The Revenge by Tijan

FORTY-SEVEN

Kash


Each time I’d been in the presence of my twin, something new was revealed. The first was just that he existed. The second was the first inkling of a connection. It shouldn’t be there. We didn’t grow up together. He was a stranger to me. And yet it’d been there.

He knew I was coming.

I knew he knew I was coming, and when I opened that door, his head was up.

I came in, and this time he was wary of me.

Roles were reversed somehow. Maybe he had heard me earlier, on the other side of the wall, and he knew that I knew more than he wanted me to know? Or maybe it was because he was caught in a way that he couldn’t get out of here?

Was that it?

Still, as I stepped inside and shut the door, neither of us looked away.

“Was he going to have you undergo plastic surgery?”

I bypassed the chair, content to lean against the mirror behind me. My head was down, and I watched him steadily.

There was no reaction, but I knew, I knew in my gut, he knew what I was referring to.

“Yes.”

My nostrils flared. “What were you doing with Chrissy Hayes?”

Why wasn’t Chrissy scared of you?

He darted a look to the mirror, then shrugged, his head lowering. “I was getting to know my future mother-in-law.”

He looked up, a small grin at that, and he saw my eye-roll.

He snickered, then sobered. “I’m kidding.”

“Ass.”

Another grin from him. “I know.” He swallowed, looking at the door. “We can’t, you know.” Those eyes—my eyes—came back to me.

Yeah.

I nodded. I knew what he was talking about.

“But I would. If…” His eyes darted behind me again. “You know.”

Well, this was anticlimactic.

He was telling he would talk, but not here. And that was putting me in a position I didn’t want to be in.

I pulled out the chair and sat. Rubbing my jaw, I dipped my head and raked my hand through my hair before I leaned back. “What’s your main goal? You have to tell me that.”

If I was going to risk everything, I had to know it was worth it.

He sobered and dipped his head down before lifting those eyes again. “Not hurting others. That’s my main goal.”

That told me nothing.

I had to remember.

He was not my twin.

He was a guy. A stranger.

I shook my head. “I already have a brother, you know.”

He saw it, and his Adam’s apple moved up and down. A light that started to shine in his eyes diminished, and even though his hands were still cuffed to the table, he was able to lean back. He put distance between us with that motion.

“I know. Matt Francis. Chrissy told me about him.” He paused, his gaze darting to the mirror behind me. “She told me about Bailey, too.”

Everything went flat in me. “Don’t say her name.”

He shut that down real quick. A nod. His eyelids clasped closed a second. “Yeah. Okay.”

I knew I should keep the real questions to a minimum, and this next one was as real as they were going to come. But did it really matter? The authorities knew about him. They knew about Calhoun. They knew about me. Not much was still secret, so I had to ask, because it’d been bothering me since he first broke into Bailey’s sanctuary.

“Were you the payment?”

He drew in a ragged breath, his own nostrils flaring.

I leaned forward. “Did he allow our mother her freedom because she gave you up? Or did he kill her because he found that she’d hidden one of us from him?”

Fury lit up his entire face.

He jerked forward. His throat contorted.

His features twisted, sharpening.

One brief second before he caught himself. He forced himself to relax. Then he lounged back. He swallowed. His shoulders loosened.

He rolled his neck, back in control.

And he smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

I waited.

Nothing.

I frowned. That was it? That was his comeback?

My frown deepened, and feeling some of my monster railing inside of me, I leaned farther over the table and showed him my teeth. “That’s all you have? No smart retort? No jab? No insult?” Were his social skills less developed? “I don’t know what your life was like, but I have to ask: Do you know what mine is like?”

He blinked, and I got him.

There was a sense of wonder there.

I leaned back again. Victoria said he was supposed to study me. She said that’s what he had been doing, what Calhoun thought he had been doing.

If he had, he would come back with something. Anything. Even an old insult that Matt might’ve used. A little quip. But I was getting nada from him.

He hadn’t been studying me.

“What were you doing?”

His eyebrows flew back up.

He saw it. He knew I had him, but he didn’t cover it up. He didn’t slam a wall down. Instead, he let me see him, and then he said, “I won’t.” His head lowered closer to the table, closer to me. “Not here.”

Oh yeah.

We were doing the twin thing, already.

I got his message loud and clear.

I nodded, standing up from the table.

I left that room knowing one thing: I needed to break him out of FBI custody.

Bright and Wilson were waiting for me in the hallway. Both were not happy.