Chapter 3 - The Mirror That Blew Apart
The barrel of my Sig Sauer wavered for a fraction of a second—the only time in twenty years my aim had ever faltered.
The man standing over Elena wasn't a stranger. He wasn't a faceless mercenary from some rival syndicate.
He was Marcus. My twin brother.
Or at least, the brother I had buried twenty-five years ago in a wet, miserable cemetery on the outskirts of Boston after a warehouse explosion that had supposedly torn him to atoms.
Marcus tilted his head, a cold, mocking smirk twisting his lips. He looked older, leaner, with a jagged white scar cutting across his left jawline where the fire had kissed him, but those eyes—the same piercing, stormy blue-gray eyes that stared back at me from my own reflection—were unmistakably identical.
"Put the gun down, little brother," Marcus murmured, his voice smooth as aged whiskey, carrying the exact same cadence as my own. "You’ll scratch the concrete. And trust me, you're going to need a very solid foundation for what comes next."
Elena whimpered, her eyes squeezed shut, tears carving clean tracks through the flour dust on her cheeks. "Alejandro... I tried. They found the medical logs from the fertility clinic in Zurich. I couldn't stop them..."
"Shut up, Elena," Marcus snapped casually, never moving the gun from her temple. He looked back at me, his smile widening into something predatory. "She’s a good woman, Alejandro. Loyal. Faithful. She hid my little biological masterpieces right under the nose of the great and terrible Chicago kingpin. Irony has a wonderful sense of humor, doesn't it?"
My chest seized. A heavy, suffocating pressure crushed my lungs.
My biological masterpieces.
The words spun through my brain like shrapnel. I looked past Marcus, past the barrel of his gun, down at the four identical boys huddled behind Elena’s skirts. Mateo, Leo, Dante, and Julian. Four years old. Brown hair. Pale skin.
They weren't my sons.
They were my nephews.
"You're dead," I whispered, the words tasting like copper and ash. "I identified the body. I buried you."
"You identified a dental plate and a pile of carbonized meat that some corrupt coroner swapped for fifty thousand dollars," Marcus corrected smoothly, his eyes flashing with decades of bitter, festering resentment. "When father left the entire logistics empire to you because you were the 'ruthless one,' I had to improvise. I faked my death, skipped the country, and built my own operation across the Atlantic. But a man gets lonely, brother. And a man needs heirs. Legitimate, genetically pristine heirs who carry the Moretti bloodline without the Moretti name."
"And Sofia?" I choked out, the name tearing at my throat like jagged glass. "What did you do to my wife?"
Marcus’s expression hardened, a dark cloud passing over his features. The playful smirk vanished, replaced by a cold, venomous fury.
"Sofia didn't die in a car accident, Alejandro," Marcus said softly.
The room seemed to tilt on its axis.
"What did you say?"
"Your precious, innocent Sofia found out what I was doing two years ago," Marcus said, stepping away from Elena, keeping his gun leveled at my chest while his free hand gestured toward the quadruplets. "She caught me sneaking into the East Wing through the old servants' tunnel. She thought I was trying to steal company documents. Instead, she found the surrogate files. She found out the boys were genetically mine—harvested using our shared family DNA bank from the clinic in Zurich."
Marcus paused, letting the silence stretch like a wire about to snap.
"She didn't want to ruin you," he continued, his voice dropping into a harsh whisper. "She knew that if you found out your dead brother was alive and stealing your legacy through test-tube heirs, you would start a war that would burn Chicago to the ground. So she struck a bargain with me. She let me keep the boys hidden in the unused wing, provided Elena looked after them. And she wrote that note—Keep them safe from Alejandro—not because she was afraid of you hurting the boys, you idiot... but because she was terrified of what you would do to me if you discovered I was living under your roof."
My finger tightened on the trigger of my Sig. My vision tunneled until the edges of the room went pitch black.
Twenty years of mourning. Twenty years of visiting Sofia’s grave every Sunday with a bouquet of white lilies, believing she had died in a tragic, meaningless wreck on the icy expressway. Twenty years of punishing the men I suspected were responsible, bleeding half the city dry to avenge her memory.
And all the while, the man who had stolen her life—and hidden an army of ghost children in our home—had been living in the walls like a parasite.
"You killed her," I whispered.
"She fell," Marcus corrected coldly. "We struggled on the grand staircase. She slipped. I could have saved her, Alejandro. But she looked at me with those big, pathetic eyes of hers and whispered that you would hunt me to the ends of the earth. So... I let go."
Before Marcus could finish his sentence, before his finger could squeeze the trigger of his silencer, I moved.
I didn't aim for his chest. I didn't aim for his head.
I fired three rounds directly into his right knee and shoulder.
Marcus screamed, dropping his weapon as he crashed hard onto the concrete floor, clutching his shattered leg while blood pooled rapidly across the gray surface.
The four boys started wailing in unison, a chorus of high-pitched terror that tore at my soul. Elena threw her arms around them, sobbing hysterically as she pulled them deeper into the corner.
I stood over my brother, the barrel of my gun pressed hard against the center of his forehead, the cold steel biting into his skin.
"Get up," I whispered, my voice shaking with a rage so absolute it transcended human emotion.
Marcus laughed through his pain, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. "Go ahead, brother. Pull the trigger. But remember... if I die today, my men outside have instructions to upload the full genetic profiles and location of your little nephews to every federal prosecutor and cartel boss from here to Bogota. They’ll be hunted for the rest of their short lives."
I froze.
The gun remained heavy in my hand.
May you like
I looked down at Mateo, who was peeking out from behind Elena’s arm, staring up at me with those familiar, accusing blue-gray eyes.
The game had changed. I wasn't just fighting for my empire anymore. I was fighting for four innocent boys who didn't even know my name.
