“I don’t know,” Matteo said quietly. “I’ve often wondered that myself. Pondering over the Ram can be infuriating at times.”
“We have more pressing matters to attend to,” Jin said.
Matteo nodded. “Now that we know your parents are alive and a part of the Ram’s operation to weaponize vampires, they’re a crucial part of taking her down.”
“Are they?” Jin asked. “Penn only said they created an inoculation for humans that was being used on vampires. We don’t even have confirmation that they’realive.”
“Penn got confirmation,” Matteo said. Arthie didn’t know if she wanted Jin to know that so soon.
“So he lied?” Jin’s brow furrowed, then he shifted his umbrella from one hand to the other, his next words a whisper. “They’re alive.” He turned to Arthie and looked away. “They’re—why would he lie to us? After the trust we ourselves placed in him?”
Arthie had wondered the same.
“I don’t think blaming him will do us any favors,” Matteo said. “Is this not a good thing? You almost sound like you’re trying to argue against finding them.”
“I’m againstusingthem,” Jin snapped. “You’re referring to them as if they’re round two of the Ram’s ledger, as if they’re an inanimate object we can retrieve and use to do our bidding.”
“They’re as much a tool to the Ram as the ledger was,” Matteo countered. “A far more substantial one at that.”
“And you’re deciding to make this about you,” Arthie said to Jin.
Jin went perfectly still. The lanterns set on various crates cast his unmoving shadow along the wall.
“Yes, I think I am,” Jin began before Matteo lifted his hands.
“What did I sayonlya moment ago?”
But Jin wasn’t finished with her. “Just as you made the past ten years about yourself.”
His tone was so curt it was almost comical. Somewhere in the fishy mess, Chester chortled, but Arthie didn’t think it was funny.
“Everything we did over the past ten years was forus,” Arthie flung back. “Spindrift, our cons, stealing Calibore. Did you not benefit as much as I did?”
There was more she wanted to say. More that bubbled to her lips but she fought down, like how she’d spent just as much time trying to find his parents, following leads, reaching out to people she could trust, if only because of the blackmail she had on them. How Spindrift had started as a way to distract him, not her.
“I’d know how to answer that if I knew you,” Jin replied.
Any response Arthie could have thrown back shriveled in her suddenly parched throat.
There was no one else alive who knew her as well as he did, but how could she tell him that? How, when his eyes were bright with anger, when everyone was staring at them, waiting to hear what she would say next?
“Maybe I was right not to trust you,” she said instead. “Look at us, now that you know the truth. We’ve never been further apart.”
Jin snorted, as if he’d been waiting for something more. “Of course you’d say something like that.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You only ever deflect and hide and swallow how you truly feel. All that talk of vengeance and getting back at the peakies for what they’d done to you? It’s become your shield. A drug you keep taking to numb everything else.”
Arthie pulled back as if he’d slapped her. She tried to do what hesaid she did best: to tamp down her emotions, to bottle them back up, but she was beginning to spiral; that bottle was starting to fracture, leaking from every crack.
They’d fought before. They might not have been siblings by blood, but they were in every other sense of the word. They’d fought over everything and nothing. None of those fights made their bond feel so fragile; none of them made the act of amending seem so distant.
None of those fights had ever been so loud and truly, terribly angry.
“I almost died that night because of this shield,” she said, and then her voice dropped. “You didn’t even come to see if I’d lived.”
A line feathered along his jaw at that. “As if you did much more than turn me and flee. You might as well have left me for dead.”
