Chapter 3

Lena's POV

I stared at all three of them and tried to keep my face from giving anything away.

The first name was mine. Always had been. But the second one, Morrison, that wasn't anything I'd ever been called. Not once in my entire life.

And yet something about the way he'd said it, quiet and careful, like he already knew the answer and was just waiting for me to catch up, made my stomach tighten.

"I don't know what you mean," I said. "And why are you asking me that?"

My hands were shaking under the blanket. I kept them there.

"We want you to be calm," the warm one said. He had kind eyes. The kind that made you want to trust them, which was exactly why I didn't. "We're not here to frighten you. We found something out, and we came to confirm it."

"You want me to be calm." I looked at all three of them. "Around three men I've never seen in my life. In a hospital bed. With a drip in my hand."

"Fair point," he said quietly.

I kept shifting backward until the headboard stopped me. My eyes went to the door. The nurse call button was clipped to the rail on my right. The IV in my hand would slow me down if I needed to move fast.

I was mapping the room without meaning to.

The stone-faced one at the back had not moved since I opened my eyes. Hands in his pockets.

Expression completely flat. He had barely blinked.

He'd just stood there and watched while the other two talked, like he was waiting for something, waiting for me to stop panicking, maybe, or waiting for a moment that only he would recognize.

He was the one I couldn't read.

And the ones you can't read are always the most dangerous.

"Even if you say it a hundred times," I said, my voice coming out steadier than I felt, "I'm not going to be comfortable around strangers."

"That's fair too," the warm one said again.

"Then why don't you just tell me what you want and go."

The stone-faced one moved.

Just one step forward, but the other two went quiet immediately, like a signal had been given that only they understood. He came to the foot of my bed and stopped. He didn't sit. Didn't lean. Just stood there with his hands still in his pockets and looked at me.

When he spoke, his voice was low and even and completely unhurried.

"My name is Damien Morrison. I'm the eldest son of Jasper Morrison."

He turned his head slightly.

"This is Henry Morrison, my second brother." A small tilt toward the warm one. "And that is Abel Morrison. The youngest."

Each of them held my gaze when their name was said. Not aggressively. Just steadily, like they wanted me to see them clearly.

I looked at each face in turn.

Damien. Henry. Abel.

They looked like brothers. Same strong jaw, different energy entirely. Henry with his warm, open expression. Abel with something gentle and earnest around his eyes. And Damien, Damien who hadn't smiled once, whose face looked like it had forgotten how, whose stillness made the air around him feel different.

"We have been searching for someone for several years," Damien continued. "She disappeared when she was four years old. We never stopped looking."

I waited.

"Her name is Lena Morrison."

Silence.

"And we believe you are her." He said it without drama, without softness, without any of the theater I might have expected. Just plainly. "We believe you are our sister."

I almost laughed.

The sound that came out wasn't quite a laugh. It was something sharper than that.

"Three men in expensive suits show up at my hospital bed," I said, "and tell me I'm their long-lost sister." I looked at each of them. "Do I look like I was born yesterday?"

"Lena…."

"Don't call me that like you know me." My voice came out harder than I expected. "I don't know you. I don't know any of you. And I'm telling you right now, if you don't leave, I will scream kidnapper so loud every nurse on this floor will come running."

Nobody moved. Nobody flinched.

That bothered me more than if they had.

I remembered the orphanage. The long corridors, the shared rooms, the matron who called roll every morning. I had grown up there from as far back as my memory reached, no parents, no siblings, no story about where I came from or who I'd belonged to before the state.

I had no memory of being taken anywhere.

No memory of a family.

No memory of a life before those walls.

"I grew up in an orphanage," I said, flat and direct. "I have no family. I have never had family. So whatever you think you found, you've got the wrong person."

Abel stepped forward.

He moved differently from the other two, less guarded, like the space between him and other people didn't feel threatening to him the way it did to his brothers.

"Please," he said. "We're not asking you to believe us right now. We're asking you to look at what we brought." He held up a hand. "Just look. That's all."

I looked at the case in his other hand.

Every nerve in my body fired at once.

What was in it? What were they about to pull out? I pressed myself back against the headboard and watched his hand move to the latch and I told myself, scream if you need to, don't wait, scream first,

He brought out a photograph.

Just a photograph.

He held it toward me. When I didn't take it immediately, he set it on the edge of the bed within my reach and stepped back.

I looked at him. He nodded.

I picked it up.

Three boys and a girl. The girl was small, three, maybe four years old, standing in the middle with her arms looped around two of the boys. She was laughing. The full kind, with her whole face, eyes crinkled shut, head thrown back. Behind them was a wide, immaculate garden.

The boys were laughing too.

They looked like the three men standing in front of me.

And the girl….

I looked up. Back down.

She looked exactly like me. Not similar. Not a resemblance you could wave away. The shape of the face. The set of the eyes. The way her mouth curved when she laughed. I had seen that face in mirrors my whole life.

My chest tightened.

"Who is she?" My voice came out barely above a whisper.

"That's you, Lena," Henry said.

"No." I set the photograph down on the blanket. "It's not. It can't be. She just looks like me. People have look-alikes."

"You have a birthmark," Abel said. "Left side of your back."

The words landed and the room went very quiet

.

I didn't say anything.

I couldn't say anything.

Because he was right.

There was a birthmark on the left side of my back, low and irregular-shaped. I had looked at it in bathroom mirrors my whole life. I had thought about it exactly zero times because there was no reason to think about it.

Nobody should have known that.

Nobody who had never met me, never seen me undressed, never had any access to my medical records, nobody should have known that.

"How do you know that?" My voice came out in a whisper.

"Because you are our sister," all three of them said.

Together.

The synchronicity of it hit me somewhere I wasn't prepared for. I looked from face to face and they were all looking back at me with the same expression, not triumphant, not demanding. Just certain. The quiet certainty of people who had been carrying a truth for a very long time and had finally found somewhere to put it down.

"It could still be a coincidence," I said. My voice wasn't steady anymore. "Birthmarks aren't exactly rare."

"We knew you'd say that," Henry said gently. He reached into the case. "So we came prepared."

He brought out three documents and held them toward me.

I took them with hands that were not steady.

DNA results.

Three separate tests. Names, percentages, laboratory stamps, dates. I read through the first one. Then the second. Then the third.

The numbers didn't lie.

I set them down on the blanket beside the photograph and stared at the wall above Damien's head and tried to hold myself together.

I had spent my whole life in that orphanage telling myself it was fine. Plenty of people grew up without families. The absence of parents didn't have to mean anything. I was fine. I was always fine.

"Our parents died still looking for you."

Damien's voice. Quiet. No softness in it, but no coldness either. Just the weight of something that had been carried a long time.

"They never stopped. Not once. When they passed, we made a promise to them that we would find you." He paused. "We've been looking ever since we were old enough to do it ourselves."

That was the thing that cracked me open.

Not the photograph. Not the DNA. Not even the birthmark.

The image of two people I had never known, spending whatever years they had looking for a daughter they couldn't find. Dying without finding her. Making their sons promise to keep going.

I pressed my lips together hard.

It didn't work.

The tears came fast and they didn't stop and then Abel was beside me and his arms were around me and Henry was there too and even Damien, even Damien put one hand on my shoulder, just briefly, just for a second, and that second said more than anything he had put into words.

"So you're really my brothers?" My voice was destroyed. Barely recognizable.

"Yes," they said.

I cried harder.

Relief and grief and fury and something I didn't have a name for all at once, the kind of crying that comes from somewhere deep and long-sealed and long overdue.

When it finally slowed, Henry pulled back and looked at me. His jaw was set. His eyes were darker than they had been ten minutes ago.

"What happened to you, Lena?" he said. "How did you end up here? Alone and pregnant?"

I exhaled slowly.

Looked down at the blanket.

I had said it out loud once already, to myself in the dark. I had rehearsed the shape of the words. But saying it to them, saying it to people who were looking at me like they actually cared what the answer was, was different.

"My husband," I started. Stopped. Started again. "He threw me out. Him, his mother, and the woman he was with. They…." My throat closed. I pushed through it. "They packed my things while I was out. Put my boxes in the middle of the sitting room. His mother slapped me. He dragged me to the door and put me out in the rain."

The temperature in the room changed.

I felt it.

Henry's jaw tightened so hard I could see the muscle jump. Abel looked away and when he looked back his expression was completely different. And Damien, Damien went very, very still. The kind of still that isn't calm. The kind that comes just before a decision.

"His name," Damien said.

One tone. No rise or fall.

"Aiden," I said. "Aiden Norman."

The three of them looked at each other.

Just for a second. A single shared glance that passed between them and closed before I could decode it.

Then they all looked back at me.

And something had shifted.

"You're coming with us," Henry said. His voice had changed, the warmth was still there but something had moved under it. Something harder. "Pack your things." He stopped. Looked around the room.

"Where are your things?"

I looked around too.

My suitcases were gone.

The space beside the bed where I'd imagined them sitting was empty. Just floor.

"Stolen," I said. "While I was unconscious, I think."

Henry's expression darkened.

Abel muttered something under his breath.

"It doesn't matter," Damien said. His eyes were still on me, steady and certain. "We'll get everything you need." A pause. "You're a Morrison."

He said it like it settled something.

Like it was the end of one thing and the beginning of another.

And standing there in that hospital bed, surrounded by three brothers I hadn't known existed twenty-four hours ago, with nothing left to my name but a pregnancy result and the clothes on my back, I felt, for the first time in longer than I could remember, like maybe it was.

"What's his name again?" Abel said quietly.

I looked at him.

"Aiden Norman," I repeated.

Abel nodded slowly.

He didn't say anything else.

But the look that passed between him and Henry, and the look Henry gave Damien, told me everything I needed to know.

Aiden Norman had no idea what was coming.