Page 50 of Twins for the Enemy

We could stay here all day, getting so familiar with each other that we could never wash each other off.

Kieran’s phone pings loudly. He kisses me deeply once more before slowly getting up. I gently pull back down on his shoulder.

“Ignore it,” I plead.

“It’s the surveillance system,” he says, squeezing my hand before gently placing it down on the mattress. “It’s probably just an animal, but I still need to check.”

As he grabs his pants to find his phone, I enjoy the view of his back again. I wish I’d traced more of it while he was lying here. I wish I’d drawn up a pact on his skin, making him promise that I’d be more than a flicker of a memory, no matter what happened.

He turns back toward me and I can already feel how flimsy the moment is.

“What?” I ask.

“It’s your brother.” He stands up, grabbing his boxer briefs and pants. He yanks them up, the simmering anger apparent in his harsh movements. “I’ll deal with him. Stay here.”

“Wait.” I quickly stand up. “I want to talk to him.”

“No,” he states, barely glancing at me. “Did you already forget what happened when you visited him? I’ll deal with it.”

“What happened isn’t his fault,” I say. “He’s my brother. I’ll talk to him.”

“Farah,” he sighs. “You don’t understand—”

“I understand my brother very well,” I interject. “You’re the one who doesn’t understand. My father… my father was a piece of shit. Whenever I did something that would make him mad—which could be anything—Neal would redirect that anger toward him. And that messed Neal up. He started doing drugs to cope with everything. Everything he’s going through, it’s because of me.”

“It’s not because of you.”

“It is.” I grab my clothes, yanking them on just as roughly as he’d taken them off. “We could talk around it all day. I understand my father is responsible for what he did, but it doesn’t change how I feel about Neal. I owe him.”

“You don’t owe him anything,” Kieran says, his hands clenched at his sides. “He made his own choices. He’s older than you. He—”

“Stop, Kieran,” I say. “Watch what you say about him. He’s my brother.”

Kieran lets out a heavy breath, glancing over at the doorway. I expect him to storm away and throw Neal out like he’s desperate to do, but he doesn’t move.

“I don’t care what Neal does,” he says. “Unless it involves you. He’s a threat to you. He got you into that situation with the drug deal. That whole thing could have been far worse, and he doesn’t… he isn’t capable of prioritizing you right now.”

“Whether or not I care about people isn’t dependent on if they can prioritize me,” I say. “And that situationwith the drug dealer wasn’t that bad. I owe Neal. At the very least, I owe him a conversation that doesn’t include you.”

Fully dressed now, I stride past him, avoiding his gaze. As I’m about to pass through the door, I feel his grip on my arm. It’s not tight and he doesn’t yank on me, but it’s enough to make me stop. I look up at him.

“For two months, I searched for you,” he says. “I knew your full name from before, but even with all of my resources, I couldn’t find you. You weren’t using any credit cards, you weren’t using a cell phone, and you didn’t keep in contact with your roommate. You were a ghost. I was desperate to find you.”

My heart is pounding in my chest. The puzzle pieces start to fall into place. I want to place my hand over his mouth and stop him from talking, but my hands are frozen at my sides.

“From my research, I knew about your brother’s addiction. I went to him. I offered him a fix. He resisted for less than ten minutes. He let me listen to all thevoicemails you left him. He let me write down the number to your burner phone.”

“I don’t believe you,” I bite out. I shake my arm loose from him and continue out into the hallway. I try to push away his words, but they crowd inside my head.

Neal was the only one who knew where I was. Kieran is intimidating, I know that more than most, but if Neal had known about that, he would have wanted to protect me from him.

Neal couldn’t have cared less that I was Kieran’s prisoner.

It’s nothing new, so it shouldn’t hurt.

But it was the last strand holding me up.

Chapter sixteen

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