Guess I was right about the estranged baby mother. Why else would Chad buy someone a place like this? A house I was damn sure was valuedat leastfour mil.
The woman’s leaf-shaped eyes watched me with a certain leeriness, her smile hesitant. On her tiny feet she graced up to us and held out her hand to me. “Hi, Jhay. I’m Clementine. It’s nice to finally meet you… instead of just hearing about you.”
Eyebrow arched, I took her hand and shook but slid my eyes to Chad.
Escaping my questioning stare, he quickly stepped to the Clementine person and wrapped her in a tight hug. They shared some kind of look when they broke apart, and I decided to stay quiet until one of them chose to tell me what the hell was happening here.
“Mentally preparing himself?” Chad asked Clementine.
With a chesty sigh, she nodded. “Yep.”
Chad tsked in disapproval. “Go get him, Clem. Slap him across the face if you need to and tell him it’s from me.”
Without waiting for the woman’s response, as though it were an order and not a request, Chad got behind me, clapped his hands on my shoulders, and propelled me further into the room. He sat me down on one of the chocolate-brown leather couches. And sweet Lord, the damned things were even more comfortable than they looked.
Clementine left the room to do Chad’s bidding, and Chad moved with an easy flow in a home that wasn’t his. Over to a wet bar, he poured two fingers of Scotch from a decanter in a whiskey glass, then moved quietly back across the room and handed it to me.
I took it without argument, because his pouring Scotch for me could only mean one thing: I’d be needing it.
We waited.
Chad paced while I sipped my hard liquor.
Donkey?s years later, Clementine came floating back into the room with a fit, dark-haired man tailing her; his gaze fixed on me over the small woman’s head. And as he got closer, I frowned, thinking he looked distinctly familiar, a face from a distant memory.
Tall, muscular, olive-skinned, with hair as black as mine, and eyes like the Pacific Ocean. No denying his handsomeness, but I felt like I knew him. It was too weird how much he resembled my—
I shot up from the couch like there were giant needles in the cushions, the whiskey glass sliding from my fingers and greeting the ground in shards.
Oh.
My.
God.
“Ricardo?” My voice was near-inaudible, nothing but a tiny catch of breath. No volume, no conviction.
“Hey, sis.” His smile was tentative, uncertain.
He took a step toward me, reaching out as if to touch me, but I jerked back and dodged behind Chad, using him as shield from…from my own brother.
A brother who was supposed to be dead. But was here in flesh and blood, alive and well. Healthier and happier than I would ever live to be.
Ricardo’s shoulders sagged, crestfallen, sadness creeping in his eyes.
I pushed hard at Chad’s back, and when he spun around, watching me with anxious eyes, I demanded, “What the fuck is this?”
Chad scrubbed his hands down his face, and with a throaty noise, moved to the couch and sat his ass down on the handle. “Ricardo was my fraternal brother, Jhay. And you…you wereeverything. I couldn’t save your parents any more than I could pull a trigger and kill either of you. I couldn’t…I couldn’t run with both of you. So like I told you, I threw you in on the ‘freedom for legacy’ deal with my father: you get exempted from the assassination and he would take you in, ensure you receive your family’s inheritance, then send you back to the US when you’re old enough…” He expelled a loud breath, no doubt mentally beating himself for being stupid enough to believe Rafail would’ve kept his end of the bargain. “For Ricardo… I’d had to find another way to save him.”
I got it. He couldn’t run with me, because Liz was already taking my place…I was a little unripe girl, not half as important as her. I couldn’t have brought him pleasure on his joyride to the States. So he chose to run withher, his uncle’s mistress, and left me behind with his monster of a father.
“How?” My voice was so empty, a whisper into an airless world.
“Kill-Ring,” he said with a simple shrug. “Not the one with the powder poison like you tried to use on me. The one with—”
“The microscopic needle,” I finished. “You swapped the poison with a heavy sedative and injected him with it by stealth before you shot him so the others would think he’s dead.”
A nod from Chad confirmed my calculations. “Verdin, he was the man I made lock you in your room, because he didn’t know of my plans; he was the report man, the one who my father sent along to bear witness that I did the job. The second man, Havil, he knew because I’d paid him off—he was an in-training recruit who wanted to run with me. And that was his opportunity.
