CHAPTER HUNDRED & SEVENTY-THREE

CHAPTER HUNDRED & SEVENTY-THREE

KYLE

“So… um… you mean you had a brother named Lucian?”

Her voice barely made it past the silence between us, and yet it sliced through the air like glass.

Ashley sat across from me—rigid, motionless, a blanket draped over her lap like she’d forgotten it was even there. She wasn’t curled up in comfort anymore. She looked like she was bracing herself. Like she might break if I said the wrong thing.

God, I hated this.

I hated that look in her eyes.

I nodded, slow and stiff. “Yes. I did.”

Her face didn’t move for a moment. But her eyes flinched, just barely. And somehow, that tiny motion hit me harder than any punch ever could.

“You never told me,” she said.

Her voice cracked.

And something inside me did too.

We had known each other since high school. Grown through every version of ourselves—awkward teens, reckless twenty-somethings, lovers, husband and wife. She had seen more of me than anyone ever had. 

And somehow, despite all of that—she was still finding out who I really was.

“I know,” I said, voice hoarse.

She looked away, her jaw clenched tight like she was holding back words—no, holding back pain. Her fingers dug into the blanket.

“We dated for years,” she whispered. “Got married. And I never even knew you had a brother.”

I felt sick.

How do you explain something like that?

How do you look the love of your life in the eye and admit that there was a part of yourself you buried so deep, you forgot it even existed?

“I didn’t keep it from you because I didn’t trust you,” I said. “I didn’t tell you because I’d been forced to forget him since I was six.”

She turned back to me then, her expression unreadable—but her eyes? They were wreckage.

“That doesn’t make it better, Kyle. That makes it worse.”

I couldn’t breathe for a second.

“I know,” I said again. “Believe me, I know.”

My hands were braced against my knees, trying to hold myself steady, but nothing about me felt steady anymore.

“I was just a kid,” I began, voice low. “I remember standing at the bottom of the stairs. My mom was talking one second. The next, she was falling. And at the top…”

I swallowed hard. The memory still felt jagged inside me.

“Lucian was there. Just standing there. I didn’t understand what had happened. And then suddenly—he was gone. No explanation. No goodbye.”

Ashley stared at me, unmoving.

“My father told me Lucian had disappeared. That he’d done something unforgivable. That we didn’t speak about him ever again. And I… I believed him. Because I had to.”

I looked up at her again.

“Because believing Lucian was a monster was easier than questioning the man who raised me.”

Her lips parted, but she didn’t speak. She looked like she wanted to scream and cry and demand answers all at once. But instead, she whispered, “You said he was your best friend.”

A sharp, burning knot formed in my chest.

“He was,” I said. “He was my protector. My shadow. My brother.”

“And you just—what? Let him disappear?”

Her words weren’t angry.

They were devastated.

She wasn’t trying to hurt me. She was trying to understand how someone she loved—someone she gave everything to—could have kept something so massive buried for so long.

“I didn’t just let it happen,” I said quietly. “I was taught to bury it. Like we buried everything else in that house. My father made sure of it. Lucian was labeled a mistake. And in our family, we don’t fix mistakes. We erase them.”

Ashley shook her head slowly. 

“I became so good at pretending Lucian didn’t exist, that eventually it didn’t feel like lying anymore. It felt like surviving.”

Ashley looked down, her shoulders curling slightly inward. Her hands were clenched into fists now, white-knuckled in her lap.

“I protected something I didn’t even understand,” I said. “I fought for Blackwood like it was sacred. Like I was honoring something noble. But it wasn’t nobility. It was fear. Silence. Control.”

“And me?” Her voice cracked again. “Was I part of that silence too?”

I looked up sharply. “No. Never.”

Her lips trembled. “Then why do I feel like I don’t know you at all?”

Silence fell. And this time, I didn’t try to fill it. I didn’t reach for her, didn’t argue, didn’t ask her not to feel what she was feeling.

Because she deserved to feel all of it.

The betrayal. The confusion. The heartbreak.

“I know what this sounds like,” I said, finally. “Like I’ve hidden an entire life from you. But the truth is… I’ve been hiding it from myself longer.”

Ashley’s gaze slowly lifted back to mine.

There was a storm in her eyes. A storm that I had caused.

And still, she looked at me. Really looked.

Like she was searching for something beneath the wreckage.

Something worth saving.

I didn’t know if she’d find it.

But I sat there anyway—broken. Bare.

Hoping to God that she still could.

That somewhere beneath all the damage… she could still see me.

Not the name. Not the mask. Not the empire.

Just Kyle.

She didn’t speak right away.

Her eyes stayed on mine, flickering between disbelief and something else—something softer. Her jaw trembled just slightly, but she didn’t look away.

Then, finally, she exhaled.

“Thank you.”

I blinked. “What?”

Her voice wavered, but it didn’t falter. “Thank you for telling me. For not hiding this. For… trusting me with it.”

That one word—trusting—hit something deep inside me.

Ashley shook her head slowly, almost like she was still trying to understand it all herself. “You could’ve buried this forever. Pretended it never happened. God knows, that’s what your family taught you to do. But instead… you came here. You told me. And that takes more strength than most people could even begin to imagine.”

I swallowed hard, something thick and tight lodged in my throat.

“I didn’t want to lose you,” I said. “Not again. Not by hiding who I really am.”

Her eyes softened. “Kyle… this wasn’t your fault.”

“I let him disappear. I never believed him. I should have listened to him well he talked about Ezra..i should have...”

“You were six,” she said gently but firmly. “You were a child. You didn’t let anything happen. You were told how to remember things. You were taught what to believe. And you did what any child would do—you trusted the only parent you had left.”

I dropped my gaze, but she reached out—slow, steady—and placed her hand over mine.

Warm.

Real.

“You’re not your father,” she said. “You never have been.”

I shook my head. “But everything I built… all this time I thought I was honoring something. Preserving a legacy. And now I know that legacy was built on silence, and blood, and God knows what else. That house, that name… it was always a lie.”

“But you weren’t,” she said quickly. “That’s the difference. You didn’t continue what your father started. You corrected it. You took something broken and toxic and you made something new. Something better.”

I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. The weight of her words of her belief in me was heavier than the guilt I’d been drowning in.

She believe me.
Ashley believed.

Ashley’s voice dropped to a soft murmur. “You rebuilt Blackwood from the ground up. Not because of your father but in spite of him. You’ve spent your entire adult life trying to fix something you didn’t break. And you did.”

A faint breath escaped my chest.

“You brought life back into a company that was dead. You turned a name that was feared into one that mattered again. You did that. Not your father. Not the past.”

She squeezed my hand. “You survived your father, Kyle. And somehow, you came out the other side not cruel. Not manipulative. Not like him. You came out you.”

I felt something crack inside me.

Not in a painful way but in the kind of way that lets light in.

Ashley wasn’t just seeing me. She was reminding me.

Of who I am.

Of who I’ve always been, even when I couldn’t see it myself.

“I’ve spent so long pretending I had everything under control,” I whispered. “Like if I could just fix one more thing… if I could just keep moving… maybe I wouldn’t have to stop long enough to feel how hollow it all was.”

She leaned forward now, her voice low, close. “You don’t have to fix anything right now. You just have to be honest. With yourself. With me.”

I nodded slowly, eyes stinging. “I was terrified you’d look at me differently.”

“I do,” she said. And my heart nearly stopped.

But then she smiled, gently, painfully.

“I look at you and see someone who finally let himself be known. And there’s nothing braver than that.”

The breath I’d been holding left me all at once.

I hadn’t realized how much I needed to hear it.

How much I needed her.

Ashley leaned her head against mine, our foreheads barely touching.

“You’re not perfect,” she murmured. “But you’ve never needed to be.”.

Then for once, I wasn’t holding up the world.

I was just holding on.

To her.

To hope.

To the truth.

And I didn’t feel alone anymore.

Ashley pulled back just enough to look me in the eyes. There was a steadiness there now.

“And you’re mistaken,” she said quietly, her fingers still laced with mine. “You’re not going to see your father first.”

I blinked. “Ash—”

“No.” Her voice was calm, but final. “You’re going to Lucian.”

She stood slowly, 

“We’re going to Lucian.”

And just like that, the past no longer felt like a weight I had to carry alone.

It felt like something we were about to face tog