Page 22 of Man of Lies

No note. No call. No trace of Ben anywhere, not even a mug left in the sink. Just the ankle monitor, a condition of his provisional release, clipped and dropped neatly on the counter, as polite and final as a middle finger.

So now it was on me…and I'd never felt so clueless.

I'd spent most of my life fighting for Ben, but I had no idea what was going on in his head. I'd even called Gideon, hoping—stupidly—that maybe Ben had gone to Eden. But he hadn't. Of course, he hadn't. Gideon's voice had been gentle in a way that only made it worse, and I hung up with the sick certainty that I'd just admitted I didn't know my own twin anymore.

I'd been circling the city for hours, scouring every place Ben might go when he needed time to think. I checked the all-night diner Ben used to love, with the terrible coffee and pinball machines he always kicked when they jammed. I hit a few other places a man like him might go to blow off steam: twenty-four-hour gyms, gas stations on the outskirts of town, even the old trailer park we swore we'd never set foot in again. But I was hunting a ghost, a man who didn't seem to exist anymore.

Now I was down to the last place that made sense—our old middle school. A squat, ugly building we used to hate until Ben had figured out how to jimmy the fire escape and reach the roof. We used to sit up there for hours, smoking stolen cigarettes and daring each other to spit on the principal's car. Pretending we weren't scared to go home and see which mood mom was in that night:Leave it to BeaverorBreaking Bad.

It was a long shot, but that was all my life had ever been.

The fire escape was still there, clinging to the side of the building by a few rusted bolts and swaying just enough to keep my pulseelevated. I gripped the rail and started the climb, each step groaning under my boots as if the corroded metal might give way any second. It had felt easier when I was fifteen, back when I was all knees and elbows and always landed on my feet like a cat. As a grown man in slacks and a dress shirt, the whole endeavor felt absurd. But my muscles remembered the path.

I pulled myself over the ledge with a grunt and dusted my scraped palms on my slacks, taking a second to catch my breath.

The roof looked exactly the same: flat, exposed, and quiet, in the eerie way that forgotten places always were. At first, it looked abandoned, but then the glowing tip of a cigarette flared in the darkness. My eyes adjusted, and there he was—a broad-shouldered silhouette, perched on the roof's edge with his legs dangling into the void.

Ben didn't look up when I approached. His shoulders were hunched, elbows braced on his thighs, a cigarette burning low between his fingers. The cherry flared with each slow drag, casting the barest red glow across his scarred knuckles, but otherwise, he didn't move. From a distance, he looked like a gargoyle carved from stone. Heavy, so heavy, and not just because of the stacks of muscle he'd added in prison. So much weight was dragging at him that the roof didn't seem solid enough to support him. Like any second, the whole structure might give way—and he'd just keep sinking.

His strength had always come from stillness, but this wasn't the same. He didn't look like someone trying to be alone; he looked like a man who'd forgotten how to be anything else.

"Figured it'd be you," he muttered without turning his head.

I crossed the gravel-pocked rooftop and sank beside him with less grace than I would've liked. We sat without speaking, a long stretch of silence unfurling between us as we stared down at the skeletal outline of the schoolyard. A breeze pushed the empty swings and stirred up the grass, bleached pale beneath floodlights that hadn't worked in years. It felt wrong, searching for a way to break the ice and coming up empty. I never lacked for words, but here I was, fumbling like a stranger beside the one person I was supposed to understand better than anyone. But the truth was, I didn't know what he needed anymore.

Eventually, I cleared my throat and grabbed the safest topic floating by. "I didn't know you were smoking again."

Ben blew a stream of smoke through his nose and held the cigarette out in my direction without looking. "Not a whole lot else to do in prison."

I didn't smoke. Never had, not even back when we were teenagers and I used to bum cigarettes off kids in the boys' bathroom to resell for spare change. Adrenaline was my vice. That's what I chased when my skin felt too tight to contain me.

Maybe he'd forgotten that.

I took the cigarette anyway, grimaced, and took a quick puff. The taste coated my tongue, pungent and acrid in a way that never bothered me when kissing Silas. But it did now. I took another drag, if only for something to do with my hands, and squinted at him through a drift of smoke.

We had the same black hair—or we would've if his wasn't buzzed so short—and the same blue eyes. He'd always been a big man, my height but twice as broad, but prison had filled him out like a heavyweight fighter. His biceps strained the seams of his cheapt-shirt. He didn't seem comfortable in his clothes. In his skin. I'd noticed it the first time we hugged after he exited the prison gates. He moved like he didn't trust his own strength. Like he was afraid of hurting whatever he touched.

I flicked a glance down at his bare ankle. "Missing something?" I asked, voice dry as dust.

He rolled his eyes. "I just wanted a few hours of real freedom," he muttered. "You can tell my babysitter to unclench."

"He's worried about you." The bite in my voice surprised me, but Ben didn't so much as blink.

"He shouldn't be."

"What about me?" I demanded, passing him the cigarette before I crushed it between my fingers. "You didn't think he'd call me the second he couldn't find you? I've been scouring every ditch in the parish for hours, hoping I wouldn't find you face down in a puddle."

He let out a humorless bark of laughter. "Not yet."

"No," I said flatly. I didn't raise my voice, but I wanted to. "Instead, you're trespassing on school grounds at two in the morning. I'm not even here as your brother, you know that? I'm here as the attorney for a dumbass client who just pissed all over the terms of his conditional release and thinks that's not gonna end with a squad car and a cell."

Ben didn't try to defend himself. He just turned his head and looked at me—really looked—for what felt like the first time in years. The man I saw staring back at me wasn't the brother who'd stood between me and hell without question. There wassomething colder in his eyes now. He'd been stripped down to a base model of only the parts necessary to survive.

"You look tired," he said quietly.

That was all I heard lately, like it was news and I didn't see it every time I looked in the mirror. The hollow eyes and sharper angles of my face weren't just exhaustion. It was erosion. The same slow, quiet pressure that had been grinding me down for years.

The only time it let up, the only time I felt like a man and not a machine, was with Silas. With him, I could breathe. Not because he was soft and made me soft, but because he saw right through me and still didn't ask me to be anything other than what I was.

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