Lahat ng Kabanata ng My Brother's Best Friend's Secret Baby: Kabanata 191 - Kabanata 200

Aiden's POV I was alive. That wasn't a given. There had been a period of several days when the question had genuinely been open, when the answer wasn't certain, and I'd operated according to the particular mode extreme situations demanded. Don't think about the question at all. Focus entirely on the next thing. Then the thing after that. And eventually, the thing after that, which was getting out. I'm not going to go into what happened. Some things belong only to the people who lived through them, to the men who made it out alongside me, and to the families of those who didn't. What I can say is that the mission went wrong in ways I hadn't anticipated, that the preparations I'd made had been enough, that we got out using everything we had, and that I would carry what happened there for the rest of my life. The same way I carried other things. Without grace, but with persistence. When I finally reached a secure communications line, it was late afternoon, in a p

Rosalie's POV The call came on a Thursday morning at 9:42. I know the time because I looked at the clock on the stove when the phone rang, the way I'd been looking at clocks since February, marking things. Unknown number. Not the secure contact number. Another one. "Ms. Russo." A voice I didn't recognize. Measured. Professional. "I'm Lieutenant Caldwell. I'm calling on behalf of Captain King's unit. You're designated as next of kin in his legal documents in case of emergency." My hand tightened around the phone. "That's me." "I'm calling to inform you that Captain King is alive and in stable condition. He was injured during the operation and is currently receiving medical treatment at a secure location. He is expected to be repatriated. The timeline is classified, but I can tell you that it is imminent." The kitchen was very quiet. "Stable condition," I repeated. "Yes, ma'am. He is injured but not critically. We expect him to make a full recovery." "He's

Rosalie's POV Knowing he was alive and waiting for him to walk through a door were two completely different things. I understood that by the second day after the call. The relief of knowing he was alive had settled into something more precise, that particular tension of something imminent that had not yet become now. He was somewhere. He was making his way through the procedures that existed between a classified operation and a front door. Debriefings, medical evaluations, the military's administrative machinery moving at its own pace, whatever might be happening on the other side of it. I focused on what was in front of me. The gallery had received three new inquiries that week. My agent was handling them, and she needed me to make decisions about two pieces I hadn't decided on yet. I made the decisions. I answered the emails. I showed up Tuesday morning, unlocked the doors, and spoke to the two people who had come in and were standing in front of a painting they'd come ba

I looked at the scars. 'Your father doesn't live inside you.' A man who hurt people. I had been hurt. I'd done difficult things under difficult circumstances, and I'd come home, just as I'd said I'd try to do, and none of these new scars were the mark of a man who had become his father. I looked at my face in the mirror afterward. The same face. Undeniably older than the one that had looked back at me in February. Thinner. Something in the eyes was different, even though I couldn't name it precisely. Looking at it for another moment, the word that seemed right was clarity. Not the forced clarity of someone who had decided to be different. The natural clarity of someone who had been through something and come out the other side knowing what mattered. Alessandro. Lucy. Rosie. Those three, in that order, were what mattered, and they had eleven weeks and seven years and the woman I'd been in love with since I was twenty-six, and they were waiting, and I was standing in my

Alessandro looked down at him. The frown was there, complete and unmistakable. Aiden's face was doing things I'd never seen it do before. Not the composed version, not the controlled version, not the one with that careful layer of restraint over everything else. Nothing controlled. Nothing restrained. His face was completely open, the way I'd seen it open three or four times over the months, that flash of genuine feeling before the layer returned, except the layer wasn't coming back. This was simply his face. "Alessandro," he said softly to the baby. Alessandro continued staring down at him with a frown. "He does that to everyone," I said. "It's not personal." Something crossed his expression. Something that almost looked like a smile, and was also something larger than a smile. "I know," he said. "He's mine." Lucy shifted back a little to look at her father's face. "He frowns exactly like you," she said. "I told Mom that on the first day." "What did she say?"