The silence in the hospital waiting room was the loudest thing Elijah Fernandez had ever heard. It was heavier than the weight of the gun hidden under his jacket.
All the six Fernandez brothers were frozen, each dealing with the fear in their own way.
Elijah the oldest at 24, stood by the window, his body tense.
His white shirt had a dark red stain on the cuff.
One moment he'd been in the warehouse, making his first true display of power as his father's heir. The next, he got the call.
His mother was in labor. There were..complications
Riven, 21, paced like a caged tiger.
He'd been mid-fight when he got the news
A fresh bruise bloomed on his jaw.
He kept clenching and unclenching his fists, itching to hit something, to make something else hurt the way he was starting to hurt inside.
Leo, 20, sat perfectly still on a plush chair, his glasses perched on his nose as he stared blankly at a medical textbook he'd pulled from his backpack. He was trying to calculate odds, to find logic in the panic, but the numbers kept swimming on the page.
Julian, 16, had his headphones on, blasting angry rock music.
He was the rebel.
He curled into himself, trying to block out the fear.
Timothy, 11, was completely lost in his tablet game, his face lit up by the screen. A nurse had given it to him to keep him busy. He didn't really get what "complications" meant—he just knew something was wrong because everyone around him was quiet and scared. But in his game, the rules made sense. In his game, he could win.
Enzo, 7, was asleep in the lap of a stone-faced bodyguard, thumb in his mouth, oblivious.
The door to the delivery suite opened.
A doctor stepped out, his face grim. Behind him, their father, Ricardo Fernandez—a mountain of a man reduced to rubble—stumbled out. His face was ash-gray, tracked with tears no one had ever imagined he could shed.
Elijah's heart stopped. He saw it in his father's hollow eyes before a single word was spoken.
"I'm sorry," the doctor said, the words too soft, too final. "We did everything we could. We saved the baby. A healthy girl."
The words hung in the air, meaningless and cruel. A healthy girl. The cost was unthinkable.
Ricardo Fernandez didn't speak. He just looked at his sons, his eyes passing over each of them before he turned and walked down the hall, a ghost in his own life, leaving them alone with the news.
For a moment, no one moved. The information was too big, too terrible to process.
It was Riven who broke first. "No," he whispered. Then louder, "No!" He slammed his fist into the wall, the sound echoing like a gunshot. The bodyguard holding Enzo flinched, pulling the kid closer.
Leo's book slid from his lap and hit the floor with a slap. He didn't move to pick it up. He just stared at the spot where his father had been.
Julian ripped his headphones off, the sudden silence ringing in his ears. He stared at Elijah, his eyes wide and desperate. "Where's Mom?" he demanded, his voice cracking. It wasn't a question anymore; it was a challenge, a plea for his brother to undo the impossible.
But Elijah heard nothing. Saw nothing. The world had narrowed to a single, searing point of pain. The cool, controlled heir vanished. The dam broke.
He turned from the window, and his face was a terrifying contortion of grief and rage. He wasn't the heir anymore. He was just a man who had lost his mother.
"No," he snarled, the word raw and guttural. He swept his arm across a side table, sending a lamp and a vase of lilies crashing to the floor. Glass shattered. Water bled across the expensive rug. ""Dammit! No! F**k!"
He braced his hands on the wall, his shoulders heaving with ragged, ugly sobs that he tried to choke back. "It's not fair. It's not f***ing fair!"
The other boys stared, frozen. They had never seen Elijah break. He was their rock. Their unshakeable leader. To see him come apart was more terrifying than the news itself.
A nurse appeared then, hesitant in the doorway. In her arms was a tiny bundle, wrapped in a pink blanket.
"Would you... would you like to meet your sister?" she asked softly.
Elijah's head snapped up. His eyes, bloody-red and blazing with a pain so deep it looked like hatred, locked onto the bundle. The source of the loss. The reason his mother was gone.
The air turned to ice.
He pushed off the wall, his steps heavy as he crossed the room. Looming over the nurse, like a storm of grief and fury. He looked down.
And there she was.
A tiny, perfect face. A rosebud mouth. Peaceful. Innocent. Unaware of the devastation her first breath had caused.
His hand trembled as he reached out. For a heart-stopping second, it seemed he might push the nurse away, might reject this tiny, life-altering creature.
But his finger, the same one that had hours ago pointed a gun and given a order that ended a life, brushed against the baby's impossibly soft cheek.
A tiny, shuddering breath escaped him. All the anger seemed to drain out of him, leaving only a devastating, hollowed-out exhaustion.
He didn't take her. Instead, he looked at his brothers, his voice a broken wreck of what it usually was, but filled with a new, unshakable authority.
"This is Juliet," he said, the name a vow. "Our sister. Our responsibility."
His gaze swept over each of them, —Riven, angry and lost; Leo, trying to be strong; Julian, scared; Timothy, confused; even little Enzo's sleeping innocence..
"The loss ends here. With her. We protect her. We raise her. We become the monsters that make sure no other monster ever f***ing touches her. Do you understand me?"
The question wasn't a question. It was a command. A promise.
In the nurse's arms, baby Juliet slept on, her first official act as a Fernandez complete. She had, in a single moment, destroyed a family and built a new one.
An empire of brothers. An empire for her.