Page 8 of Twins for the Enemy

Chapter six

~KIERAN~

Seeing my sister is always a glacier of emotions. On the surface, it’s good to see her. She’s the last piece of me that’s not corrupted by greed, rage, or arrogance.

But underneath that, the fury is worse than ever. It’s my job to keep her safe. Two months ago, I would’ve sworn on my life I’d have done anything to do it. I would’ve said it was the most important responsibility in my life.

Then Farah literally crashed into my life, and I’d forgotten all about her. I let my responsibility to her slip between my fingers. It’s not Farah’s fault that I allowed myself to be distracted .

It is her fault for causing the fire that injured Ellie.

“Hello, Kee-kee,” she says, smiling. Nobody would ever be able to tell that she’s my sister.

She has long blonde hair, folded into two braids, with a body that’s thin enough that it seems unsafe for her to live in the Windy City.

One strong gust and she’s drifting away to the Atlantic Ocean.

She wraps her skinny arms around me and kisses my cheek.

“Why are you shirtless? Were you flexing for someone?”

With her face so close to mine, I can see the white scars on the left side of her face. Dr. Bartkowski had done an extraordinary job after the burns, turning her immense pain into faint cobwebs along the edge of her face.

Even with the expert hands of a surgeon hiding her pain, I can’t let her know that Farah is here. Ellie can do yoga and meditation all day long, but it’s significantly more difficult to forgive when the arsonist isn’t a phantom that vanished in the night .

I have the opposite problem—where it was easier to hate her when she was a phantom. But she’s soft, supple flesh and bone, creating chaos in my head.

I tell myself to stop and I go. I tell myself to go and I stop. I tell myself to keep my distance, and I gravitate around her like a goddamn moon.

“Kieran?” she asks. “Are you doing okay?”

“I’m doing good,” I say. “I am curious if you’re here so late to rob me or kill me.”

She rolls her eyes. “I wouldn’t need to come over late at night to kill you. I could do it in broad daylight, and a million businessmen would come out and applaud me.”

“Only a million? I thought I’d broken into at least three million at this point.”

“They’d send me gift baskets.” She beams at me.

It pulls a bit at the scarring near her eye, but if you didn’t know about it, it would just look like some glitter.

“I had some mini replicas made of the buildings Henry designed. It’s going to be a surprise for the engagement party, but I can’t let him find them at our apartment, so I stored them on the shelf in your library. ”

The engagement party. The engagement party that is going to be here. In my house. Where Farah is.

What a fucker of a brother I am.

“You just need to make sure Henry doesn’t go up there.

” She bounces on the balls of her feet. “He’s coming by tomorrow with those big, oversized prints for the party—which includes that photo of the two of us at that club, where you were with that redhead, but we cut her out, we were certain you wouldn’t mind—”

“I have no idea who you’re talking about, so I don’t mind.”

“But you know, he and I think the same, so he might try to store the prints in the same place. Don’t let him. Tell him a group of wild cats peed up there or something. ”

She crinkles her nose at her own joke. It’s a mystery to me how she remains so lighthearted when the world has been so cruel to her.

“Helena,” I say. “I don’t—”

“Oh. My. God.” She huffs. “Do not call me that. You can tell my parents hated me because the second I was born, they gave me the name of a ninety-year-old woman. Not even a fun ninety-year-old woman, but the kind who yells at her husband who died twenty years ago.”

I shake my head. “Fine. Ellie. What about having the engagement party at The Calson? With a large enough donation, they’d shut their doors for us.”

“No.” She fixes the strap on her shoulder. “We’re having it here.”

“What about that place on Lake Michigan that you liked? The one with the translucent floor.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Kieran, why are you trying to change the venue? Are you trying to hide something? Is there… a guest here? Is that why you don’t have a shirt on?”

Ellie spins around like she might find someone lurking behind her. Evidently, there is only a marble floor.

She spins back around, grinning.

“I don’t hear a denial. This is amazing,” she gushes. “After what happened, you were so depressed. I thought—”

“I wasn’t depressed.”

“Kieran, you're forty-one and I feel like I still have to worry about you. You went from screwing any woman within your line of sight to never sleeping with anyone.” She keeps looking around me, desperate to spot my mysterious guest. “You stopped going to clubs. You spent even more time working than usual. You were very, very depressed.”

“While you carried on like you always do.” I rub my jaw. “If I managed to finally find Farah Todd, what would you want to happen to her?”

“I wouldn’t want to be involved.” She fiddles with the button of her shirt, pretending to be fascinated by its stitching. “I’ve been working on forgetting and I plan to keep doing that. Capiche?”

“She hurt you. She deserves some—”

“You’re the one obsessed with that, Kee-kee, not me.” She looks back up at me. “It’s because of Olivia.”

“This has nothing to do with Olivia,” I say tersely. “The replicas are in the library?” Changing the subject from the past.

“On the shelf. Try to not let any cats in.” She takes my hand, squeezing it. “Thank you, Kieran. Try to not think about that woman. Breathe in, breathe out, tell our enemies to go fuck themselves. That’s the mantra.”

She spins around, half-dancing to the entryway and out the door.

It’s what reminds me about why nobody would be able to tell we’re related. We’re not blood-related. My foster sister and I are polar opposites. She is light and air, where I’m darkness and misery.

I turn around .

The smallest movement near the entrance to the lounge catches my eye. It resembles some blonde hair I know—that’s the color of sunrise.

I briskly walk over to the room. As I’m about to round the corner, I hear her trying to scurry, but I move too fast. I grab onto the edge of her sleeve, yanking her back toward me. Her feet slide, and she scrambles to get them back underneath her.

“What were you doing?” I hiss. She could have heard so much. She could have seen so much. If she figures out that my sister is the one she burned, she will know that as soon as I have my children, I’m casting her out to the wolves. “What did you hear?”

“Nothing,” she says, trying to pry my fingers off her sleeve.

“Bullshit.” I drag her closer to me, crushing her hands between our chests. They’re cold against my skin. “Tell me. What exactly did you hear?”

“Nothing,” she repeats. “It took me a while to sneak around without being seen. I ran into that room while your girlfriend was looking behind her. I thought it was the best position, but that hawk sculpture is in the way and all your sweet nothings were too quiet to hear. Why does it matter?”

I stare at her. Those soft green eyes glare back at me. If she’s lying, she’s lying incredibly well. I look over my shoulder. It’s true that the hawk statue is in the way. She wouldn’t have been able to see Ellie clearly.

Ellie. I didn’t put her first last time, but this time, she is the only thing that matters.

“Let’s go,” I say, changing my grasp to grip onto her wrist. “Dinner is over.”

“What if I’m still eating?”

“I don’t care.”

I half-drag her back to her room. When I stop in front of it, she bumps into me. Looking down at her, she seems smaller. She seems vulnerable.

With slightly less force, I nudge her into the room.

“Have a good night,” I say, starting to close the door.

“Bite me.”

I close the door and lock it. I shake my head. She may have intended it as an insult, but it sounded a lot like an invitation.

I watch the sunrise, but it’s not some peaceful endeavor. I hate it. I haven’t slept, I haven’t fucked, I’ve just watched the goddamn sun do the same thing it does every second of every day.

The glows of oranges and yellow remind me of the fire Farah started.

They also remind me of how she burned for me the night I took her virginity, incandescent and with a gravitational force that’s impossible to pull away from.

I roll over and check my phone.

Usually, I start running two hours before the sun comes up unless I’ve been making calls to Japan or Korea.

If that's the case, I start running an hour before sunrise.

After the run, I get on the phone and determine if I need to change my tactics to keep the herd moving in the right direction.

Everything is about ambition and control.

I’ve become lazy since Farah came into my life. I’ve lost my ambition. I’ve lost my control. I’m an everyday man with nothing to bring into the world but deficiency and dependency.

I cut my teeth on turning the world upside down to throw my enemies off of it. Ellie deserves a brother who will do the same to her enemies. Not someone who becomes unraveled by that enemy simply because she has skin that makes silk feel rough and a flush to her cheeks when she’s aroused.

I get dressed slowly, trying to not imagine it’s her hands trailing up my arms instead of Egyptian cotton or that I’ll never finish buttoning my pants up before her hand is slipping in and turning a late morning into a late afternoon .

It’s been two months since I fucked someone. That’s the problem. I let it go on for too long, and now my libido is turning monstrous.

She’s just a woman, a gender I’ve been around my whole life. There is no enigma here; it is just a failure to prepare for the way that animosity can cross the membrane into desire. It’s biochemistry. It’s a tomb for my common sense.