to be you fuckers,” he tells Rowan and Emerson and twiddles his fingers at them like a showman shepherding his lover to bed. His hand lands on my hip, firm and familiar, and he steers me down the hall. The pat he gives my ass is gentle but possessive, and it sends a ridiculous heat through me that twists my insides into something soft and dangerous all at once.
I move because I want to, because the safety sliding along his side is something I’ve starved for, and also because part of me still wants to hide. Behind us, Emerson and Rowan trade a look that is fuller than apology and quieter than a vow. It says we’ll make this right. The kitchen clock ticks down, the food cooling in its pot, the ordinary domestic noise a ridiculous counterpoint to the day’s violence and the plan we’re building. It comforts me more than it should.