I look down at my feet and kick the door absently with one foot. Inside, I hear Caroline gasp, and I close my eyes against her fear. She’s listening. Of course she is. The smallest sounds are bombs going off to her. She’s nude and tied up. She’s terrified. “Why did you fight us, Rian?”
His blinks slow down. His jaw twitches. He’s caught. “I…I just had second thoughts. I came to my senses, didn’t I?”
His senses.He was inside her when Declan opened that door. And there was a moment there wherewewere the enemies. “She was supposed to be a mark,” I mutter. “But you’ve made her something else.”
Rian scoffs, but there’s no real weight behind it. He leans against the wall like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. I’ve seen Rian bluff his way out of torture, lie to a man while holding his heart in his hands. But now he can’t even lie to me properly. Not when her name hangs between us like a blade we both know is sharp enough to cut through blood ties.
I rub my chin and look away, keeping my face turned toward him even as my eyes follow the sound of Declan’s footsteps above us. “You know,” I say, keeping my voice quiet so neither Caroline nor Declan can hear. “You sent me to stake out the house while you planned to kill her. You didn’t let me in on that.”
“Declan agreed with that plan, Kellan. We thought it would be too much for you to know we planned to kill the children.”
There it is.
Swallowing down my white-hot rage, I shake my head and say quietly, “I don’t kill children.”
Rian shifts uncomfortably. “Declan thought it would be easier for you if you didn’t know ahead of time.”
“Easier,” I repeat, like the word means anything in this context. Those kids aren’t just names or hypothetical variables. I saw them tonight. Declan told me I was staking out the target’s house, getting recon on Caroline. Lying to make me feel useful.
But part of me thinks he wanted me to see the kids, wanted to see if I would still help or if I would intervene. If my conscience would get in the way. Declan doesn’t like anyone in the Crowley family to display a heart of any kind.
At first, I didn’t know whose was whose. Two little girls and a pair of twin boys were playing outside in a plastic kiddie pool in the yard while Caroline’s friend sprayed them with a hose. The friend’s husband came out and hugged her sideways, his arm around her waist. Then he grabbed the hose from her and sprayed her back until she ran from him through the grass.
The girls jumped up out of the pool and chased their dad, and the boys joined in, and then it was obvious. The blonde girls looked too much like their father, and the little boys were clearly twins.
I watched it like it was a scene from a TV show. Something entirely foreign to me. I had never seen anything like it, that kind of playful fun in a family. I knew from Da’s recon that the boys were raised fatherless, and I wondered if those boys felt a pang when they played with someone else’s dad.
And then I started to notice those blue eyes and the little glints of copper in their curls. But that wasn’t it. When I spotted that spray of freckles across the kid’s ankle, my lungs locked up. It was like looking at a ghost of something I never knew I left behind. My stomach twisted—deep and low—like it wanted to purge something I hadn’t even admitted to myself yet. I’d twisted sideways, pulled my leg up against the steering wheel to double-check the pattern I knew was there on my own ankle.
The twins ran in circles around the yard, and my eyes flickered around, trying to find the right one, their curls flying behindthem, their laughs screeching down the sidewalk. I compared birth marks, and I couldn’t deny what I was seeing.
And now that little patch of freckles on my ankle seems to be aching, itching, as I stare down Rian while he tells me about his plan to kill those two little boys as soon as their mom was out of the picture.
The two of them, Declan and Rian, are a pair to be terrified of. Individually is one thing, but they make an evil duo. He’s manipulating me, trying to sell it as a favor. “Don’t do that,” I snap. “You knew I’d say no.That’swhy you didn’t tell me. No other reason.”
He shrugs like he can shrug away his guilt. “Kellan, we have a job to do here.”
“The job is to kill the girl, not her kids.”
“The job is to tie up loose ends.”
“Here’s what happened when you sent me there. I learned that you can keep a secret from me,” I tell him, straightening the cuff of my shirt to busy my hands. “And I saw those kids. You’ve been keeping a secret from both of us.”
Rian doesn’t say anything, but I see in his eyes that he knows what I’m going to say next. “And I see the way you look at her now.”
“What are you saying, Kellan?” He narrows his eyes.
“Those kids favor us. I know my own blood when I see it, Rian.”
It’s slight, just a flicker, but he closes his eyes.
It’s all I need to know that I’m right.
“Jaysus,” I whisper. “Does Declan know?”
Rian shakes his head and runs his hands over his face.
“Are you going to tell him?”
