The silence that followed Victor's face gone from the screen was more deafening than any explosion. Adriana gasped bright and shallow, every intake stuttering on the fragments of memory that jabbed her chest.
Victor Alvarez.
Her father's second in command.
The man who had knelt beside her as the casket lowered into the earth, who had sworn in a quivering whisper: I will protect what he left behind.
That promise was a deceit.
Adriana stared at the black screen until her face blurred through tears she wouldn't allow herself to cry. Anger, hurt, betrayal each competed to rise to the forefront, pushing against her insides until she could barely gasp.
"I don't understand," she panted, though there was a sharpness to her tone. "How did he do this? Why?"
Damian stood on the other side of the room, shadows gathering around his rigid form. He had not budged since the discovery, had not uttered a single word beyond that one: Lucian. His silence weighed more than answers.
Adriana rose from her seat, fists trembling at her sides. "You knew. Didn't you? You suspected him every time."
His jaw tightened. "I had doubts."
"Doubts?" She laughed, a bitter sound. "And you thought best to keep them from me? Let me grieve a man betraying me?"
He spun then, his eyes meeting hers. His were fire and tempest, but beneath the anger simmered guilt. "I had no proof. And proof is more valuable than suspicion in this world. You know that."
Adriana stepped forward, anger giving her power. "What I need to know, Damian, is the truth. Not half of it, not what you think I can handle. If you wish me to stand with you, then stop shielding me like a child. I need to see the whole of it, even if it destroys me."
Her words cut deep; she sees the flicker in his eyes, the flinch he tries to conceal.
But before he can answer, her chest tightens at Victor's voice his strong baritone pledging loyalty, swearing loyalty to her father and herself. All tainted now.
Victor toasted me on the eve of my dad's death," she whispered, lost in thought. "He told me the Veyra name would never disappear as long as he was alive. I believed him. I trusted him." Her lips trembled, but she pressed them into a firm line. "Now I want answers. From him. Nobody else.".
Damian's expression grew cold. "That's what he's after, Adriana. To get you out of here. To get you careless."
Her jaw stiffened. "Then let him. Because I won't leave until I know why he betrayed us."
Finally, after Adriana's fury had burned itself into stark quiet, Damian retreated to his study. The desk lamp's warm light illuminated the room, but nothing warmed him. He slumped forward over blueprints for tunnel escapes, surveillance files, coded papers anything to take his mind off the name still echoing in his head.
Lucian Hale.
He hadn't uttered it aloud in years. He'd buried it like a thing, deep down between strata of ruthlessness and steel. But seeing that symbol on the crate behind Victor ripped open a wound he'd thought long healed.
Lucian wasn't just family. He was brotherhood, forged in fire and blood. As boys, they had learned the business together Damian the strategist, Lucian the enforcer. Together they had been unstoppable, until ambition split them apart.
Damian's mind replayed the last night they spoke Lucian's face half-hidden in the glow of Havana streetlamps, eyes burning with betrayal. "You chose power over blood. You'll regret it."
And now, all these years later, the guilt had come.
He clenched both fists on the table, knuckles white. Adriana didn't see how far. She thought Victor's treachery was the worst pain. She hadn't been given a glimpse of the kind of war Lucian was capable of waging.
And she didn't know not yet that Damian was most afraid of one thing: that Lucian would employ her as the knife to prick him.
Adriana found him thus, hunched over the desk like a silhouette carved of stone. She stood in the doorway, regarding him. For a moment, she almost relented. He wasn't so much the unapproachable king but a man burdened by too many ghosts.
But her rage hadn't faded.
"Are you going to tell me who he is?" she snapped across the room with her voice like a lash.
Damian lifted his head. His gaze met hers, and for the first time, the fire there wasn't directed outward it flared inward, a self-inflicted wound.
"My cousin Lucian Hale," he said slowly, deliberately, as if every word was bound to him with shackles. "My brother, in all but blood. And the man I betrayed to take my place."
Adriana blinked. The revelation struck her harder than she expected. "You. betrayed him?"
His lips were pressed into a thin line. "I did what had to be done. But men like Lucian do not forgive. They wait for the perfect moment to strike."
Adriana came into the room, fury shattering beneath the weight of seething fear. "And now he's playing Victor."
Damian nodded. "Victor is a piece. Lucian is the hand that plays the pieces."
Her chest tightened. Betrayal smarted more now, intertwined with Damian's revelation. All of it felt like quicksand her past, his past, it all sinking down.
She forced palms against the desk and leaned forward. "Then tell me this: when it is time, are you fighting for us. or merely to settle your own score with him?"
The question hung heavy, dangerous. Damian looked at her, his eyes sweeping across her face, his silence stretching out until her heartbeat pounded in her ears.
Finally, his voice broke the air, low and rough. "I'm fighting because if Lucian wins, I lose you. And that… I will never allow."
Her breath caught. For a moment, the world narrowed to the two of them the storm outside, the betrayals, the war to come all dissolved in the intensity of his gaze.
A beep broke the moment, though.
They both stepped toward the laptop as a new message appeared on the screen. It was not Victor's face. Only words, white on black.
You can't escape blood.
And she can't stay hidden behind you indefinitely.
Adriana's mouth opened in horror. Damian's hands were clenched until his veins were visible.
The signature below the words was a discreet one. A single letter.
L.