Page 88 of Second Story

I can barely take in what follows.

“I’d call in every favour to get to see the fucker who got you scarred arrested. Been gathering the data for years. Why do you think I changed career paths?”

Isaac stalks across the street our way without looking, and horns blast. He picks up speed, sprinting between cars, and I know violence about to happen when I see it.

For the second time today, I get between my brother and someone who trusts me.

I plant one hand on Isaac’s chest, the other on Josh’s, any hope of a life including both men hanging from a cliff edge.

Isaac tried to save me once on a beach. My brother has apparently tried to do the same by hunting down who hurt me. Right now, I need another hero to swoop in and save all three of us from falling.

I wouldn’t have guessed he’d be a red-haired kid from Cornwall.

24

ISAAC

“Sir? Mr. Webber?”

I barely hear that shout. I’m too busy yelling at the double of someone I love.

“Stop hurting Joe.”

Fuck finding my inner lion, or thinking I’d ever accessed its roar. The real deal thunders from me the second I leave one defeated person inside a prison to see Joe wearing the exact same expression.

He’s as crushed as Mum, and if I could bring fiction to life I wouldn’t only roar. Right now, I’d breathe fire for him. Incinerate every single person who makes him feel less than perfect, starting with his brother. I’d spit fire and leave cinders for Joe. Snatch him up, unfurl leathery wings, and fly him away from a family who have no idea that he’s the best of all of them. I have to settle for roaring again.

“Stop fucking hurting him. You’ve done that enough already.”

Traffic roars too, and so does the blood in my ears. It spreads to my vision. A red haze filters this view of pain in progress. I’monly stopped from switching places with Joe and then taking a swing at a da Silva with a black soul by what I lip-read from a twin with a snowy white one.

Joe mouths a name.

Noah.

I can’t process why he says that. Can’t do anything but lurch to shove his twin further away from him until Joe’s arms lock around me, and I guess that’s a choice made.

He’s protecting his brother.

I can’t even blame him. It’s only what I’ve spent the last year doing, and what I’ll need to do for even longer now Mum has officially set legal wheels in motion.

I’m still furious for Joe. Still spitting fire and only wanting to leave ashes. Or I would be if Joe didn’t manhandle me against his chest, hands rubbing my back as if I need comfort instead of restraining.

It’s confusing.

So is his brother asking, “I hurt Joe?” with so much disbelief it sounds authentic.

I’d list examples for him if Joe didn’t confuse me again by saying, “Noah! What are you doing here? You okay, mate?”

My blood-red haze recedes once a different shade of red comes into focus. Noah sprints like I did moments earlier, only he doesn’t dodge inner-city traffic. He runs from a bus stop with something fluttering in his hand like I last saw bunting do at Glynn Harber.

Noah shoves what he’s carried all the way from Cornwall into my hands.

“Mr. Webber. Got you something for Lenny.”

I clutch a page torn from a scrapbook, but this map Noah has followed step by step to end up here isn’t what he wants to give to me. Yes, it led him to us, but Noah roots in a backpack to pull out another gift he’s brought to the city—a mud-stainedenvelope. There’s mud under his nails too. It’s as red-tinged as his freckles, and I’m no forensic expert like Joe’s brother, but even I can guess that’s Cornish soil, and that Noah has dug up the contents of a time capsule.

He looks between Joe and his brother, perhaps trying to tell them apart. Joe makes that easier for him by nudging up one sleeve, only Noah doesn’t hand that envelope to him or to Mum’s new legal counsel, who crosses the street to join us.

---