“He did not. I was not broken.”
She said it with such vehemence that her brother’s head snapped up. “You were. You cried, Ed. You never cry over a man.”
“Wrong. I cried over Tad.”
He made a face. He had never liked her high school boyfriend. In fact, now that she thought about it, he didn’t like any of the men she’d dated. Was that why she had never let him meet Kap?
She pushed that thought aside.
“You take the first three and I’ll take the next. Think of everything you heard about them through gossip, even unsubstantiated.”
He looked like he wanted to say more, but instead, he nodded. They worked in silence for a while. The only sound was the scratching of their pens as they made notes and the turning of pages in the notebooks they were writing in. They could always do this, even when they were kids. They had that weird twin connection that even if they were irritating the hell out of each other, they liked to be close. Codependent? Yep, but with their childhood as the children of CIA operatives, they could only trust each other.
“Why did you cry over that asshole?”
“I was sixteen and he broke my soft heart,” she said, sarcasm dripped from every word.
“And your head? Is it screwed on straight?”
“Has it ever been?”
His eyes narrowed. “Ed, I just want to make sure…”
She sighed and reached across the table to take his hand. They had been through hell together these last three years. “I’m good. Don’t worry about me.”
He turned his hand so his palm was facing up, and he could grab her hand. “But I do. They never…they never came after you before.”
“But what if they did?”
He let go of her hand. “What?”
“What if they used you to lure me out?”
He closed his eyes. “Ian was thinking the same thing, which means you got shot on purpose.”
“Of course I did. That was no accident,” she said, humor lacing her voice.
He opened his eyes, regret shimmering. “Don’t joke.”
“Hey,” she said, getting up from her chair and going over to him. “We have to joke so we don’t fall apart. You know that. But either way, I think they wanted both of us.”
He frowned up at her. “Both of us?”
She nodded. “I think they took you because you were the one going around to other sites.”
One of his jobs for Carlyle was PR. He would go around and drum up business for their company, but he would also do a little work for the CIA. She had done the same thing up until the year before his abduction.
“It could have been me.”
He sighed. “If you say so.”
He had never been so pessimistic, but forty-eight hours in hell could really fuck a person up.
“I do. So, that might help us. Let’s keep working on these lists. I want everything you can think of, too. We both knew a lot of the same people, but we also had different relationships. Plus, men are gossipier.”
“I take offense to that,” Ian said, walking into the room. She rolled her eyes.
“Give me a break. Y’all are always worse than we are. Including at Dillon. I have never heard so much illicit gossip from Emily, and you know how much she talks.”
