Page 19 of Twins for the Enemy

“Bullshit.” I drag her closer to me, crushing her hands between our chests. They’re cold against my skin. “Tell me. What exactly did you hear?”

“Nothing,” she repeats. “It took me a while to sneak around without being seen. I ran into that room whileyour girlfriend was looking behind her. I thought it was the best position, but that hawk sculpture is in the way and all your sweet nothings were too quiet to hear. Why does it matter?”

I stare at her. Those soft green eyes glare back at me. If she’s lying, she’s lying incredibly well. I look over my shoulder. It’s true that the hawk statue is in the way. She wouldn’t have been able to see Ellie clearly.

Ellie. I didn’t put her first last time, but this time, she is the only thing that matters.

“Let’s go,” I say, changing my grasp to grip onto her wrist. “Dinner is over.”

“What if I’m still eating?”

“I don’t care.”

I half-drag her back to her room. When I stop in front of it, she bumps into me. Looking down at her, she seems smaller. She seems vulnerable.

With slightly less force, I nudge her into the room.

“Have a good night,” I say, starting toclose the door.

“Bite me.”

I close the door and lock it. I shake my head. She may have intended it as an insult, but it sounded a lot like an invitation.

I watch the sunrise, but it’s not some peaceful endeavor. I hate it. I haven’t slept, I haven’t fucked, I’ve just watched the goddamn sun do the same thing it does every second of every day.

The glows of oranges and yellow remind me of the fire Farah started.

They also remind me of how she burned for me the night I took her virginity, incandescent and with a gravitational force that’s impossible to pull away from.

I roll over and check my phone.

Usually, I start running two hours before the sun comes up unless I’ve been making calls to Japan orKorea. If that's the case, I start running an hour before sunrise. After the run, I get on the phone and determine if I need to change my tactics to keep the herd moving in the right direction. Everything is about ambition and control.

I’ve become lazy since Farah came into my life. I’ve lost my ambition. I’ve lost my control. I’m an everyday man with nothing to bring into the world but deficiency and dependency.

I cut my teeth on turning the world upside down to throw my enemies off of it. Ellie deserves a brother who will do the same to her enemies. Not someone who becomes unraveled by that enemy simply because she has skin that makes silk feel rough and a flush to her cheeks when she’s aroused.

I get dressed slowly, trying to not imagine it’s her hands trailing up my arms instead of Egyptian cotton or that I’ll never finish buttoning my pants up before her hand is slipping in and turning a late morning into a late afternoon.

It’s been two months since I fucked someone. That’s the problem. I let it go on for too long, and now my libido is turning monstrous.

She’s just a woman, a gender I’ve been around my whole life. There is no enigma here; it is just a failure to prepare for the way that animosity can cross the membrane into desire. It’s biochemistry. It’s a tomb for my common sense.

As I approach her room, it takes me longer to notice than it should have. I see the first wood chip near the leg of a console table. It occurs to me that it’s odd because my cleaning staff is impeccable, and it’s a long way for the wood to travel from the den—the only place we’ve had any stove fires. But my brain discards the oddity in my determination to get to Farah.

It’s not until I see two more wood chips in the hallway that it registers as an ominous sign.

I pick up my pace, but it only takes a few more feet before I see the scattering of wood chips in front of Farah’s room and the hole in the door, nearly four feet in diameter. The lamp with the stone base and oneof the bed frame’s side rails lies in the center of the explosion of wood.

It’s a taunt. She wants me to know exactly how she broke through the door and how I could have stopped her—because I saw her dismantling her bed.

I should be pissed, but the willpower and persistence she exhibited are the kind of qualities I’d kill for in my corporation.

For all the extra space in my thoughts where the anger should expand, it’s taken over by concern. The weather reports broadcast plunging temperatures, and there’s a significantly higher chance she runs into danger in the city than she would have in the small town she’d been hiding in.

I’ll get ahold of Craig. As the Superintendent of Police, he’ll be reluctant to jump into a search for an adult woman who could have disappeared a half hour ago, but with the way he grovels during charity events, he’ll yank out his own teeth to make me happy.

I quickly move down the steps, pulling out my phone. I listen to it ring as I walk into the kitchen.

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