Page 47

“I’m way ahead of you, twin.”

“You two share a room?” I asked. That seemed weird because this house was just as massive as Mr. Cole’s house. There had to be plenty of room and only four people lived here.

“Yeah,” they both said at the same exact time in the same voice.

“Is that a twin thing?” I asked about their shared room. I’d never even met twins before them, maybe it was normal.

“We do everything together,” Abel told me as we started up the stairs.

Addison placed his hand on the small of my back and I found myself engulfed in their strange heat. Thankfully, it wasn’t overwhelming this time, but comforting instead.

“We’ve shared a room since the day we were born,” Addison told me.

“We’ll likely share one until the day we die,” Abel said.

I found myself a little envious of their obvious bond. What would it feel like to have someone to be so close to, someone you could count on, someone who cared so much? I wanted someone like that in my life.

We were halfway up the stairs when the shouting started.

“Shit,” Abel muttered as he picked up his pace, practically jogging up the stairs and pulling me along behind him. “I thought we’d be long gone before they started yelling at each other.”

“What the fuck were you thinking?” Tyson shouted.

I realized his voice was coming from the office that had no door I’d passed on the way to the kitchen the other day. Or had it been yesterday? I couldn’t remember anymore, too much had happened.

“What I do isn’t any of your fucking business, nephew.” Quinton snarled back.

Oh boy.

“Hurry,” Addison gave me a gentle push from behind.

“None of my fucking business?” Tyson shouted, sounding more enraged than he had been mere seconds before. “None of my fucking business? Are you kidding me right now? You can’t do shit like that. You’ll expose us all and it’s dangerous. Not to mention you scared the shit out of Ariel and now I have to explain things to her that I thought I would have more time to…” His voice faded as we reached the top of the staircase.

There was a huge open area to the right of the staircase that was completely empty. Weird. Tyson’s house might have looked a lot like Mr. Cole’s house from the outside and I thought they were similar in size but they had entirely different layouts on the inside. A hallway went left and I could see another hallway leading deeper into the house from the weird empty room.

Abel pulled me left down the hallway. We passed by two doors on the left before stopping in front of the only door on the right side of the hallway. It was closed. Abel turned the knob and pushed the door open. Addison pushed me inside.

“Holy crap,” I sputtered as I took in their bedroom. It was at least twice the size of my bedroom at Mr. Cole’s house. It was the largest bedroom I had ever been in before or ever seen for that matter.

To the right, were two king size beds. One up against the left wall, the other up against the right wall. The bed on the left had a black comforter and the bed on the right had a white comforter.

I pointed between the two beds. “Which one’s which?”

If I had to guess I’d say the one with the white comforter belonged to Addison and the black belonged to Abel. I was wrong.

“The black one’s mine,” Addison told me. “The white one’s Abel’s.”

Huh.

I hadn’t seen that one coming.

On the other side of the room sat a black leather couch facing a mammoth flat screen mounted on the wall. There wasn’t much else in the room save for boxes stacked up against the walls. On the wall with the flat screen were two doors. I imagined they lead to a closet and a bathroom.

“It’s… uh… roomy.” I said. It was roomy but it was also weirdly empty like the rest of the house.

They both laughed at me.

“We’ve only been here for a week,” Abel told me. “We haven’t had a whole lot of time to unpack anything yet.”