“It’s time.” I hid my gaze in the setting sun, away from their faces. “For Keira and me…it’s time to go.”
I heard Charlotte huff, like she was annoyed at having been right.
“What do you mean? Go where?” Marcus asked, as though he didn’t understand, as though the language barrier between us was suddenly heightened.
“I don’t know where, just away, from Department D.” I was now willing the sunset to blind me, so I wouldn’t have to see their expressions.
“I’ll go with you,” Marcus offered.
When I didn’t respond, Charlotte stepped closer.
“I don’t think you’re invited,” she answered for me. I turned toward her, dizzying black spots in my vision from the brilliant glare. “It’s true, isn’t it? If you want to get away from Department D, you can’t lug around a guy whose family still works for the company. Or a girl who hacks their communications, who receives all their messages.”
She was hinting at the baby photo, but I wasn’t leaving because of the photo. This had been my plan for awhile, but Urban reaching out didn’t help. “I’m sorry. I just don’t see another way for us to get away from the danger.”
Tears welled in my eyes. They were all looking at me like after everything they’d done I had the nerve to leave them behind. But it wasn’t like that. I wanted to stay, I wanted to be with them, but there was a reason programs like Witness Protection existed: because sometimes disappearing was the only option.
“I understand your position, but might I offer an alternative suggestion?” Julian piped up, and everyone turned his way. “Running off, starting over, it is a viable choice. But so is coming forward.”
I rolled my eyes, stifling a groan. I knew exactly what he was going to say. He’d said it before. More than once.
Julian held up a manicured finger, predicting my reaction. “Hear me out,” he insisted. “I know you’ve been resistant in the past, but maybe the time has come. If you tell your story to me, I can protect you, help you perfect your image. I promise I will put your safety first, and believe me, it is not a kindness that will be afforded to you should your story get out through alternative means—”
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Are you saying you’ll report on it anyway?” It sounded like a threat.
“No.” He shook his head. “I would never publish your story without your permission. I’m too invested, in all of you.” He looked at Charlotte as he said this. “But becoming a public figure has its advantages. I should know. Namely, it would be very hard for someone to harm you and for it to go unquestioned. But if you go off on your own, with no identities, no one to look for you, a person could get away with anything.”
“He has a point.” Charlotte peered at me, begging me to reconsider.
Keira and Marcus’s eyes held the same hopeful glare.
“I think it’s a good idea,” Marcus said. Of course, he agreed with Julian.
“We should at least consider it,” Keira added.
But they weren’t thinking it through. This plan meant putting our lives entirely in Julian Stone’s hands and ignoring a very scary repercussion.
The rest of the world thought my sister was dead. The CIA had convinced us to stay quiet, for the sake of avoiding this exact type of public scrutiny. Girl back from the dead! Chained to a sink! Photographed in the trunk of a car! News at eleven. Once Julian came forward with Keira’s story, even an edited version, we’d become a 20/20 special that would air in perpetuity, only increasing our chances that some persistent reporter (not Julian) would eventually dig for the facts we left out—like the motive behind my sister’s abduction. This would inevitably lead to our parents, which would lead to espionage, which would lead us to being the children of crime lords who might also not be dead. What sort of lives would we have after that? We’d publicly be known as the children of Benedict Arnold, and there would be nothing Julian Stone could do to stop that. Both of our options sucked, but at least with mine, we got to suffer without the spotlight.
“We can’t.” I shook my head, looking at my sister. “You know this. Even if Julian tried to protect us, and I believe you would”—I smiled at him in appreciation—“some other journalist would not. Mom and Dad’s lives, their crimes, would come out. Everyone would know our names, our faces, and not in a good way. Every job you applied for, every guy you met would know who you are—or think they know who you are. We’d never be able to trust anyone.”
“Like that’s so different from now,” Antonio quipped, as if this were funny, as if he had a right to an opinion.
Marcus and I both shot him a look.
“Que?” Antonio shrugged. “From what I’ve heard…”
“Don’t,” Marcus interjected, eyeing him with a warning.
Unspoken words passed between them. Marcus had talked to his brother about me. It made sense. I talked to Keira. But the way Antonio was looking at me, I felt like a girl seeing her name scrawled on a bathroom stall. These weren’t romantic dreamy conversations, Marcus complained about me. Suddenly, the two sips of champagne floating in my stomach turned sour.
“I don’t know,” said Keira, pulling my attention. “I hear what you’re saying, but going on the run, constantly looking over our shoulders, doesn’t sound much better—”
“If we do what Julian’s saying, we can never take it back. We can’t undo a globally televised interview,” I pointed out, desperate to make her see reason. “We’d have to live forever as the children of terrorists. Do you think anyone’s going to want to hang out with me at school? Do you think a parent is going to trust you to care for their sick kid once they read your name on a hospital chart?”
“But we didn’t do anything wrong,” Keira whined.
“Like that stopped them from kidnapping you!”
“I could frame the story to present you in the most positive light, make sure everyone knows you are completely innocent, the victims in all of this,” Julian offered.
“I believe you, Julian,” I said, my voice filled with exasperation for having to defend my position. “But you’re one journalist out of millions. Not to mention, what if our parents are alive? If we’re in hiding, we can go through it together, quietly. But if we go public, the press, the whole world, will eat us alive.”
“We should at least talk this out before you go anywhere,” Charlotte insisted.
“No. We shouldn’t.” I tossed my hands in the air. “I know you all want to offer your opinions. I know you think you have our best interests at heart. I get that. But my gut told me that Craig was a psychopath, that Keira was alive, and that I should keep searching for her no matter what.” I eyed my sister pointedly. “If I had listened to anyone else’s opinion—anyone else’s—you’d still be chained to a bathroom sink somewhere.”
All eyes instantly darted away, mouths shut like the truth was a poisonous fog they refused to breathe. But they couldn’t ignore it. This wasn’t their lives. It was Keira and me. And the last time Keira asked questions about our parents and spoke out, she disappeared from a tub full of blood.
We had to go into hiding to stay safe. I believed that in my heart. It was what the CIA recommended, after all—they gave us new names, new passports, and told us to get lost. Charlotte and Julian infiltrated that plan. Without asking us. And even though I listened to them, then listened to Marcus’s fear over his missing brother, I now had to listen to myself.
“Okay, we’ll do it your way.” Keira grabbed my hand in solidarity. Finally. “We’ll leave. You’re right.” She smiled at me, and in that one gesture, I felt less alone.
Julian nodded once. “All right.” He projected his voice like a practiced politician. “This is your decision to make. We all know that. So if you need to leave, please know this is not goodbye forever. It is just goodbye for now.” He rested a reassuring palm on Charlotte’s shoulder, and she leaned into him, physically needing the support. I was leaving her, after everything she’d done, and I knew she’d blame herself
, but this wasn’t about one picture. It was much more than that. Julian squeezed her arm tighter. “Department D has ruined enough lives. It will not ruin any more. We will expose them, I promise you that, and like you said, the choice you’re making can be undone. You can change your minds, so…” He looked at all of us. “’Til we meet again!”
He raised his champagne flute, and there were a few halfhearted mumbles of “Cheers,” but the toast felt worthier of a wake than a sunset.
Marcus kept his eyes on the patio tiles, his expression grim. I wanted to hug him, kiss him, and take that horrible look off his face, but I’d only make it worse. This was happening.
Antonio shifted toward Keira, and she dropped my hand. They resumed their conversation, smiling and saying good-bye before they really had a chance to say hello. It was better this way, I told myself. The two of them could move on before anything started, before anyone got hurt.
Marcus and I couldn’t say the same.
Chapter Five
A knock on the door at three in the morning is rarely a good thing. My eyes cracked open, my down comforter twisted around my torso as I glanced blearily about my dark hotel room. For a moment, I didn’t realize where I was. I’d bounced from city to city, country to country so much in my life that all the beige, generic interiors had become indecipherable.
The knock sounded once more.
London. I’m in London.
I rolled onto my side, sitting up as my eyes swung to the bed beside me. It was empty. Keira wasn’t back yet. She already seemed buzzed from champagne when we left Julian’s flat, but she insisted on having “one last drink” in the hotel’s lobby bar. With Antonio. His criminal past with the organization that kidnapped her didn’t seem to be as much a deterrent as I thought it should, but there was no point in fighting. We were leaving London. All of our relationships would be ending soon enough, whether we wanted them to or not.
I yanked open the heavy door, expecting to find my sister. “Seriously, you better not puke in here,” I hissed, squinting as I flicked on the too-bright overhead light, my eyes momentarily blinded by the illumination.
“No. Just tired,” said a familiar accented voice.
I rubbed my groggy eyes, peering through the fluorescent blaze at Marcus, who looked as exhausted as I did—eyelids half drooping as he leaned an outstretched arm against the doorjamb for support.
“Where’s Keira? What happened?” I jolted, an intravenous shot of adrenaline suddenly coursing through me.
“She’s fine.” Marcus raised a hand in reassurance. “At least, she’s having…fun.”
“Where?” Though I already knew the answer.
“In my hotel room. With my brother.”
“Oh.”
I forced myself not to judge my sister for her fantastically bad taste in men. After all, I’d spent a lot of time worried that my sister might never be her “old self” again. Maybe I could take that worry off my long list.
“Sorry.” Marcus shrugged, acting amused, if not proud, of his brother’s player status. I didn’t feel the same. “But I can’t sleep in there for obvious reasons.”
“Come in,” I offered, reminding myself that Antonio was Marcus’s brother. And Marcus trusted him, so nothing bad was going to happen to my sister tonight. I hoped.
He followed me into my room and dropped onto the bed across from me. “Do you have any water?” he groaned, pressing his palm to his forehead.
“Hungover already? You haven’t even slept yet.”
“My brother ordered shots. Again.” He rubbed his temples.
“How many did Keira do?” I sounded like a disapproving mom.
“Less than me. I should have stopped when she did.”
My sister voluntarily stopped drinking before the party was over? That was new.
“What was she doing if she wasn’t drinking?” I fetched a glass from the bathroom and filled it with cloudy, lukewarm tap water. I returned and handed it to him.
“Grilling my brother about his work at Dresden, or Department D, or wherever.” He chugged the water.
I smiled—my sister interrogated Antonio, while he was drunk, or more specifically, while he was drunker than her. Maybe she wasn’t her “old self.” Maybe she had changed, and in ways that went beyond slumped shoulders. “What did Antonio say?”
“The same thing he told us.” Marcus set the empty glass on the nightstand. “He went into more detail about exactly how much he hated his job. He sounded miserable.”
“I can’t believe your parents recruited him.” My eyes narrowed. Why would they want to put their child in danger? “Do you think they’d try to recruit you?”
“No.” Marcus shook his head, his bangs dripping into his eyes. I loved when his hair did that. “They hardly talk to me about work.”
“Do they know Antonio’s here?” My voice sounded casual, but really, I was pressing to learn if he was still in contact with his parents. Maybe if Marcus cut ties, forever, maybe if he broke that thread to Department D, we could possibly stay together, he could come with me, and we could see each other again.
“I sent them a text telling them Antonio’s fine. But we’re still not speaking.”
My head fell. Of course he texted them. He didn’t want them to worry. He was their son, and they were alive, and he’d love them forever. He’d choose them. I knew that, even if I didn’t want to know it.
Our days were numbered.
“How did we get here?” I sighed.
From my parents abandoning us, to me now abandoning Marcus, my life had become a series of events I had no control over. Because if I had a choice, I’d take Marcus’s hand and go off to NYU or Duke or Berkeley. We’d go to college, and Keira would go to med school. She’d live with Charlotte, and we’d have apartments next door to one another. We’d all go on double dates and hang out in a coffee shop like they did in Friends reruns.
A heaviness gripped my chest as I felt a faint hint of the funk mist over me. I didn’t want to say goodbye to him.
My eyes welled, and Marcus noticed; he reached for my hand.
“You don’t have to worry about my brother and Keira,” he said, misreading my emotion, thinking I was upset because they were together. I was, but that wasn’t what had my eyes burning.
“I’m not. And I know you’re happy he’s here. You obviously talk to him…a lot.” I couldn’t help but remember the way Antonio joked that I didn’t trust anyone, then the look he shared with his brother. I didn’t want to see Marcus’s face now.
I picked at a loose thread in the comforter. I was leaving, by my choice, but it still bothered me that Marcus said something to make Antonio react that way.
Despite the deadly espionage, I was still a girl.
Marcus squeezed my palm tighter. “I told him all about us. How you tripped Wyatt Burns in the cafeteria. How we rode off together after you were hit by a chicken wing—”
“Aw, the good old days…” I mocked. God, that felt like a lifetime ago.
“You’ve been fearless since the day I met you.”
“You’re the one who saved me from the chicken wing heard ’round the world,” I pointed out. “And from Luis Basso in Cortona…”
“Then you saved your sister.”
He sat up and tucked a lock of hair behind my ear. He had that boy smell of sweat and leather that made my cheeks burn. Then I spied the bull tattoo on his neck, resembling the ink on his brother’s arms. “You told Antonio more than that…” I pulled away.
Marcus ran his hands through his messy locks, his face looking too tired (and drunk) to have this conversation. “I told him that you sometimes have…trust issues with new people.”
“Everyone is new to me. And you. We’ve moved around our entire lives.”
“But my brother isn’t new, not to me.” He lazily swung his head my way. “I know you think he’s a spy, but I know him. He never wanted to work there, and he’s out now. You don’t have to leave because of him.”
&n
bsp; I wasn’t leaving because of him. I was leaving because of everything. He couldn’t expect me to trust this stranger with my sister’s life. There wasn’t another person in this world I could trust with that anymore, not even our own parents. That was why I was going.
Marcus read my eyes.
“When are you leaving?” he asked, sadly looking up through his lashes. He ran his fingers along my cheek like he was making a mental drawing. Pinpricks covered my skin.
“I don’t know.” I was lying. My suitcase was already packed. I wanted to check the train schedules for tomorrow before Marcus could use the butterflies in my stomach to change my mind. God, I want to stay…
He moved his fingers to my mouth, tugging my bottom lip from my bite, and it was as if every hair on my body lifted upright. I closed my eyes. What if people only got one shot in life to feel this way, and I was running away from it?
“I don’t want you to leave,” he whispered.
“I know.” I wanted so badly to tell him how I felt about him, but the words piled on top of each other at the back of my throat. Any grand gestures now would only make things worse, and the pain was bad enough.
I opened my eyes, and he was staring at me like he wanted to look at nothing else for the rest of his life, like he wanted me. I reached for his face, sliding a strand of hair from his eyes, and his breath hitched, eyes darkening. I might never see him again. This could be our last night together.
I lifted my lips to his, slow at first, then his fingers slid into my hair. He groaned, squeezing me tight, and I pushed him back onto the mattress and moved on top. I was wearing an old Red Sox T-shirt and lacrosse shorts, not exactly my best look. Why couldn’t I be the type of girl who slept in satin?
My hair tumbled into his face as I kissed him. His mouth tasted like stale red wine.
He moved the hem of my shirt toward my head, throwing Big Papi’s number onto the floor. We’d never gotten this far. Venice and Amsterdam were too chaotic, and afterward, we were so focused on finding Antonio that we were never alone, never feeling romantic.
Lies That Bind Page 5