Page 105 of The Maverick
We didn't touch.
We stood three feet apart and looked at each other for what felt like a long minute and was probably ten seconds. My father said the next thing, which was the thing he'd come to say, the thing he'd risked the doorstep for.
"Craine came to your hotel again."
"He did."
"We know what he said."
I tilted my head.
"How?"
"That's a longer conversation than tonight allows."
I didn't push. He'd known I wouldn't. He'd been counting on it.
"You're standing here," I said, "because of Craine."
"In part."
"In part."
He looked at me, steady.
"There's also—" he started.
"Don't."
He stopped.
I drew in one slow breath through my nose and let it out the same way and tried to sound like a man whose interior was not, at that moment, in three different rooms at once.
"You said your piece on Craine. Say the rest of it. Then, I'd like to be alone."
He nodded again. That same nod.
"Tommy. The others in this house. Lucas. Ryker. Atlas. The men you haven't met yet."
He held my eye.
"They're your brothers, son. Half-brothers. But brothers."
The room did its thing.
The thing was a small physical thing—a slight downward shift in my balance, a recalibration of where my weight was on the floor, the way a man's body responded to information that hadn't yet reached his face.
Brothers. Half-brothers. The men in the foyer. The man on the chaise with Lexi Montgomery in his lap. The architecture of Dominion Hall, with its corridor of vaguely related portraits and its viper calledfamilyand its butler who knew my measurements before I'd given them to him.
The line had been engineered.
I'd known it had been engineered.
I had not known, until this second, what the engineering had beenfor.
"What?"
It came out flat. I hadn't planned for it to come out flat. It had come out flat because the rest of the questions—how, when, who is their mother, who are their mothers, how many, how old, how long have they known and not told me—were going to need an interior I wasn't currently in possession of, and the body had decided to ration what it spent the words on while the mind caught up.
