All Chapters of The Captain I Blame For My Brother’s death, Hides his Jersey: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

CHAPTER 50I stared at the faded photograph for a long, disoriented moment, my brain refusing at first to make sense of what I was looking at. Cam had brought it back along with the rest of the intercepted crates sometime past midnight, and Tiago had barely made it through the door before pulling me aside, his expression telling me this wasn't something that could wait until morning. The young woman in the picture wasn't my sister. I didn't have a sister. But the resemblance was close enough to be unmistakable, close enough that my mind immediately jumped somewhere else entirely, somewhere I hadn't let it go in years.My mother.I had almost no clear memories of her, just the scattered, unreliable kind that come from being very young when someone dies, a handful of old photographs kept in a box I hadn't opened in years, sitting somewhere in the back of a closet in my father's house, gathering dust alongside everything else nobody in my family liked to talk about.I turned the photogra

CHAPTER 52I sat with the new shape of the story long after the call with Beatriz ended, feeling five years of certainty about Henrique's motives shift beneath me again, this time not toward sympathy for him but toward a far more complicated, personal explanation for his cruelty. Everything I'd assumed about this war, about the man who'd been trying to kill me since before I understood there was even a war to fight, suddenly looked different, the edges of the story softening into something far messier than the clean political conflict I'd trained myself to see. If Henrique had once loved my mother and lost her, and if that loss somehow connected to Mateo's death and the current war, then everything I'd believed about pack politics and territorial ambition might only be the surface of a much older, more personal grievance.I sat at the kitchen table long after the call ended, turning the old photograph over and over in my hands, studying my mother's young, unfamiliar face for some clue

Henrique's voice had lost every trace of the cold authority I'd braced myself for, and that, more than anything else, terrified me. I'd prepared for cruelty. I'd prepared for threats dressed up as pleasantries, the kind of careful menace he'd always wielded so effortlessly. I had not prepared for him to sound, suddenly, like a man about to tell me something he'd never said out loud to another living soul."I have never spoken of this to anyone," he said. "Not to Beatriz. Not to any council member, in all the years I have sat among them. I find it strange that the first time I say it aloud, it will be to you.""Then say it," I told him, my voice steadier than I felt. "I didn't agree to this call for you to circle the subject all night."He almost laughed at that, a small, surprised sound. "You have her directness too, it seems. I should have expected that.""I'll take that as a compliment, since I'm fairly sure you didn't mean it as one, coming from you.""I meant it entirely as one,"

CHAPTER 56TIAGO-I didn't try to fix what couldn't be fixed tonight. I simply stayed close, bringing Camila tea she didn't drink, sitting with her in a silence that felt different from every other silence we'd shared this summer, heavier, stranger, carrying a grief that had nothing to do with the war and everything to do with a lifetime of assumptions about her own family quietly, completely unraveling. She sat curled into the corner of the couch, staring at nothing, and I resisted every urge to fill the silence with reassurances I wasn't certain I could honestly offer."You don't have to talk about it tonight," I told her eventually, setting the untouched tea on the table beside her. "You don't have to do anything tonight except exist through it."She nodded, barely, and leaned her head against my shoulder, and we stayed like that for a long time, the farmhouse quiet around us in a way that felt fragile rather than peaceful. At some point Cam wandered through with a blanket he depos

CHAPTER 58The result was unambiguous. Henrique Cabral was, beyond any reasonable scientific doubt, my biological father. I sat with the word confirmed glowing on my phone screen for a long, suspended moment, feeling five years of grief over one family tragedy suddenly tangled up with an entirely new, equally complicated family truth I never asked for and wasn't sure I wanted. The screen blurred slightly as my eyes filled, though I couldn't say, even to myself, whether the tears were grief or relief or something stranger that didn't have a clean name yet.The kitchen around me seemed to hold its breath, Tiago and Cam both watching me with identical expressions of careful, searching concern, waiting to see which direction I was about to tip. I became aware, distantly, that I'd been staring at the same word on my screen for nearly a full minute without saying anything at all, the silence stretching long enough that it had apparently started to worry both of them.Tiago's hand found mine