Chapter 6 - Resurrection
The ballroom, now half-destroyed, felt like a graveyard. Declan lowered his weapon slowly, his gaze locked onto the man he had mourned for four long years. Aaron looked older, harder, his skin weathered by years in hiding, but the unmistakable spark of defiance remained burning in his eyes.
"You're dead," Declan breathed, the words escaping his lips like a forgotten prayer. "We buried an unrecognizable body. Graham brought the dental records."
Aaron cast a cold, venomous look toward Graham, who was currently pinned to the floor by an elite team of loyal Shaw enforcers who had just flooded the room.
"Graham is a master forger," Aaron said, walking slowly into the center of the study. He knelt down beside Mia and gently stroked little Penny's hair. The little girl instantly threw her arms around his neck, sobbing softly. "He arranged a dead body from the morgue, dental-swapped the records using a corrupted coroner, and threatened to kill Mia and Penny if I ever came back to the city."
Declan looked at Graham, whose face had turned the color of wet chalk. "You played us both."
"I played the whole damn family," Graham snarled, spitting blood onto the rug as two guards hauled him to his feet. "You were both so busy playing mob royalty that you didn't see the throne was already mine."
"Take him down to the subterranean vault," Declan commanded, his voice vibrating with a terrifying, suppressed fury. "Lock him in the titanium cell, turn off the heat, and leave him in the dark. Let him contemplate what it means to betray a Shaw."
As Graham was dragged screaming down the corridor, the heavy silence of the room returned, broken only by Penny's soft sniffles as she buried her face in Aaron's shoulder.
Declan stood frozen, looking at his brother, the woman he had misjudged, and the child who had accidentally called him 'Papa' just hours before. The icy wall around his heart—built over a decade of suspicion and sorrow—cracked wide open.
"Why didn't you contact me, Aaron?" Declan asked, his voice cracking slightly. "You knew I would have torn the world apart to protect you."
May you like
"Because Graham had a sniper trained on Mia's apartment every single day for four years," Aaron said, looking up at his older brother with raw, unfiltered pain. "If I reached out to you, you would have launched a full-scale war, and Graham would have executed my family before you even reached the doorstep. I had to wait. I had to build a counter-network from the shadows."
Declan walked forward, knelt beside his brother, and for the first time in ten years, he reached out and pulled both Aaron and little Penny into a tight, fierce embrace.
