Page 10 of Man of Lies (Vendetta Kings #2)

Chapter Ten

MASON

The school looked smaller than I remembered, but everything did at two a.m., when the streets were empty and the sky was dark, vast, and empty overhead.

I killed the engine and sat there for a minute, kneading the steering wheel, watching the building's shadowed windows like they might blink back. The night had finally cooled, but the air was heavy and motionless this far on the outskirts of the parish. Even the insects had gone silent. Nostalgia pressed against my ribs from the inside.

Colton hadn't said much when I got to his apartment; he'd just opened the door with a grim expression and a half-empty glass of gin in one hand. I'd seen him puking in the bushes after our LSATs, but I'd never seen him look like he'd had the wind kicked out of him.

"He just…left," he'd muttered, dragging a hand through his hair. "We argued this morning, but—I didn't think it was that bad." He wouldn't meet my eyes. "I came home from work and he was gone."

No note. No call. No trace of Ben anywhere, not even a mug left in the sink. Just the ankle monitor, a condition of his provisional release, clipped and dropped neatly on the counter, as polite and final as a middle finger.

So now it was on me…and I'd never felt so clueless.

I'd spent most of my life fighting for Ben, but I had no idea what was going on in his head. I'd even called Gideon, hoping—stupidly—that maybe Ben had gone to Eden. But he hadn't. Of course, he hadn't. Gideon's voice had been gentle in a way that only made it worse, and I hung up with the sick certainty that I'd just admitted I didn't know my own twin anymore.

I'd been circling the city for hours, scouring every place Ben might go when he needed time to think. I checked the all-night diner Ben used to love, with the terrible coffee and pinball machines he always kicked when they jammed. I hit a few other places a man like him might go to blow off steam: twenty-four-hour gyms, gas stations on the outskirts of town, even the old trailer park we swore we'd never set foot in again. But I was hunting a ghost, a man who didn't seem to exist anymore.

Now I was down to the last place that made sense—our old middle school. A squat, ugly building we used to hate until Ben had figured out how to jimmy the fire escape and reach the roof. We used to sit up there for hours, smoking stolen cigarettes and daring each other to spit on the principal's car. Pretending we weren't scared to go home and see which mood mom was in that night: Leave it to Beaver or Breaking Bad.

It was a long shot, but that was all my life had ever been.

The fire escape was still there, clinging to the side of the building by a few rusted bolts and swaying just enough to keep my pulse elevated. I gripped the rail and started the climb, each step groaning under my boots as if the corroded metal might give way any second. It had felt easier when I was fifteen, back when I was all knees and elbows and always landed on my feet like a cat. As a grown man in slacks and a dress shirt, the whole endeavor felt absurd. But my muscles remembered the path.

I pulled myself over the ledge with a grunt and dusted my scraped palms on my slacks, taking a second to catch my breath.

The roof looked exactly the same: flat, exposed, and quiet, in the eerie way that forgotten places always were. At first, it looked abandoned, but then the glowing tip of a cigarette flared in the darkness. My eyes adjusted, and there he was—a broad-shouldered silhouette, perched on the roof's edge with his legs dangling into the void.

Ben didn't look up when I approached. His shoulders were hunched, elbows braced on his thighs, a cigarette burning low between his fingers. The cherry flared with each slow drag, casting the barest red glow across his scarred knuckles, but otherwise, he didn't move. From a distance, he looked like a gargoyle carved from stone. Heavy, so heavy, and not just because of the stacks of muscle he'd added in prison. So much weight was dragging at him that the roof didn't seem solid enough to support him. Like any second, the whole structure might give way—and he'd just keep sinking.

His strength had always come from stillness, but this wasn't the same. He didn't look like someone trying to be alone; he looked like a man who'd forgotten how to be anything else.

"Figured it'd be you," he muttered without turning his head.

I crossed the gravel-pocked rooftop and sank beside him with less grace than I would've liked. We sat without speaking, a long stretch of silence unfurling between us as we stared down at the skeletal outline of the schoolyard. A breeze pushed the empty swings and stirred up the grass, bleached pale beneath floodlights that hadn't worked in years. It felt wrong, searching for a way to break the ice and coming up empty. I never lacked for words, but here I was, fumbling like a stranger beside the one person I was supposed to understand better than anyone. But the truth was, I didn't know what he needed anymore.

Eventually, I cleared my throat and grabbed the safest topic floating by. "I didn't know you were smoking again."

Ben blew a stream of smoke through his nose and held the cigarette out in my direction without looking. "Not a whole lot else to do in prison."

I didn't smoke. Never had, not even back when we were teenagers and I used to bum cigarettes off kids in the boys' bathroom to resell for spare change. Adrenaline was my vice. That's what I chased when my skin felt too tight to contain me.

Maybe he'd forgotten that.

I took the cigarette anyway, grimaced, and took a quick puff. The taste coated my tongue, pungent and acrid in a way that never bothered me when kissing Silas. But it did now. I took another drag, if only for something to do with my hands, and squinted at him through a drift of smoke.

We had the same black hair—or we would've if his wasn't buzzed so short—and the same blue eyes. He'd always been a big man, my height but twice as broad, but prison had filled him out like a heavyweight fighter. His biceps strained the seams of his cheap t-shirt. He didn't seem comfortable in his clothes. In his skin. I'd noticed it the first time we hugged after he exited the prison gates. He moved like he didn't trust his own strength. Like he was afraid of hurting whatever he touched.

I flicked a glance down at his bare ankle. "Missing something?" I asked, voice dry as dust.

He rolled his eyes. "I just wanted a few hours of real freedom," he muttered. "You can tell my babysitter to unclench."

"He's worried about you." The bite in my voice surprised me, but Ben didn't so much as blink.

"He shouldn't be."

"What about me?" I demanded, passing him the cigarette before I crushed it between my fingers. "You didn't think he'd call me the second he couldn't find you? I've been scouring every ditch in the parish for hours, hoping I wouldn't find you face down in a puddle."

He let out a humorless bark of laughter. "Not yet."

"No," I said flatly. I didn't raise my voice, but I wanted to. "Instead, you're trespassing on school grounds at two in the morning. I'm not even here as your brother, you know that? I'm here as the attorney for a dumbass client who just pissed all over the terms of his conditional release and thinks that's not gonna end with a squad car and a cell."

Ben didn't try to defend himself. He just turned his head and looked at me—really looked—for what felt like the first time in years. The man I saw staring back at me wasn't the brother who'd stood between me and hell without question. There was something colder in his eyes now. He'd been stripped down to a base model of only the parts necessary to survive.

"You look tired," he said quietly.

That was all I heard lately, like it was news and I didn't see it every time I looked in the mirror. The hollow eyes and sharper angles of my face weren't just exhaustion. It was erosion. The same slow, quiet pressure that had been grinding me down for years.

The only time it let up, the only time I felt like a man and not a machine, was with Silas. With him, I could breathe. Not because he was soft and made me soft, but because he saw right through me and still didn't ask me to be anything other than what I was.

I gave a short, bitter laugh and looked out over the rooftops. "This is just how I look now," I said. "You'd know that if you'd let me come see you."

Ben tipped the cigarette to his lips, inhaled deeply, and let the smoke drift through his nose. I could feel him watching me from the corner of his eye, gauging how far to reach. He didn't speak for so long, maybe that was all I would get. Then he admitted reluctantly, "I didn't want anyone to see me that way."

I understood that kind of pride. It was hardwired into our bones, growing up with nothing, spending half our lives proving we're more than the world said we were. But understanding didn't keep me from resenting how long it had taken for Ben to admit it.

"I wasn't there to judge," I said finally, swallowing the lump in my throat. "Just to see you."

"I wasn't there." He flicked the ash off the roof, following it down with his eyes until it disappeared into the darkness. "The man I was inside…that wasn't me, you know? You wouldn't have recognized him."

"You think I haven't seen you at your worst a dozen times?" I bit out furiously. "You think you could admit to anything that would shock me? You're still my brother, Ben. That's not something time or distance gets to rewrite."

He didn't answer, but I caught a muscle spasming in his jaw, the slow grind of molars as he stared straight ahead. The cigarette hung forgotten between his fingers, burned nearly to the filter.

"I just need a little time," he said finally. "Time to get my head straight and figure out where I fit."

"Fine," I said. "Take the time. But stop being selfish about it. You can't just cut your monitor and take off, not with Vanderhoff and the DA itching to get you back behind bars. You're an embarrassment to them. You get that? They played fast and loose with your conviction, and now they're just praying you'll do something to convince a judge you're a danger."

His eyes narrowed, and I knew he wanted to argue, but I wasn't finished. "The only reason you're out is because the AG's office opened an investigation long enough for Colt to shove a motion through. That judge didn't vacate your conviction, Ben. He agreed to a conditional release pending judicial review. You're a free man on paper and a felon in every way that counts. They gave you just enough rope to hang yourself. So don't."

Sullen color worked its way up Ben's throat. "I didn't mean to cause trouble," he muttered, eyes fixed on the skeletal outline of the schoolyard.

I snorted. "You're a Beaufort. Trouble's in the name."

He gave a small, humorless huff and offered a fist to bump. I knocked mine lightly against it. Some habits survived everything. Even prison.

"Next time you're feeling caged, give me a call. I'll take you for a spin on the Ducati until it passes. Hard to be mad at the world when you're screaming down the highway with your hair on fire."

Ben's lips twitched, and I could tell he liked the sound of it. Just like the old days, when I'd hotwire an old junker and we'd take it ripping through the cane fields.

"Yeah," he grunted wryly. "My babysitter would be real happy with that."

"He put a lot on the line for you. He's got a right to be pissed," I said, reaching out to deliver a light smack to the back of his head like I used to when we were kids, trying to knock us back into our old routine.

Ben recoiled before I could connect, catching my wrist in a grip so hard my bones creaked.

We both froze.

Slowly, awareness bled back into his eyes. The tension in his fingers released like a trap springing open. He dropped me and pulled back, putting extra space between our bodies.

"Reflex," he clipped out, still refusing to look at me.

"Yeah," I muttered, rubbing the sting out of my reddened skin. "I get it."

That damn silence was back, but it felt different now. More brittle. Neither of us rushed to fill it. A breeze had picked up, tracing along my collar and chilling the sweat on my neck.

Ben stared straight ahead, his face carved from stone. Then, like it cost him something just to ask, he said, "He still mad?"

I studied him in profile—the thick line of his jaw, the way his mouth pinched tight at the corners. Guarded was his everyday body language these days, but there was no defensiveness in the question. Just resignation, the kind that came from already knowing the answer but needing to hear it confirmed.

"I don't know," I said finally. "He didn't tell me what the fight was about."

Ben nodded shortly. He didn't offer an explanation either, and I didn't push. They'd both been locked up tight for weeks, and I'd run out of tools to pry them open.

"Whatever it was," I said, tired down to the marrow, "you need to deal with it. He stuck his neck out to get you here. I wish it was me. God knows I tried. I turned over every rock looking for that damn gun. But in the end, Colt's connections got you out. He put his reputation on the line, signing up as your designated custodian. He's holding the leash right now, whether you like it or not, so don't make it harder than it already is."

He didn't like that. I might not be able to read him like I once did, but he was still my twin, and I'd recognize that lowering of his brow anywhere.

"It's complicated," he said tersely.

I just nodded. "Yeah," I said, looking out over the dark rooftops. "It usually is."

We sat in the hush of the dead hours before dawn, side by side, saying nothing. As time dragged on, the quiet softened into something that wasn't tense; it just stretched too far. A distance we couldn't quite find a way across.

Once, Ben was as familiar as my own pulse, but now I couldn't begin to guess what was going through his head. Nothing good, at any rate.

My own thoughts weren't nearly so cryptic. They came organized in a neat to-do list already stacking itself into triage. I'd need to call the supervising judge by eight, file an incident report with the Department of Corrections, check the exact wording of Ben's conditions, and see how much legal gymnastics I could pull before Vanderhoff got wind and made it impossible to contain. I'd have to loop in Colton and send him to charm the DA out of filing for remand—he was always better at playing the slick, oily back-scratching game than I was.

And that was just Monday morning.

Exhaustion was already settling like sediment into my bones. It wasn't just whiplash from the crazy night. It was the accumulation of days and years just like this, stacked on each other. I was finally starting to falter under the weight, and the grim chill in Ben's eyes only added to the pressure.

I hadn't saved him, and I couldn't fix him. Hell, I could barely keep the system from chewing him up again.

It was a damn good thing Silas and I had set those boundaries. No strings. No promises. Because if he'd expected more from me—anything at all—I'd already be failing him. At this rate, I'd be lucky to carve out time to see him before the quarter closed.

Assuming he waited that long.