Brothers

by Helena Newbury

  Then I remembered Bradan’s face, in the back of that car.

  I looked at the President. “I’m sorry, sir,” I said. “But he’s my brother. I have to try.”

  The President closed his eyes and nodded. “Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “I had a feeling you were going to say that.” He knocked back the rest of his whiskey, rubbed his eyes and then looked at me. “I don’t know who’s part of the cult. If I try to bring the authorities in to help you, I’m liable to just tip them off. But there is one guy at the FBI I do still trust. Bit of a rule breaker but he’s a good man. He knows the cult and he might be able to help.”

  He wrote a phone number on a scrap of paper. When he passed it to me, he took my hand in a warm, firm grip. “You come back alive, you hear?”

  I nodded. “Yes sir, Mr. President.”

  I walked down to the White House garage to pick up my rental car...and found Miller standing next to a huge black SUV. It was unmarked but I recognized it as one of the ones the Secret Service used, the kind with discreet armor plating and bulletproof glass. “I can’t take this,” I protested. “What I’m about to get into...you don’t want the White House anywhere near it.” I was pretty sure that, to find Bradan, I’d have to break some laws.

  Miller shrugged. “It’s fine. Anyone asks, I’ll say you stole it.” He moved closer and lowered his voice. “I don’t want you getting shot, O’Harra,” he said gruffly. “It’d break Emily’s heart.”

  It was as close to an emotional outpouring as the two of us got. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Thanks.”

  I climbed in and put the SUV in gear. God, the thing was ridiculous: it seated eight with luggage and looked as if it would go through a brick wall. But after the President’s warning, it made me feel a little better. I gave Miller a wave, drove up the ramp to the security barrier and set off.

  Carrick seemed to have sought out the darkest, grimiest bar he could find: maybe it was the only one that would serve a biker. I couldn’t even believe the place existed within a few streets of the White House. The SUV looked conspicuous as hell parked outside but, fortunately, Carrick came out as soon as I pulled up. His arm was around—wow. She was stunning. Hair the color of the sun just as it drops below the horizon and so long it almost hit her waist. Gorgeous, delicate features and soft, pale skin: she didn’t look like a California girl. She had curves that made you stop and look, too, especially in tight jeans and a fitted leather jacket.

  “This is Annabelle,” Carrick told me as I lowered my window.

  Holy shit. My brother had hit the jackpot. I mean, she wasn’t Emily, but…. I shook her hand through the window and she gave me a smile that lit up the whole street. I nodded to the rear seats. “Jump in. There’s plenty of space.”

  Carrick looked from me to the SUV. His expression said, are you kidding? “We’ll ride.”

  I blinked. “You’ll…?” I watched as he swung a leg over the Harley that was parked alongside me. “To Chicago?! That’s like ten hours!”

  He ignored me and put on a helmet. Annabelle slid onto the bike behind him, her body pressed close to his.

  I sighed and started the SUV. The roar of Carrick’s Harley shook the buildings around us, making people turn and stare. When he pulled out into traffic, I fell in behind him.

  “Okay,” I muttered. “Let’s start putting this family back together.”

  4

  Bradan

  I woke into darkness.

  That made no sense. Whenever I opened my eyes, it was to the flashing blue light and gentle chime that meant it was time to get up. Whenever I went to sleep, it was with my eyelids bathed in the pulsing red light that meant it was time to rest.

  I’ve heard that other people dream. They wake up having slayed dragons, or been to school naked, or kissed their best friend. I’ve never dreamt. Between the red light and the blue light is deep, seamless black. Maybe I dreamt Before. But I don’t remember much about Before.

  I slowly sat up, grunting as my spine protested and my legs cramped. Your body isn’t designed to be in one position for hours. That’s the other thing about me: I sleep absolutely still. Motionless. I think we all do, at least all the Primes, who were trained as I was. It’s a side effect of Room Nine.

  Room Nine is in a disused water treatment plant, one of the many properties Aeternus own. Room Nine used to be an observation gallery. There’s this huge space inside the plant where millions of gallons of water used to fall in a continuous, crashing waterfall. There’s a walkway that runs around the edge of the space where staff could look up about fifty feet to the top of the drop and down a few hundred feet to the bottom, as water rushed by inches from their noses. It must have been a pretty scary place to stand, even in those days.

  When Aeternus took it over, the water had long since stopped running and all that was left was the drop into inky blackness. They got angle grinders and sawed off the metal fence that stopped you falling off the walkway. The result was Room Nine: a ledge less than three feet wide, running around the perimeter of a huge, dark hole.

  That was where I slept. That was where all the trainees slept, stretched out on our backs along the length of the walkway. If we rolled over in our sleep, we’d wake up screaming, midway through a two hundred foot fall.

  When it was time to sleep, we had to file in one by one and fill up the ledge in order from furthest-from-the-door to nearest-to-the-door, because once people were lying down, there was no room to get past and change position. At first, none of us dared to go to sleep. But you can only keep that up for a few days. We had to will ourselves not to move, imprint it on our minds so hard that we held our position all night. That’s what they wanted us to learn: that resolve.

  I was fourteen, the first night I slept in there. I cried my little heart out—silently, because they would beat you if you made a noise. In the morning, the kid next in the line, the one who should have been lying by my feet, was just...gone.

  I slept in Room Nine for four years. I don’t move in my sleep anymore. I don’t think I ever will again.

  The blue light finally came on, lighting up my tiny room. I’d awoken maybe thirty seconds before the alarm: that never happened. It was bad: wasting sleeping time was inefficient. I wrinkled my brow. What would wake me? The mansion was silent. I couldn’t recall a noise. It felt more like something had happened. Like a change had begun, far off in the distance, and the ripples it had thrown out had just reached me.

  I shook my head. Superstition. And there was no place for that in Aeternus.

  Angry, I dropped to the floor and started my push-ups, pumping them out mechanically as I replayed last night’s job in my mind. It made me feel better. I’d done well, last night, sneaking undetected into the grounds of a house belonging to a judge. He’d been one of us for years but his new wife had been trying to separate him from us. So I’d snuck into the garage, found the little red sports car he bought her and cut almost through the brake cables, filing down the casing so that it looked like the cable had been rubbing on exposed metal for months. She drove too fast anyway and the area near the judge’s home was full of long, sweeping downhill bends, many of them running alongside the cliffs overlooking the sea.

  I didn’t feel any guilt about it. We are a family and she’d tried to separate him from us. There is no greater crime.

  I finished exercising, showered, dressed, and hurried downstairs. I was hoping he would still be eating breakfast and he was. A grin spread across my face as I saw him: bald now on top, his hair just two neatly trimmed lines of white extending back from his temples. But he was still a strong, muscular man, still started off his day with the same exercise routine he’d taught me, still dressed in shirts pressed with military precision.

  Aeternus extends to fourteen countries that I know of and there are thousands of us just in the US. Very few people get to know the man who’s taken on the difficult burden of leading us. But me? I get to live with him.

  Everyone else calls him Mr. Pryce. I am f
orever grateful that he allows me to call him by another name, accurate in sentiment if not in blood.

  “I heard about last night, Bradan,” he said. “Well done.”

  I beamed. “Thank you, dad.”

  5

  Sean

  There was a faint whistle as the sledgehammer swept through the air. Then that split-second of resistance as the cinderblocks fought my resolve, trying to slow the unstoppable force of the leaden head. The satisfying sound of crumbling, splintering stone as I smashed them. And then, with a twist of my waist, I reset to swing again.

  Time was, it would have been the hood of some guy’s BMW crumpling under my hammer. Or priceless oil paintings and vases as I smashed up an upscale apartment. Scaring people and smashing their places. Simple.

  This new life was complicated. Who knew that going straight involved so much paperwork, so much talking? Medical insurance and Kayley’s grade point average and 401Ks. A billion things I had no idea about. The only thing I knew was, I couldn’t solve them with a sledgehammer. When it all got too much, I asked my boss on the construction site if there was anything that needed destroying. This, I understood.

  The smooth rhythm was interrupted by my phone ringing. Muscles aching, sweat running down my chest, I pulled it out and answered. And instantly, the din of the construction site died away.

  Kian. And he’d found Carrick. Wanted me to come to Chicago because they’d found Aedan, too. My whole family. I stood there, the sledgehammer still dangling from one hand, my eyes closed as years of memories swept over me.

  Kian asked if I wanted to speak to Carrick: he was right there, standing next to him. I swallowed and mumbled something about wanting to wait until I could do it face-to-face. I told them I’d get a flight and then quickly ended the call. Then I opened my eyes and just stared at the half-demolished wall as the noise of the site filled my ears again. I took a long breath, the scent of scorched wood from the saws filling my nose. Carrick! Aedan! It had been so many years. I hadn’t even been sure they’d been alive.

  I felt my eyes going hot and blinked quickly. Feckin’ sawdust in the air.

  I called Louise and told her what was happening. I told my boss I was going to need to take some time off. Then, for the rest of the day, I obliterated the wall, letting the emotion that was boiling up inside me power my swings. It all came back to me: my mom being drawn into the cult; Bradan, locked in the back of the car as she drove him away; she and my dad fighting on the kitchen floor; the flash of a knife…. Aedan and Carrick had seen my dad’s side of it but Kian and I had never been able to forgive him for killing our mom—

  I swung the hammer hard enough to send a lump of wall flying twenty feet. I heard muttered, awestruck curses from the workers around me. Even now, I still scared the others. I might be reformed but I was still the big Irish fucker who destroyed stuff.

  My new life had already been too complicated. To suddenly be thrown back into the middle of a family again, to revisit the past I’d so firmly locked away...I don’t know if I can do this.

  Someone yelled Time and the others threw down their tools. But I stood there, hands still gripping the shaft of the sledgehammer, unwilling to put it down. As long as I was smashing stuff, I could make sense of the world.

  And then I heard the familiar growl of a V8 engine and I let out a long, shuddering sigh and placed the hammer down. Because suddenly, everything was okay.

  As I stalked across the construction site, I felt myself growing lighter, felt the clouds of rage retreating. Every guy there had turned towards the street as the engine noise increased. I saw their jaws drop as my 1960s Mustang pulled up and Louise jumped out.

  Despite everything, I felt a big, dumb grin break across my face.

  No matter how many times I saw her, she still cast a spell on me. It didn’t matter if it was first thing in the morning, rolling over to see her sleeping face as the light came through the drapes, or when she came out of the bathroom, hair dripping and a towel snugged around her breasts. Every time, I remembered I was the luckiest goddamn guy alive.

  The construction site was all hardness and brute force: iron nails hammered into sharp-edged planks of wood, cold steel split by jagged-toothed saws. When Louise arrived it was as if a portal had opened to some other world and the goddess of plants and nature had stepped through. That copper hair, long and shining and blowing in the breeze. That gorgeous, bountiful body with an hourglass figure, like some Greek statue come to life. Those full, soft breasts, their tops displayed by the vest top she wore. And best of all, that smile that made it feel like the sun had just come out. I remembered the days when she’d been haggard and drawn, when Kayley had been ill. She smiled a lot, these days.

  I knew that, behind me, every guy on the construction site was looking at her as they filed out. No one dared wolf-whistle because they knew I’d punch them out, but every time Louise stopped by—to pick me up or to drop off the lunch I’d forgotten or, once, to bring a basket of homemade cakes for the whole site—all of them had told me how lucky I was. What kinda leprechaun magic did you use to snag her, O’Harra?

  I didn’t have an answer. I just knew I loved her. She was the person who’d helped me to change: the only one who could have done it.

  I barely let her get out of the car. The door was still swinging closed when I slipped an arm around her waist and lifted her into the air, pulling her against me so that her legs slid around my hips, those luscious breasts pressed against my chest and her groin nestled warmly against my abs. I breathed in the scent of her and sighed, immediately at peace with the world.

  “I’ve booked us on an overnight flight to Chicago,” she said as I studied her, lost in those big, moss-green eyes. “Kayley’s psyched because she gets to stay at Stacey’s apartment for a few nights.” Stacey was Louise’s best friend. She lived downtown, roared around in a Mercedes visiting all the bakeries she managed and could hold about twenty different conversations at once on her hands-free phone while training for her next triathlon. She was great, even if just watching her made me feel tired. And compared to the calm, slow-paced life we’d settled into, Kayley thought “Aunt Stacey” was incredibly cool.

  “There’s a bag of clothes for you in the trunk,” Louise continued. “I wasn’t sure how long we’d be in Chicago so I haven’t booked anything yet, but I’ve scoped out some hotels. Oh, and I brought you a sandwich because I’m not sure we’re going to get chance to eat before we get on the fligh—MMF!”

  I’d pulled her closer and covered her lips with mine. A few of the braver guys passing behind me cheered. Christ, I loved this woman. This is how she’d been able to make the grow house work: she organized like no one I’d ever met. And she’d dropped everything to come with me, to support me, no questions asked.

  She groaned in pleasure as my tongue brushed the inner edge of her lip, and opened to me. We twisted and moved, my hand sinking into that glorious copper hair, silken strands tickling between my calloused fingers. My tongue found hers and she drew in a breath, pressing herself closer. I felt a ripple pass through her body as I kissed her: she was coming alive in my arms, everyone watching us forgotten.

  It was more than just lust. Sure, I wanted to just put her down on the hood of the Mustang and peel those jeans off her, but there was a different kind of urgency, every time our lips met. Like a day was too long apart. Like an hour was too long apart. We’d found our other halves and now we weren’t complete unless we were together. I honestly couldn’t figure out how I’d managed before I met her. The kiss changed, growing deeper and slower. My hands moved down her back, cupping her ass and squeezing, and she moaned against me.

  When we finally broke the kiss, we moved back very slowly and just gazed into each other’s eyes. The sun was sinking fast, red and gold light making her hair gleam and blaze. “We should get moving,” she murmured, not moving.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, not moving either. I kissed her again, then bit gently at her lower lip and she writhed, her gro
in pressing hard against me. We stayed there for another few minutes, until we had to go or we’d miss the flight.

  “You feeling okay now?” I asked as I climbed behind the wheel. She’d had to suddenly run to the bathroom, early that morning, to throw up.

  She nodded. “Probably just something I ate.”

  I threw the car into gear and we roared off.

  6

  Carrick

  Washington DC to Chicago is almost exactly seven hundred miles. Seven hundred miles, at night, with the temperature down in the forties and a vicious wind whipping across the interstate.

  I loved it.

  A Harley, when it’s properly tuned and cared for, settles down into a low throb at freeway speeds, a vibration that’s almost a heartbeat. My bike had been with me for years and, since Annabelle came along, it had two of us giving it love and attention. She’d tended to its pipes and pistons like a master surgeon and now it sang. The heat from the engine rose up through the saddle and warmed me and my leather cut kept the worst of the wind at bay. Behind me, Annabelle was tight against my back, the soft press of her breasts making me smile every time I shifted or moved. She had her arms around my waist with her hands snuck up inside my cut to keep warm. Every few miles, her hands would explore my abs and then give me a little squeeze.

  Best feeling in the world.

  Beside us, Kian in that ridiculous SUV. He was sitting in a heated leather seat that probably massaged his back at the push of a button. He was sitting in there cocooned from the world: hell, he probably had the radio on. I shook my head. You don’t know what you’re missing.

  And he wore a suit. A suit! I couldn’t get over that. I wasn’t kidding about being proud of him. But a suit? And dating the President’s daughter? I’d seen Emily on TV and she was beautiful and sweet but she was also sophisticated and moneyed. It was hard to wrap my head around the idea of her snuggling up to the Kian I remembered, a guy who’d gotten into a thousand schoolyard fights alongside me.