Page 73 of Bad Blood
It wasanger.
I laid the second picture down on the table, the one depicting a man with Kane’s face.
“Is this a joke?” Kane asked.
“This is the face of the second victim,” I said.Impossible—but not. “It’s funny—no one in Gaither ever mentioned that you had a twin.”
That was the only explanation that made sense—not Kane crumpled at the bottom of the stairs. Not Kane covered in blood.
“Maybe,” I said, slanting my gaze to catch his, “no one in Gaither knew. You told me the other day that growing up, you were the golden son.” I looked down at the photo. “Your brother was something else.”
Sometimes, a profiler didn’t have to know the answers. Sometimes, you just had to know enough to push someone else into filling in the blanks.
“My brother’s name,” Kane said, staring at the picture, “was Darren.” The anger I’d seen in his eyes was replaced with another emotion, something dark, full of loathing and longing. “He used to joke that they’d gotten us mixed up at the hospital—that he was meant to be Kane. In his version, I was Abel.”
“Your brother liked to hurt things.” Dean read between the lines. “He liked to hurt you.”
“He never laid a hand on me,” Kane replied, his voice hollow.
“He made you watch,” Dean said. He knew what that was like—viscerally, in a way he could never forget.
Kane dragged his eyes away from Celine’s drawing. “He hurt a little girl back in California. He was the reason we moved to Gaither.”
When Kane had moved to Gaither, he and his twin were all of nine years old.
“Darren was the reason your father started Serenity.” I could see, now, shades in that action that went beyond the older Darby’s thirst for power and adoration.
In Serenity, I’ve found balance.
In Serenity, I’ve found peace.
“Darren wasn’t allowed to leave the property,” Kane said. “We kept a close eye on him.”
I’d theorized before that Kane had developed his unnatural calmness as a result of growing up around someone who was unstable, volatile, unpredictable.
“Your father’s followers kept Darren a secret.”
Kane closed his eyes. “We all did.”
I thought of Malcolm Lowell, saying that his grandson had found his way into the compound. I thought about the animals—
They weren’t clean kills. Those animals died slowly, and they died in pain.
“Your brother and Mason Kyle were friends.”
I thought of Nightshade and the monster he’d become. Had he been that way even as a child? A sadist?
“My parents thought Mason was good for Darren. Good for us. It was almost like…”
“Almost like you were normal kids,” Agent Sterling filled in. “Almost like your brother didn’t have a fondness for hurting animals—and people, when he could.”
Kane’s head bent so low that his chin nearly gouged his chest. “I let my guard down. I let myself believe that my parents were wrong about Darren. He wasn’t broken. He’d just made a mistake. Just one mistake, that was all….”
“And then came the Kyle murders.” Dean knew, better than anyone, what it felt like to carry the blood of someone else’s victims on your hands.
“Darren went missing that day.” Kane closed his eyes, reliving what he’d seen as a child. “I knew he’d gone to Mason’s. I followed, but by the time I got there…”
Anna Kyle, dead. Her husband, dead. Her father, dying…
