The Sister Who Belonged to Both Houses
Chapter 08 - The Sister Who Belonged to Both Houses
Nell laughed first.
It was the wrong sound in the wrong room, sharp and breathless, the kind of laugh that came when the mind refused to accept a wall had just become a door.
“No,” she said.
Lucia closed her eyes.
Roman did not move.
Declan appeared behind him, as if summoned by damage. Gabriel came seconds later with two guards behind him, took one look at Nell’s face, and dismissed the men without a word.
Maeve stood between her sister and the Falcone mother, and the kitchen that had smelled warm that morning now felt too small to hold all the lives rearranging inside it.
“What do you mean, one was yours?” Maeve asked.
Lucia looked at Nell.
“I was pregnant before the fire.”
Roman’s voice was quiet. “You never told us.”
“I never had time.”
Declan gripped the back of a chair hard enough to whiten his knuckles.
Lucia’s memory came in fragments. Some pieces sharp as glass. Some gone forever. She remembered the night of the fire. Vittorio shouting. Rose holding a bundle at the service door. Smoke crawling under the pantry. The baby crying.
A baby girl.
Vittorio had wanted the child gone because she complicated inheritance, ownership, and the lie he had already begun shaping.
Rose had carried both children out.
Maeve, nine months old.
And Lucia’s newborn daughter.
Maeve looked at Nell.
They were not twins. They had never looked like twins. But poverty made people accept odd family shapes. Their mother had said Nell was small because she had come early. Maeve had believed her because belief was easier than measuring truth with a child’s eyes.
Nell sat down slowly.
“I’m a Falcone?”
Gabriel stared at her with something like wonder and terror.
Declan turned away.
Roman closed both hands on the chair in front of him.
“You are Lucia’s daughter,” Maeve said before any of the brothers could make the word a weapon.
Nell looked at her. “And what am I to you?”
Maeve crossed the kitchen and knelt in front of the chair despite every ache in her body.
“The same impossible pain you were yesterday.”
Nell began to cry then.
Maeve held her.
Nobody interrupted.
For once, the Falcone brothers had sense enough to let women grieve without trying to manage the room.
The DNA test was Gabriel’s idea, though he presented it like a joke so nobody could accuse him of hope.
“I hate to interrupt the baptism,” he said, “but before we hand anyone a bloodline and an armed escort, perhaps science.”
Lucia smiled at him through tears. “Still hiding fear under charm?”
Gabriel’s face changed.
For a moment, Maeve saw the boy in the photograph.
The test took hours, not days, because Roman called people who did not ask why a private lab needed opening at midnight.
While they waited, Lucia slept.
Nell lay beside her mother’s bed because she had no idea how to leave.
Maeve went outside onto the back terrace.
The ocean was black beneath the cliff, throwing itself against stone like it had been insulted.
Roman found her there.
“You should be inside.”
“I’ve been told that by every employer I’ve ever had.”
“This terrace is not safe.”
“Neither is your kitchen, apparently.”
He stood beside her, not too close.
She appreciated that.
After a long silence, he said, “If Nell is my sister, Varo will try to use her claim to fracture the family.”
“She isn’t a claim. She’s a person.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
Roman looked at the sea.
“No.”
The honesty surprised her.
“I know how to protect territory,” he said. “Money. Secrets. Men. I do not know how to protect someone who has already been harmed by what my family built.”
Maeve folded her arms against the cold.
“You start by asking what she wants.”
“And you?”
She looked at him then.
“What about me?”
“What do you want?”
Nobody asked Maeve that. Not doctors. Not landlords. Not employers. Not men with money who mistook rescue for ownership.
She should have had an answer.
All she could think of was sleep.
A warm room.
Nell safe.
A morning where survival was not the first job waiting.
Before she could speak, Gabriel opened the terrace door.
“The results are in.”
Maeve’s stomach tightened.
Roman did not move.
Gabriel’s face, usually built to hide knives behind smiles, was bare with shock.
“Nell is Lucia’s daughter,” he said.
May you like
Then his gaze shifted to Maeve.
“And Rose Cole was not your mother.”
