Page 63 of Man of Lies

I turned, following his gaze to the glass door. Mason sat on the couch, leaning forward, hands locked between his knees. His eyes were sharp, narrowed in that way he did when he was dissecting every damn thing I said. The grim set of his jaw told me he wasn’t missing a single word, and my stomach dropped.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

MASON

The leather cushionswere still warm from Silas’s leftover body heat, but it was cooling fast. I had no idea how long he and Dominic had been outside, but it was long enough for me to feel the absence even in my sleep.

I sat on his discarded blanket, elbows on my knees, and silently watched the door. I wasn’t a lip reader, but I’d picked up enough over the years to know when words mattered. This wasn’t a casual conversation; their mouths moved too quickly, and their body language was strained. Silas’s brow was furrowed, his jaw locked, and Dominic wore the same expression he’d worn when we were kids, back when he took the fall for me when I’d hotwired a motorcycle. The look of a man ready to do what was necessary.

I could only catch snippets of their exchange—words likeriskandgirls—but there was no mistaking the shift in Silas’s posture when Dominic leaned close. A sign that the conversation was turning deadly. And me? I was sitting here with my thumb up my ass, a silent observer, while two of the most important people in my life played a dangerous game right in front of me.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know Silas was hiding things; I wasn’t that naïve. But it had never felt important enough to dig up, not when we were playing at keeping it casual. I'd told myself I didn’t need to know everything, and if it was essential, he’d be the one to fill me in. But he’d tried, hadn’t he? No more than a few hours ago, when we were making love. I hadn’t wanted to hear it. Instead, I’d chosen to ignore the pieces of his life that wouldn’t fit into the tidy box I had in my head. But now, when my head was filled with the idea of building something real and permanent between us, I realized how short-sighted I’d been. Sitting here, watching him through the glass, he felt like a stranger…and I felt like a fool.

Just a few hours earlier, we’d been as close as two people could be, but when Silas stepped back inside, he watched me warily, like he wasn’t sure how to bridge the space between us.

“You’re awake,” he said stiffly.

I twitched one eyebrow. “Too soon, it seems.”

His eyes flicked to the bedroom door where Dominic had just disappeared, then back to me, and I could see him doing the calculations in real time about how to stall this conversation. Somewhere along the way, the man who’d always been so mysterious to me had become a tune I could hum by heart.

Before we could say much more, Dominic reappeared, looking like he’d just stepped out of some high-end catalog: tailored suit, blood-red tie, and the familiar bulge of a shoulder holster beneath his jacket. Dressed to kill—maybe literally.

“Where’s the fire, Dom?” I asked, keeping it light.

He barely spared us a glance, his eyes cutting past us as he headed for the door. “Wait here,” he said, putting enough growlinto it to make it clear he wasn’t asking. “The doc’s coming in a few hours to re-check your boy’s stitches. Keep him from pushing too hard. I don’t need him bleeding out all over my place.”

And just like that, he was gone.

I shifted my gaze back to Silas. He stood there, vulnerable and barefoot, naked except for a pair of Dominic’s boxers, and still, every inch of him radiated strength and control. The kind of build that made me itch to put my hands all over him even now: muscle, power, and raw magnetism. His hair was a tangled mess, wild and hanging down his back, and the scruff on his jaw only added to that damn sexiness.

The ache in my jeans was involuntary. Looking at him like this, I should’ve been used to it by now. But it still felt like getting hit with a truck.

But when his eyes met mine, something in me recoiled. Those laughing, devil-may-care eyes were guarded and distant, and for the first time, I barely recognized the man I’d fallen for. No matter how much I wanted to close the gap between us, facing him now felt like staring at a stranger.

I loved my brother, but I had no illusions about who he was or the violence he was capable of committing if crossed. The lawyer in me didn’t want or need every detail of his life, just the facts I could defend in court when it mattered. Those were the boundaries I’d set, compartmentalizing the murky, dangerous depths of my brother’s world.

But I couldn’t compartmentalize Silas—I’d tried. He smashed through every line I’d drawn.

I pulled in a long, slow breath to steel myself, ignoring the panic trying to squirm through my careful mask. “Tell me you’re not responsible for the girls who’ve been going missing.”

Silas’s expression hardened, but he didn’t reply. Instead, he moved toward the kitchen, one hand subconsciously hovering at his side to cradle the pain he refused to show. His slow, cautious movements betrayed how much it was still hurting him. The doctor had called it a graze, but the rivet in his side was deep, and he’d lost so much blood before we got it stopped. He looked like a man worn thin and operating on fumes. I hated it.

He reached for the bottle of whiskey Dominic had left behind, and I didn’t need to watch for long to know what he was doing. He was going to numb the pain, and I wasn’t about to let him do it alone. I followed him into the kitchen and grabbed the tumbler before it touched his lips.

“You don’t have enough blood left to be mixing it with booze,” I said darkly, dumping the glass and filling it with water from the tap. “But if you’re determined to do it, take this first.”

I grabbed a bottle of Tylenol from the cabinet over the sink, shook out a few, and thrust them at him.

Silas swallowed the pills, throat working as he drained the glass and set it down with a snap. “I have nothing to do with hurting those girls,” he said in a voice like gravel. He hesitated, then added reluctantly, “But I didn’t stop it either. Not soon enough.”

I hadn’t felt like this since I was a kid, standing on the curb in front of the fire station with Ben, holding a trash bag full of my life while my whole world slipped through my fingers. My back molars crunched as I ground my teeth, but I smoothed the wrinkles out of my expression. I’d never been the type to let myemotions run the show, and I wasn’t about to do it now, not when I had questions that needed answering.

“Explain,” I snapped.

Silas took a deep breath, opened his mouth—and stopped. His gaze dropped to his hands, flat on the counter, fingers splayed wide. It was as if he was gathering strength to say something I didn’t want to hear.

I looked down at his hands and mapped the thick and well-defined veins and the web of thin white scars across his knuckles. I knew those hands: the calluses on his palms, the rough scrape over my skin, the soft prickle of the hair running up his forearms. But I had no idea what they’d been through. What they’d built. What they’d destroyed.

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