Page 30 of Man of Lies (Vendetta Kings #2)

Chapter Thirty

MASON

Something was brushing through my hair, light and slow, easy to ignore.

I surfaced hard from sleep, that kind of heavy, body-deep exhaustion where the world didn’t come back all at once. For a second, reality seemed warped, too cold and bright for my watering eyes.

My back screamed first, one shoulder locked from hours spent hunched over, head resting on my folded arms. My right leg was pins and needles, and my jaw ached from the crease of the vinyl mattress digging into it for hours. The air smelled like floor polish, alcohol wipes, and antiseptic.

Fingers threaded through my hair—firmer this time. Impatient and familiar.

I jerked upright with a sharp breath, every vertebra in my spine cracking a protest as I came upright. The world came back in pieces: beige curtains, blue linoleum, the low beep of a machine keeping the rhythm of Silas’s heartbeat.

Silas.

Hope flared behind my ribs, and my eyes snapped toward the man in the bed. But he hadn’t moved. Still out cold, half-swallowed by the tangle of wires and tubes, bruises blooming down the side of his chest in a mess that was painful to even look at.

He couldn’t have touched me. But someone had.

I cranked my head around, rubbed my blurry eyes and snatched up my eyeglasses, and that was when I saw him.

Ben was leaning against the bed rail like he’d been there a while, hoodie unzipped, ankle monitor flashing under the cuff of one rolled-up pant leg. He had that quiet look he got when he was trying not to make something worse.

“Jesus,” I croaked. “How long have you been standing there?”

“Long enough to watch you drool on the mattress,” he said, smiling slightly. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep it between us.”

I rubbed at my face, trying to wake myself up properly, though everything inside me still felt about two feet underwater. “How the hell did you know I was here?”

Ben shrugged, thumb hooking into the edge of his hoodie pocket. “Dom told me what happened.”

I blinked at him. “You’re still speaking to him?”

“Not like I got a group chat going with the rest of you,” he said, dry as ever.

I let out a low breath that might’ve been a laugh, except it stuck halfway down. “Last I heard, Gage still wants to rip his heart out and feed it to him, and Gideon looks like he’s praying for spontaneous combustion anytime Dom’s name comes up.”

Ben’s mouth twitched at that. “Yeah, well. He didn’t call looking to make peace. He needed help running interference with Gideon.”

I frowned. “Interference for what?”

“To place some of the girls,” Ben said. “The ones he pulled out right before the feds busted that trafficking ring in Mississippi.”

That gave me pause. It had only been a few days since the crash, and news was still coming out almost hourly on the local channels.

Dominic’s interference had paid off in the only way that mattered. The feds finally had enough to run a sting across the Mississippi border, and for once, it stuck. Dozens arrested. A handful of girls were taken into protective custody, and enough weapons and narcotics were seized to make headlines for weeks. The press conferences were already rolling—flashing lights, federal jackets, local politicians preening in front of microphones like they’d engineered the whole damn thing themselves.

But no one was claiming ownership of the operation. Whoever was running the thing had vanished, and so had most of the transport men on our side of the border—low-level thugs who kept their heads down and mouths shut. They weren’t in custody, but they weren’t on the street either. Whether they were in the wind or Dominic had found them first… that was anyone’s guess.

The bayou hid a lot of secrets.

No arrests had been made in Gator’s murder. No suspects, no names, and barely any mention of it in the news. Just a dead body in a condemned house and a rumor that maybe he’d gotten too greedy or crossed the wrong man at the wrong time. Whoever had pulled the trigger was long gone.

Instinctively, I glanced at Ben’s wrist, but it was covered by the frayed sleeve of his hoodie.

“And you agreed to help?” I asked, slower this time.

He looked at me then, eyes clear and steady. “I’m not in any place to judge what my brothers do, Mase. Not after everything. And if he’s trying to make it right, I’m not gonna be the reason he can’t.”

I leaned back in the chair and rubbed the grit from my eyes. Silas was breathing easily, and he’d been surfacing from his medicated sleep every few hours, but never long enough to do more than meet my eyes before he slipped away again.

That tether of hope I was clinging to felt thinner by the hour.

Ben hadn’t moved; he just stood there, arms crossed loosely over his chest, one foot braced against the bed frame. His hoodie was damp around the edges from a dash through the rain, but if he was uncomfortable, he didn’t show it. He just watched me with his sad, patient eyes, as if waiting for me to take an offer I didn’t even realize he’d given me.

Silence had always been his language of choice.

“You never said why you came,” I muttered. “A call from Dom isn’t a reason.”

Ben shifted his weight, arms still crossed, ankle monitor blinking once in the dim light. “We’re twins, Mase. You don’t have to earn my loyalty. You’ve already got it.”

He finally looked at me then, eyes steady. “I might be a mess—up here.” He tapped his temple with a vicious finger. “But you’re my brother. If you think I wasn’t gonna show up when you needed someone? You don’t know me at all.”

My eyes dropped to the scuffed linoleum, then drifted toward Silas, taking in his chest's slow rise and fall beneath the tangle of monitor lines.

“You’ve always been there,” Ben said. “For all of us. Backup even when we didn’t want it. Even Gideon relies on you, and you know he’d rather eat broken glass than admit to needing anyone.”

His smile was small and quiet, like a private joke between us, but I was too tired to smile back.

“You made yourself the foundation,” he said. “For everybody else’s damage. And you never stopped to ask if you were allowed to fall apart too.”

“It’s not like that,” I said slowly, feeling it out in my mind before speaking. “It’s not just about helping. It’s…control. If I’m the one handling things, then I know what’s coming, and I have a plan to fix it. Then nothing can blindside me.”

It felt shameful to admit, but Ben’s expression didn’t change. That gave me the courage to continue.

“I’ve spent my whole life preparing for the worst-case scenario. Building my day around contingencies. Shaping every plan, every habit, so I never have to feel that drop in my gut again. The one we used to get when Mom was off her meds, you know? Or when Dad dropped us off for the last time.”

Ben stayed quiet, but I felt him listening.

“And I would’ve spent the rest of my life like that—probably died like that—if it weren’t for him.”

I looked down at Silas, the man who'd nearly torn himself apart keeping me alive.

“He never asked me to hold it all together,” I said softly. “He didn’t want someone with all the answers. He just wanted me. All of me. Even the mess.”

My throat tightened.

“He taught me how to live in the moment. How good it feels to let go and live and not worry about what comes next. Without him… I’d never have realized how many years I wasted just surviving instead of living.”

Somewhere overhead, the vent kicked on with a low mechanical groan, pushing out air that smelled faintly of bleach and plastic tubing. Recycled, processed, flavorless. It didn’t matter how often they scrubbed these places down—the smell of fear was baked into the walls.

Ben shifted beside me, arms still crossed tight across his chest, one thumb tapping against his forearm like he needed somewhere for the tension to go. “So, what now?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

For once, I didn’t try to fill the space that followed. I didn’t reach for a plan or roadmap to make it sound like I had it under control. I just let the words sit there—raw and unvarnished. Let them be exactly what they were.

It was Ben who noticed first.

He went still beside me, head turning just slightly, eyes narrowing.

I followed his gaze, and the second my eyes landed on the bed, my heartbeat surged.

Silas’s eyes were open.

Unlike the dozens of times he’d surfaced throughout the day, only to be dragged immediately under, this time was different. His face was pale and drawn tight, lips dry and cracked, one corner twitching like he wanted to talk but didn’t have the strength yet.

But those eyes—those goddamn eyes—were clear.

And locked on me.

Ben stepped back, quiet as a ghost. I didn’t even spare him a glance. The soft squeak of his sneakers on the linoleum told me he was leaving, but it was the only sound he left in his wake. The familiar silence of a man who knew how to disappear.

I kept my focus on Silas.

Nothing else mattered.

I swallowed hard past the catch in my throat. “How do you feel?”

His brow twitched slightly, like the question was stupid but worth tolerating. Then, slowly—painfully—he worked his tongue across cracked lips. His voice was ragged when he spoke, like he’d swallowed some of that gravel we’d scraped up off the road.

“Like I picked a fight with a five-hundred-pound steel bitch,” he rasped.

I barked out a mangled sound—half-laugh, half-sob. I don’t know what I’d expected, but knowing him, it should’ve been something like that.

He didn’t look away. Just kept his eyes on me, unblinking. Quiet. Like he was cataloging every change in me since he’d been unconscious. Every thought and feeling I’d shoved down deep. Despite everything that had happened, the way he looked at me hadn’t changed. Like he still knew exactly what he was looking at, even if I didn’t.

“You scared the hell out of me.” I couldn’t hold it back anymore; the fear scraped its way out of my throat whether I liked it or not.

His mouth tugged into something between a grimace and a smirk. “The pavement started that fight. You were just collateral damage.”

I let out a breath through my nose, sharp and humorless. “Next time, just shoot me. Fewer variables.”

“What, and deprive the world of that face? Selfish bastard.” Silas’s eyes gleamed with that same old devilish heat that had always gotten a rise out of me.

My gaze dropped to his hand resting slack against the blanket, skin mottled with bruises that hadn’t started healing yet. I didn't reach for it, no matter how much I wanted to. I couldn’t. One more inch and I’d be laying myself bare.

“What’s the damage?” he asked, lids so heavy he could barely keep them open.

Unable to resist, I stretched my pinkie out toward his nearest finger. The touch was so light, he probably couldn’t even feel it. But I did. The warmth, the electrical pulse that couldn’t be quantified, but I recognized it every time he walked into a room.

“Your gunshot is slightly infected, but they’re managing it with some drip antibiotics,” I said slowly, arranging the nurses' reports into something easy to digest. “You broke your clavicle, cracked a few ribs, and your back looks like someone tried to sandpaper you down to the bone. You’ll have scars, and they won’t be pretty, but it…it could have been much worse.” My breath hitched. “You were lucky.”

“Yeah,” he muttered, sliding an amused look toward me. “Feels just like luck.”

I hung my head. My body still ached from the crash—not as bad as his, not even close, but enough to remind me what a goddamn idiot I’d been.

“I shouldn’t’ve ridden like that,” I blurted. “I just… wasn’t thinking straight. Dom was acting like he’s fucking invincible, and once we found Gator, I?—”

I broke off abruptly, my mind snagging on something I hadn’t even begun to process. The blood, the face that had looked so different alive…the watch.

It was still sitting in the locked drawer of my desk at the task force building. I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. Dominic and I hadn’t talked about it, and I hadn’t told anyone else. Not yet.

I cleared my throat and tried to shove the thought aside. “Anyway. You should know… Dom pulled it off. He saved the girls. Got to them before anyone else could. The feds swept the Mississippi side after that, but whoever ran the whole thing? Still a ghost. No charges. No name.”

Silas released a slow breath and settled his head against the pillow. His gaze tracked upward, settling somewhere on the water-stained ceiling tiles like he was trying to read what came next in the shape of the cracks.

“That’s the important part,” he said, almost to himself. “Not the only part that matters. Not with the drugs still moving, and the ones responsible still on the loose. But if the girls got out… and no one innocent died getting them there—” He blinked, eyes still fixed on the ceiling. “Then I can close the page on this one.”

I shut my eyes.

Close the page.

I knew what he meant, and it was more than the case. It was this chapter of his life. The part where he lived nothing but lies…including us.

My throat went tight before I could stop it. I hadn't felt that sick, hollow pinch of panic since I was a kid, watching people walk out and knowing better than to ask them to stay. He hadn’t said the words yet, but I could feel them lining up behind his teeth.

It was good while it lasted.

People said that when they wanted to make a bitter truth go down easily. That it had meant something...but not enough. Yeah, we’d burned hot. Fast. Cut open pieces of each other that we didn’t show to anyone else. I knew that. I knew it in my body, how I still felt him when he wasn’t in the room. We’d said things— real things—and meant every word.

But maybe it wasn’t about truth.

I didn’t know if truth could carry us that far.

“What…” I had to clear my throat and try again. “What’s next?”

Silas’s gaze stayed fixed on the ceiling. When he finally spoke, it was slower than usual, like every word was being weighed on its way out.

“I’ve got to report to my field office,” he said detachedly. “Debrief, go through the case files, and see how many loose ends we can tie off before every bridge is burned.”

“And then?”

Silas’s mouth tugged at the corner, not a smile—more like a grim acknowledgment of where this was headed.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “Not much left on the other end of that flight. My career’s probably done. There’s no coming back from the mess I’ve made.”

I looked down at my hands and flexed my fingers on instinct. My palms were scraped, and the knuckles on my right hand were split open. The skin was puckered and raw. I closed them slowly into fists and rested them on my thighs.

“I can’t leave Devil’s Garden,” I said. “I can’t leave my family.”

His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Yeah.”

Before I could talk myself out of it, I brushed my fingers along the stubble of his jaw. His skin was warm under my touch, and he allowed me to turn his face toward mine.

“Tell me you’ll come back,” I said quietly.

Silas’s gaze didn’t waver. But the silence stretched long enough to tell me what was coming.

“I can’t,” he said. “I don’t know what I’ll have left to offer if I do.”

“That’s not good enough.”

He flinched like the words hurt and sucked in a deep breath. “I know,” he said hoarsely.

I looked away first.

We’d survived the crash, but that didn’t mean we’d figured out how to sort the wreckage and rebuild.

Eventually, I rose, knees cracking before they let me straighten. I grabbed the folded blanket from the foot of the bed and shook it out slowly, laying it over him with more care than I’d realized it would betray.

His eyes followed the motion, but he didn’t say a word.

“I’ll let the nurse know you’re awake,” I croaked, backing away.

“Mason—”

My name stopped me halfway to the door. I turned.

He held my gaze…but he didn’t say a damn thing. I didn’t blame him. What was there left to say?

I nodded. Once. Controlled. Contained.

Then I walked out, wishing like hell that love alone had ever been enough to solve a thing.