Page 30

THE WARDEN

T he surveillance van we’d parked behind the ruins of Ashcradle House was goddamn claustrophobic. I’d only been in the back for ten minutes and yet I couldn’t fucking breathe.

I wanted to burst out the door, to sink my bare feet into the grass and suck in fresh air, but I was supposed to be paying attention to Ciaran as he went through all the listening equipment I was in charge of while he went in with Ava.

Ciaran looked over his shoulder at me from his place at the computer, which he’d installed in the back of the van along with a shit ton of other technical equipment.

“So does that make sense?” he asked.

He stood to make room for me to take his seat.

I did, but I would have rather been strapped down to an electric chair. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d lost so much control of myself. Panic rose in me like a flood and there was nothing I could seem to do about it.

All the tricks I’d learned during my time in prison—my breathing, my repetitive tapping, my mental disassociation—were proving useless.

I had never been enthusiastic about this plan—Ava’s plan—but I had wanted to support her. But now, when I was actually faced with letting her go, with letting go of the sight of her as she descended into the passagetomb, with giving up control, I wasn’t sure I could go through with it.

Ciaran frowned. “Are you alright?”

I glanced over toward the front of the van where Ava sat hunched over a laptop in the passenger seat. I could just see her small, delicate fingers moving over the keyboard. What if I never touched them to my lips ever again?

Get ahold of yourself!

It wasn’t fucking working.

Gesturing wildly to the panel of instruments, I said, “I’ll just fuck all this up.”

I tried to push the chair back to escape, but Ciaran set his boot behind me to lock me in place.

The sound of my own teeth gritting against each other set me on edge. Evidence of my breakdown. Fuck.

“I should go in as you. You should man all this shit,” I said, shoving back again with the same result.

In a cold, unrelenting voice stolen from me, Ciaran said, “You’ll manage just fine.”

He knew I wanted to be the one to go with Ava.

Did he feel the same as me? That it was torture to leave her side for what could be the last time?

“We both know I could pass as you,” I said.

“What about your tats?” my brother asked.

“If I cover them up—”

“Too much of a risk,” Ciaran said, his only kindness being to withhold the words and you know it . “We have no idea what we’ll be walking into. A security check being the least of our worries. The lift of your sleeve and there would be a bullet between your eyes regardless of how much they look like mine. And Ava…”

Ciaran’s silence allowed the implications to hang like a guillotine over my head.

My shoulders slumped and I rubbed my eyes. I suddenly felt so tired, like it’d been five long years since I slept properly.

“You okay?” Ciaran asked, an unusual softness in his tone. I heard him speak to Ava that way. But never to me.

A nostalgia for our childhood days stirred a mix of pain and sweetness in my heart.

I nodded. “Grand.”

Ciaran removed his boot from behind my chair, both of us knowing that I would remain in place.

My place.

There in the van.

Watching. Helpless. No control on whatever might happen in that fucking tomb.

I rested my elbows on the desk and dragged my fingers through my hair.

“It’s meant for me to do this now,” Ciaran said softly. “As it was meant for me then .”

I raised my head and found Ciaran watching Ava at the front of the van.

It was the only thing I had left to hold on to—that my brother, as much as I hated him for it, loved her as much as I did.

He would die for her .

I just didn’t want him to.

Maybe it was because I felt like Ava had always been mine to protect. Maybe because I was older, by four minutes, but it counted, at least in my head, and I wanted to protect him, too.

After a tired sigh, Ciaran met my pained gaze. “It should have been me who went to prison.”

Even in the dark of the van with its sickish green glow from the array of computer screens, I could see that this was a wound Ciaran carried with him. All his erratic emotions and wild impulses blurred the edges of a deep, deep cut.

I only understood how he felt because it was my turn to stay behind. My turn to have the sacrifice stolen from me.

I couldn’t reach out to physically touch Ciaran. That was too far across a burned bridge. But I knew I had to speak now or risk never getting to tell him.

“I would do it again if I had to,” I said in little more than a whisper.

“But—”

“You are my brother ,” I said, my voice firm, admitting far more than my words would allow me. “Then, now, and always.”

You are my brother.

And I love you.

Have always loved you.

Even after the woman we both love tears us apart, I will always love you.

The only sign that Ciaran heard me—really heard me—was a quiver in his chin .

He gazed down at his hands which he rubbed against one another.

“It was never a choice,” I said as if it could end the conversation.

As if that could bury the hatchet. Could alleviate the guilt he felt for letting me take the fall.

Apparently not.

“And now, neither is mine,” Ciaran said, his words heavy and full of a meaning I couldn’t quite grasp.

I would. Much later, I would understand what he meant to do if it came to it.

But not in that moment.

Ciaran winced as he rubbed his face, the muscles along his arms strained, his gaze distant.

Torturing himself, I realized.

So we were identical twins it seemed. Even after all that had come between us.

My heart ached in a way it hadn’t for longer than I could remember as I watched him.

Say something , a part of me whispered, a younger me from the days before a black car door opened on a gravel drive and a beautiful girl with raven hair and startling round eyes emerged.

Release him from his debt to you. He is your brother.

But the words we’d left unsaid piled high like a wall between us. I couldn’t find the right words to cast over the crumbling bricks.

In the end, it was Ciaran who broke our fragile silence.

“I’ll find a way to repay you.” My brother’s eyes held a storm of terror and determination as he lifted them to mine. “I must,” he said with emotion enough to make me look away in shame.

The answer was there on the tip of my tongue. What he could do to rectify the years of imprisonment I endured in his stead.

All I had to do was say it.

Let me have Ava.

But I knew in my heart that it wasn’t up to Ciaran just as it wasn’t up to me.

In the end, Ava would have to decide.

The tension was back between my brother and me as both of our gazes instinctively moved toward the object of our shared desire.

Ava was oblivious to our mutually beating hearts, the unspoken war neither of us could command. She lifted her slender fingers to tuck a strand of dark fallen hair back behind her ear, completely unaware of her intoxicating beauty as she worked, lips pursed in concentration.

She was drafting an article revealing all the sordid details we’d discovered about the Sochai.

Once she was finished, it would be sent to Lisa with instructions for what to do with it should things end badly and none of us made it through the night alive.

We were in the precarious position of not knowing what our enemy knew.

We thought we had the upper hand, that our ruse would be convincing, but we were dealing with a shadow group and all three of us understood that we might have only stumbled upon the tip of the iceberg.

I looked up to study Ciaran’s face as he continued to watch Ava type against her drawn-in knees, crumpled in the seat like the normal student he wished she could be, stressed about tests and papers instead of secret societies and missing girls.

He and I imagined vastly different things for the girl who changed our fates forever. But they were two sides of the same coin—wanting the best for Ava.

“ She survives this,” I said.

A demand.

A promise.

He did not flinch nor hesitate with his response. He nodded. “No matter what.”

We were both silent, the meaning of our words heavy. The agony of what we were about to do was shared between us, a brotherly burden.

I wondered what—or who —we’d have to sacrifice in order to keep that promise.