Chapter 57: Piper’s Brother
Chapter 57
Piper spent the rest of the evening locked in the small guest room she still occasionally used, and when she finally emerged, her expression carried the particular hollowness of someone confronting a memory they’d spent years deliberately not examining.
"I need to tell you something," she said, finding Rowe and Reaper still in the chapel, working through genealogy records with Sandra’s help. "About my father. About things I never mentioned because I genuinely didn’t think they mattered."
"Sit," Rowe said gently, pulling out a chair.
Piper settled slowly, her hands folding together with visible tension.
"My father wasn’t married to my mother. She was someone he met during a period he spent estranged from the family, before Cornelius eventually pulled him back into the club’s orbit. I only met her twice, growing up — mostly I was raised by my father’s second wife, the woman I actually consider my mother."
"Your birth mother," Reaper said slowly. "Do you know what happened to her?"
"She left when I was young," Piper said. "I always assumed it was simple abandonment, the kind of thing nobody wanted to talk about in detail. But—" she paused, old memory surfacing with visible difficulty "—I remember, once, overhearing my father arguing with someone about her. Something about a son. A boy she’d had after she left, with someone else."
The room went very still.
"A half-brother," Rowe breathed. "You might have a half-brother out there we’ve never accounted for."
"I never thought about it seriously," Piper admitted. "It was just fragments of an argument I overheard as a child, easy to dismiss as misunderstanding. But given everything else we’ve uncovered about this family’s talent for burying inconvenient relatives—"
"We need a name," Reaper said. "Your birth mother’s name, anything that might help us trace this."
"Carla," Piper said slowly. "Carla Mendez, I believe. Though I genuinely don’t know if that’s accurate anymore, given how long ago I heard it and how young I was."
Sandra was already typing, cross-referencing the name against available records with practiced efficiency.
"There’s a Carla Mendez who would have been approximately the right age, deceased eight years ago in Nevada. Records show she had one son, born—" Sandra paused, scanning further, "—thirty-one years ago. Name listed as Daniel Mendez."
"Do we know anything about him?" Reaper asked. "Current location, occupation, anything?"
Sandra’s fingers moved rapidly across the keyboard, cross-referencing databases with the same methodical thoroughness that had eventually caught both Marcus and Frank.
"Daniel Mendez," she read slowly, "legally changed his name eight years ago, following his mother’s death."
She looked up, her expression carrying fresh dread.
"To Daniel Webb."
Rowe felt the floor of her stomach drop entirely.
"Webb," she repeated. "As in—"
"Marcus Webb," Piper finished hoarsely. "Cutter. That’s not coincidence, is it?"
"I don’t believe in that many coincidences anymore," Reaper said grimly. "Not in this family."
Sandra pulled up additional records, cross-referencing with mounting urgency.
"If this is accurate, Cutter isn’t just some ambitious Disciples enforcer looking to seize territory. He’s your cousin, Piper. Samuel’s son. Which makes him a legitimate Kane descendant, same as you, same as Doc, same as Rowan and Raven."
The implication settled over the chapel like a physical weight, one more devastating revelation in a family history that seemed to have no bottom, no final layer of buried secrets left to finally, completely excavate.
"That’s why he targeted us specifically," Rowe said slowly, the pieces assembling with sickening clarity. "This was never just about ambition, or proving himself capable of taking rival territory. He’s got a legitimate claim to everything we just fought to secure in that courtroom. The land, the trust, all of it."
"And he’s choosing to take it through violence and rival club warfare," Reaper said, "instead of through the same legal channels the rest of this family finally used."
"Maybe he doesn’t know he has a legal option," Piper said slowly. "If he grew up believing his mother’s family history, without ever learning about the Kane bloodline connection—"
"Or maybe he knows exactly what he’s owed," Rowe countered, "and he’s decided violence is simply faster than waiting for courts and lawyers to sort out another inheritance dispute."
Reaper was quiet for a long moment, processing the full weight of this fresh complication.
"Either way," he said finally, "this changes our approach considerably. We’re not dealing with an outside threat anymore. We’re dealing with one more piece of this family’s fractured history, demanding acknowledgment the same way Doc did, the same way Deborah did, just choosing a considerably more violent method of announcing himself."
"Do we reach out?" Rowe asked. "Try to resolve this the way we resolved everything with Doc and Piper — through truth and legal recognition instead of continued conflict?"
"I don’t know if that’s possible anymore," Reaper admitted. "He’s already built an entire leadership position on the promise of taking us down by force. Offering him a legitimate inheritance claim now might look like weakness, might actually validate his narrative that we’re vulnerable enough to be pushed around."
"Or it might be exactly what finally ends this," Piper said quietly. "Rowan, you convinced Doc to abandon fifteen years of hidden resentment through nothing but honest conversation and genuine acknowledgment. Maybe Cutter — Daniel — deserves the same chance before we assume violence is the only path forward."
Rowe considered this, old exhaustion warring with the same stubborn hope that had carried her through every previous crisis.
"Three weeks until the wedding," she said. "If we’re going to try reaching out, try resolving this the way we resolved everything else, we don’t have much time before whatever he’s planning either escalates or gets overtaken by the celebration itself."
Reaper’s jaw tightened with fresh calculation, the weight of one more family reconciliation attempt settling alongside the practical dangers of a rival club leader building momentum against them.
"Then we reach out carefully," he said finally. "Through proper channels, with witnesses, with enough security precautions that if this is a trap rather than a genuine opportunity for reconciliation, we’re not walking into it blind."
"And if he refuses," Rowe asked. "If Daniel Webb has no interest in anything except taking what he believes is owed through force?"
Reaper’s expression hardened with the particular resolve Rowe had watched him summon through every previous battle this family had survived.
"Then we protect what we’ve built," he said simply. "The same way we always have. Together, honestly, and without ever forgetting that even our enemies deserve the chance to choose a better path before we assume they won’t take it."
Outside the chapel window, the desert stretched dark and quiet under a canopy of stars, one more piece of this family’s tangled, buried history finally surfacing at exactly the moment they’d hoped to close the book on old secrets for good.
Three weeks remained until the wedding.
And Rowe found herself preparing for the possibility that the final Chapter of this family’s forty-year war might not be written in courtrooms or legal settlements at all, but in whatever choice Daniel Webb made when finally confronted with the truth of exactly who he really was.
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