Liars' Legacy

by Taylor Stevens

  Befuddled, perplexed, she said, “I don’t understand.”

  No, that was wrong. The tone was too gentle.

  Gentle was unbelievable.

  She added an edge. “What are you doing here, Chris? I mean, not just here”—she raised her wrists as far as the binding would allow and tugged for emphasis—“but here in Prague, and what have you done to my fucking brother?”

  “That wasn’t me,” he said. “Had absolutely nothing to do with me.”

  The words made no sense.

  And then they made too much sense.

  Her brother, her own goddamn, son-of-a-shit-face, quisling-ass brother had cut her out and let her drown. She should have seen it, him being so goddamn nice last night, pulling out a deck of cards like when they were kids, trying to pretend that they even knew how to just be siblings, and that Clare, for everything else she’d taught them, hadn’t failed to teach them how to be a family. He had known what was coming—no, had planned what was coming—and had roped in an accomplice to handle the dirty work, and that bullshit hurt worse than if he’d just been his usual asshole self.

  Holden pulled the chair out from the tiny side table, spun the seat away from the bed, straddled it, draped his forearms across the high back, and studied her.

  She couldn’t stomach looking at him.

  She turned to the window, said, “Where is he?”

  “Wherever it is he wanted to be, I’d guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “I’m not working with him, Julia. Not siding with him against you, either.”

  She glanced at him, went back to staring at the window, and summoned enough water for a few tears to leak visibly down her face.

  He said, “Not that it likely matters from your perspective, but I hate doing this just as much as you hate it being done.”

  “You’re not the one duct-taped and zip-tied to a bed.”

  “That was for my protection,” he said. “I like being alive.”

  The subtle admission within admission almost made her smile, reminded her of why she liked him—God—no—stupid, stupid, what the stupid—had—reminded her why she had liked him enough not to kill him when killing him was all that mattered.

  What a fucking mistake that’d been.

  She summoned another round of leaky eye faucet.

  He said, “Couldn’t afford to have you swinging at me as soon as you opened your eyes. I’m cutting you free. Just need you to hear me out first.”

  She refused to give him the satisfaction of a reaction, any reaction.

  He reached round to the back of his waistband, pulled out a SIG, set it on the desk. “Show of good faith,” he said. “That’ll be there waiting when you’re loose.”

  She had nothing to lose by calling his bluff. “Show me,” she said.

  He picked up the weapon, released the magazine, turned it round-count forward for inspection. Eased back the slide, showed her the chambered round, let the slide go, snapped the magazine back into place, and set the SIG back on the desk. She watched his hands, big hands, capable hands in strong, smooth, fluid movement, and caught herself.

  No, that was not where her head needed to be.

  He said, “I told you in Houston you were going to need an ally, told you I wanted to be your friend. That’s what I’m doing here. I tagged along as an extra set of eyes and an extra rifle in case shit went sideways. Figured if you got lucky, if everything turned out on the level, I’d say hello, say good-bye, and bow out unless invited to stay. But the venue changed and you two split up, and the only way to find the next rendezvous was by following one of you to it.”

  She cast him a side-eye glare.

  “I’m already on your shit list,” he said. “Thought I should put it all out there in one go. Yes, I followed you into France. No, I didn’t mention your little detour to your brother. He spotted me in Frankfurt, confirmed me again in Savignyplatz, knew I was following you, and used that to find me once you got to Prague.”

  “Let me guess,” she said. “He told you what was going to happen. Said he had to do it alone because he couldn’t trust me, and you went right along with it, because what kind of a dick would you be if you didn’t show up?”

  Holden sighed.

  She coughed out a mirthless laugh. “Dangle a princess, threaten some dragons, and the big dumb knight goes charging in. Goddamn story of my life. My mother, brother, now you . . . everyone making decisions on my behalf, choosing what they think is best for me like they’re God’s gift to an incapable half-wit.”

  Holden looked at her funny.

  She could read the hurt right off him.

  He said, “You think I didn’t see your brother’s bullshit and call him on it?” The tone in his voice edged up. “We could have gone in circles, playing I know you know all night. I didn’t do this for you or for him. I did it for me.”

  His word choice threw her, forced a pause.

  She said, “I never took you for a sadist.”

  “And I never took you for an idiot.”

  She kicked the bed and thrashed, left, right, left, attention-drawing racket that forced the legs up off the floor and scooted the frame out of place.

  He watched impassively, as if she’d finally given him what he expected and now he waited for her to tire herself out. She didn’t care. He’d said his piece, he’d made his promise. Either his word was good or his word was trash. It made no difference, because the two things she could count on were that big boy here wouldn’t kill her, and that he couldn’t keep her tied up forever.

  Holden pulled a knife off his belt and waited.

  She slowed and stopped, out of breath, out of strength.

  God, she hated the way sedation messed with energy like that.

  He said, “You finished?”

  She glared.

  He unfolded the blade, knelt by her right foot, slipped the tip between zip tie and tape and cut the zip tie free. Tension released. With just the tape, she had stretch and room to move. That was a start.

  He said, “I’ve watched you work, Julia, and I spent days pent up with Robert, forced to listen to him pine for you. I know you far better than one stranger has a right to know another.” He stepped around to the other side of the bed. “There are a handful of people in this world capable of understanding what we’ve lived and how we think, even fewer who’d accept that truth exactly as it is. That matters for something.”

  He cut through the zip tie on her right foot and, as with the first, left the tape in place. “I hated your brother’s plan,” he said. “Hated it on principle, hated the unfairness to you. But mostly, I hated it because any hope of friendship is impossible so long as I’m considered a tool and a weapon in your sibling war.”

  He sliced through the tape that bound her thighs and chest.

  “I didn’t care that he tried to play me, I cared that he tried to play me against you. What I wanted was his word. I wanted off his board for good.”

  He reached for her left hand, cut the zip tie, moved back around to her right, and did the same there. “I upheld my end of the deal,” he said. “So now, here we are.”

  She rolled her eyes and met his gaze.

  He snapped the knife closed.

  He’d cut the zip ties, but she was still taped to the bed.

  “A quarter-inch strip,” he said. He motioned from hand to foot with the knife. “Leave the rest of you like that and cut your left hand mostly free. A quarter-inch strip will buy me all the time I need to clear the room before you get loose. Gun’s on the other side of the bed. By the time you reach it and aim for the door, I’ll be gone. So the question I’m asking myself is, Do I act the fool and stick around, hoping you want a friend as much as I do, or do I walk now and spend the rest of my life thinking back on this moment, wondering what might have been if I’d remained?”

  She shut her eyes to block him out.

  This vulnerable honesty thing he did made it really damn hard to stay angry.

  Not
that she didn’t know how to handle an occasional bout of sincerity. Just that with anyone else, she’d have used it to crawl inside their head, and here it crawled inside hers, forcing her to acknowledge the anguish that made her want to lash out, reminding her that what burned on the inside was Jack’s doing, and projecting his betrayal onto someone else only made her the bigger asshole.

  Holden re-straddled the chair.

  She cursed him inside her head.

  She didn’t know what she wanted, but she did know she didn’t want him to leave, and that was twice the mindfuck because Jack knew it, too, would have counted on it, which meant more was coming and Jack was still making decisions on her behalf and the only way to free herself from him was to choose a path she didn’t want.

  She clenched her jaw shut and, muted, screamed.

  She said, “I hate him, Chris. Sometimes I truly, truly hate him.”

  “I don’t blame you,” he said. “But where does that leave me?”

  She didn’t know the answer to that. Honestly, she didn’t.

  “I don’t want to kill you,” she said.

  He said, “That’s hardly reassuring.”

  “I do still want to hurt you.”

  He pondered for a beat. “Fair enough, I suppose.”

  He stepped around the bed for her left hand, unfolded the blade and, for the first time, cut through tape. She waited, watching, rage and frustration, exhaustion and emotional overload colliding into a need for control, watching until the blade cut clean through, and she lunged to snatch the knife.

  He was faster than expected, but he flinched, nicked her wrist, and for a fraction of a second, his expression hovered between horror and panic.

  That alone was worth shedding blood for.

  She laughed, she couldn’t help it.

  And with the laughter, rage and tension eased.

  Holden stared at her, mouth agape.

  That only made her laugh harder, silent, body-racking manic laughter that sent relief flooding her system and real tears streaming down her face.

  He said, “You’re an asshole.”

  Her one free hand wiped her face. “Yeah,” she said. “I am.”

  He placed the knife tip against her left foot.

  “Stop moving,” he said.

  She stilled to let him do his thing, and once she was fully loose, seriousness descended as quickly as the laughter had. She scooted into a seated position, tore the tape mittens off her fingers, and rubbed her wrists and ankles.

  “Do this to me again,” she said, “I’ll slit your throat.”

  She wasn’t kidding, and he knew she wasn’t.

  He nodded, and silence and emptiness followed, as if reaching this truce was as far as either of them had thought out. There was no “What next?” No purpose.

  At least she sure as hell didn’t have one.

  Holden offered her a bottle of water, said, “You hungry?”

  She said, “I’m not going to do it.”

  He said, “Do what?”

  “Tell me I’m wrong,” she said. “God, please tell me I’m wrong. But I’m not. I know I’m not. My brother did not go to all this trouble to push you and me together and get himself abducted just so he could walk off alone into the sunset. No. Today was the beginning.” She swung her legs off the bed. “He told you more than you’ve told me.” She searched the floor, looking for footwear. “There’s more coming, and whatever he has planned, I’m not doing it.”

  Holden pointed toward the opposite wall, where her boots were lined up neatly, toe to baseboards, beside his gear. She stood, wobbled the couple steps it took to reach them. She struggled to get a foot inserted, gave up, and sat on the floor.

  He said, “I don’t know what John has planned, but I think he thinks you do. Something about how having you on the outside was the only way he’d get back out alive. Said the reason he couldn’t tell you ahead of time was that you’d sabotage the whole thing to keep him from going.”

  “Well, I guess now he gets to learn how right he was.”

  “You’re serious?”

  She loosened the laces. “One hundred percent.”

  Holden slid down the wall and sat beside her. “I don’t know what it’s like to grow up with a sibling,” he said. “Closest I got is the guy who’s been my best friend since we were fourteen, but he’s my brother, you know? In the truest sense he’s my brother, just like John is your brother, and it wouldn’t matter if he sold me down the river for thirty-three pieces. I’d still rather die than leave him in the hands of people who’d grabbed him. The rest, we sort out after.”

  She shoved foot into boot. “John will be fine. He can take care of himself.”

  “So can Baxter, but that doesn’t give me a reason to abandon him.”

  She tightened the laces.

  “If John wanted my help, he should’ve included me in.”

  Holden shifted to put space between them and looked at her hard. “Is it me you’re lying to, or is this just something you do to yourself?”

  She grabbed the second boot, shoved it on.

  He said, “You know you do shit behind his back to sabotage him, and yet somehow you can’t see that maybe because of the constant war, he felt he had no choice?”

  She tied off the laces. “He had a choice.”

  “So did you when you went to France.”

  “Totally different.”

  “How different?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She stopped. Looked at him. “Listen,” she said. “I know you’re just trying to help, and I get how, from your perspective, this makes no sense. But there’s history here—a lot of fucking history—if you’d lived it, you’d understand, and I assure you, John understands.”

  “Make it make sense, then. Make me understand.”

  She sighed. Debated. Some things just weren’t worth the effort.

  “It’s just words,” she said. “It’s not the same.”

  “Try me.”

  She answered out of spite more than anything. “Clare pitched us against each other constantly,” she said. “She played favorites. Didn’t matter if I outshot, outfought, outperformed my brother. He was brilliant, and I was the fuckup. I guess a person can only handle so much of that before they buy into the belief, and he bought into it hard enough to carry it into adulthood. He makes decisions on my behalf that aren’t his to make, believes he has that right, because he thinks he knows what’s better for me than I do. We’ve drawn blood over it. He’s well aware of where the line is and what happens if he crosses it.”

  She wrapped her arm around her knees. “I’ve made a lot of shit choices in my life, Chris, but every single one has been deliberate, and I’ve always been aware of the consequences. John, on the other hand, is so used to being Mr. Good Guy that he’s blind to his own blind spots. We should have bailed in Berlin the moment that fucktard offered new tickets, but John, he’s like this abandoned street urchin who just heard a rumor about parents searching for him. He wants this thing with Dmitry more than he’s ever wanted anything, wants it so badly that he’s lying to himself about what he sees. He would have gone with or without me, so I came to make sure he had someone watching his back. He thanked me by pulling this shit, so yeah, I’m done.”

  Holden took a long time to answer.

  “I get why you’re angry,” he said. “I do. I just can’t wrap my head around hating him so much, you’d rather let him die than suck it up and deal with it later.”

  “I don’t hate him,” she said. “I mean, yes, I do. Especially right now. But it’s not him I hate. It’s . . . it’s everything else. I don’t want him dead.”

  “Want, indifference, it’s all the same thing, really.”

  “No, want would be me actively seeking to make him dead. Indifference is me refusing to let him drag me into more of the same old shit.”

  “So there’s no changing your mind?”

  “No.”

  “All right,” Holden said. “I tried.” He heav
ed up off the floor, reached for his bag, pitched the strap over his shoulder, and moved for the door.

  She studied him, confused. “You’re going somewhere?”

  “Like I told you, I tagged along as an extra set of eyes and extra rifle in case shit went sideways, and we’ve gone straight past sideways into upside down. If your brother can’t count on you, then someone’s gotta save his ass, and I guess that someone’s me.”

  She said, “Wait. Hang on.”

  Holden paused, hand on the door hardware.

  She pulled in detail, reading him the way she’d read people her whole damn life, and inside her chest the first anxiety flutter rose. He wasn’t bluffing, and this wasn’t a power play or negotiation. It simply was. And when he left, he’d be gone.

  She wasn’t ready for that, not like this, not with everything on his terms right after she’d spilled her guts. She said, “You don’t have to save him right this second.”

  Holden smiled wryly, as if he knew exactly how this worked and was amused enough that under other circumstances, he might have humored her.

  He depressed the handle.

  The anxiety fluttered harder.

  There was always room for negotiation if the motivation was right. The one thing she had that he wanted was information. She patted the floor and, offering the secret that would cost least to give up, said, “I’ll explain France.”

  He released his thumb. He didn’t sit.

  She said, “How much do you know about Dmitry?”

  “Only that supposedly, he’s your father.”

  “But who he is or was?”

  “No.”

  “Nobody does. Clare’s version of events—believe it at your own risk—was she was deep-cover CIA in Moscow, running a guy who was KGB and actually running her. They had a real-life thing for each other, which is how she got pregnant. Yada yada yada, skip a lot of drama, she ends up cut off from her people, Dmitry gets her out of Moscow, tells her he’ll follow, and asks her to wait for him. She never hears from him again. Clare being Clare, she tries to contact him, which is when she discovers Dmitry—KGB or otherwise—never existed. She has no idea whose body she was having a thing with. She’s tried to get that answered a few times but always ended up almost dead for it. Lots of years pass, more yada yada, and then two weeks ago the hit goes out on her, you enter the picture, and out of nowhere this so-called Dmitry turns up with tickets to Berlin. We have no idea if he’s our DNA donor, only that he says he is.”