Page 63 of The Blonde Who Came in from the Cold
“What are you talking about?”
“I know you remember. What I told you—about my sister...”
“There are two of you.” He still kind of couldn’t believe it.
He’d never seen her look away from a challenge, back down froma fight. Alexandra Sterling wasn’t someone who looks the other way, period. But that’s exactly what she did.
“I’m too much. Isn’t that what you said?”
“Sterling—”
“You’re right. I was always too much—even before I was born. I took up too much room, and I consumed too much energy, and I drained everything and everyone around me. I almost killed her. I almost killed the person I love most, and I didn’t even have opposable thumbs yet.” She gave a sad, dry laugh. “Imagine what I can do now that I have knives.”
She sounded insane because that was how she wanted to sound. She didn’t want anyone to see how raw that wound was—how much it had shaped her and changed her and brought her to that moment and that world.
“Hey—”
“It was her heart. Mostly. It was small and underdeveloped and full of holes like Swiss cheese.”
“Sterling—”
“She was just a few days old the first time they cut her open. We were lying in the nursery, me a baby giant and her... They had to do it again, of course. And again. And again. My first memory was of a children’s hospital in Germany, shouting that the doctors should take my heart instead. I wasn’t using it.” It was the saddest smile he’d ever seen. “Haven’t used it since.”
“Sterling.”
“Good night, King—”
“Alex.”
He wasn’t sure if he’d ever said her name before. He didn’t stop to think what it meant, the fact that he couldn’t remember. “I didn’t mean...” All those times he’d said she was too much—too bold, too brave, too strong, and too foolish. She’d been told she was too much her whole life, but—“I like your heart just the way it is.”
She nodded slightly and started to turn but looked back at him, like she’d almost forgotten—
“She’s okay, you know? My sister. She’s... happy? I think?”
“Are you happy?”
If he lived to be a hundred, he’d never know what made him ask it. What made her stop and look at the lights on the far coast and the dark water—the vast sky full of twinkling stars. And him.
“I am tonight.”
Long after she was gone, King just sat there, thinking to himself that, for the first time in a long time, so was he.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Alex
“Hello, dear.”
Alex had honestly forgotten Merritt was down below, which might have been a mark on the “maybe Alex isn’t cut out for covert operations” side of the ledger, but Alex didn’t show her surprise—which might have been a mark on the other one.
“I don’t suppose there’s any chance you didn’t hear that?”
She looked across the plush room to where Merritt stood, gazing out the windows at the lights that dotted the coastline. The older woman gave her a look that was somewhere betweenyou wishandgive me some credit, but her smile was soft and indulgent. “You’re going to be good, dear. But for now, I’m still better.”
Merritt walked to a bar cart and poured two glasses of something dark and liquid. She handed one to Alex. “Michael’s family—”
“I know. He’s a baby duke...”
