Page 127 of Crave Me

He was about to step back when Dante came out of the manor and headed over.

“Travel well,” he told Asher as he reached us. “You have an ally in me too should you need anything down the road.”

“Same,” Asher returned.

With that, Caleb wrapped his arm around him one last time, then led him to his BMW.

A few more words were exchanged and then Asher ducked inside and peeled on out of King Manor.

As the gates closed, Caleb returned to us, a bittersweet smile on his face.

We were just about to head back inside together when Caspian pulled away and walked to Dante and told us, “There’s something you need to know. Something I’d planned on waiting to tell you when this war was over and done with, but which needs to be revealed sooner due to certain… circumstances and complications.”

Bastian, Caleb, and I exchanged a look.

“Need to know about what?” Bastian asked.

“About me,” Dante answered. He looked at Caleb. “Your suspicions were correct, I was hiding something.”

“Hiding what?” Caleb asked with a noticeable edge.

“It’s not like that,” Caspian assured him.

“Then what is it like?” Bastian said, uttering what we were all thinking.

Caspian drew in a breath and grasped Dante’s shoulder in a gesture of solidarity.

And then he smiled as he revealed, “Dante is my biological father.”

Holy. Shit.

27

~Caleb~

This was more than a little difficult to wrap my head around.

I’d clearly had solid instincts about Dante Mancini.

He absolutely had been hiding something major, something that directly affected Cas.

It just hadn’t been anything like what I’d anticipated.

No, this was beyond.

Caspian King was his son? The heir to the Mancini Syndicate?

It had been covered up for a quarter of a century?

Jesus fucking Christ.

It was a hell of a lot to absorb.

But as I looked out at Caspian beside me eating away and chuckling at something Dante had just said, it seemed he was handling it amazingly well.

Then again, Cas could take things in his stride better than most.

They’d even started on the road to bonding now and not just with things only relegated to business and the war. They’d cooked this dinner together. Throughout the couple of hours that they’d been in the kitchen, I’d passed by a couple of times and heard them laughing and chatting away lightheartedly. I’d been dealing with my business, checking in with Sven and the heads of my facilities. Ash had done an admirable job of keeping things running smoothly while I’d been gone, but now it was time for me to get back into it.

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