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“Not voluntarily,” he says, folding his arms.

“I’ve got a hypothetical for you, Charlie,” I say, just as the search narrows down mention of any Morelli before moving onto Gio. “Say you stumbled across the relative of someone important, and that relative was dead, how bad would that be?”

He pulls in a breath. “How important are we talking?”

“Not top, but close.”

“What coast?”

I meet Zayden’s eye, and he waits a beat before nodding. “Yours,” I say.

Charlie is quiet for a sec. “Don’t tell me a name. I don’t want to have to make a difficult choice, here.”

“No names. Purely hypothetical.”

He sighs. “If it’s just a relative, cousin twice removed or⁠—”

“A brother.”

“Holy fuck, Yale,” he groans, and Silence leans into Xavier’s chest. His expression is stony, as is Z’s. “Well, we’re talking purely hypotheticals, so I’m guessing you’re not talking about Sabina Morelli’s little brother going missing a few months back.”

Zayden pinches the bridge of his nose.

“Never heard of them,” I say.

“How much of a hand have you had in it? Are we talking trigger finger or⁠—”

Zayden says, “A miscommunication, Charlie. Not intentional.”

“Sabina doesn’t tend to care about intentions, Z. Pissing her off is not a way to prolong your life,” he says. “If it was anyone else, I’d say fall on your sword. Arrange a meeting, explain, maybe lose a few of your body parts, or maybe they’d take just one of you as payment. But with Sabina … bury it.”

Zayden swears under his breath. “You’re sure?”

“Unless you want your wife to become a widow.”

Chapter 22

Xavier

“Well, that’s fucking unsettling,” I groan, leaning back in my seat as Yale ends the call. Silence is tense in my arms, and I pull her against my chest. “So, we bury it. We know, Envy knows, and that’s it, right?”

Zayden shakes his head. “The recruit that killed Gio had a phone in his room, and made calls after the kill. Envy tried to trace them and got nowhere.”

Fucking great. I want to rant about the danger that puts us in, but Silence is already pale enough. “Then we do what we can, right? The chances of it getting back to us are slim. We’ll deal. We put Gio on ice, we deal with the Morelli family if it comes to it. Otherwise, we carry on as normal.” My brothers nod, but Silence remains quiet. “Wanna fix up my stitches again, Q?”

While Yale works and Zayden checks in on Monica’s security, Silence and I return to the medical room. No morphine this time, thank God, but also no easy conversation either. She’s barely said a word.

Sitting on the stool and cleaning up my wound again, she’s tight lipped. A small line between her brows gets deeper with every passing second, and I have a feeling if I could read minds, hers would be a blur of total fucking panic.

“You do this a lot in work?”

She looks up at me. “Hm?”

“Stitches and stuff.”

“Oh, yeah. A lot.”

She continues with her task, and I look around the room as if inspiration for conversation will pop up. I don’t talk to Silence. I don’t really talk to anyone. Flirting isn’t my thing, and conversing is low on my list of priorities.