The following morning, Conor and Liam come to my room to tell me that I’m wanted for a family meeting. Their family now, obviously, and no longer mine. I walk along the hallway behind Conor, and with Liam trailing behind me. When we reach the dining room, Shane and Mikey sit at the table already waiting and I swallow as I glance around the room, recalling what happened the last time we were in here and we made our ‘cum oath’. The night when I was officially welcomed into the family. What a crock of shit that turned out to be.
“Sit!” Shane orders as I reach the table and, like an obedient puppy dog, I do as I’m told.
Conor and Liam sit next to their brothers and the four of them stare at me like I’m at a job interview. I glare back at them. They don’t intimidate me.
“Shall we just get this over with?” I snap.
Shane scowls and rubs a hand over his jaw and Mikey grins, but it’s Conor who speaks.
“You want out of here, Jessie?” he asks.
“What do you think, asshole?”
“I told you this is not going to get us anywhere,” Shane snarls.
“And like I said, what’s our alternative?” Conor frowns at him and suddenly I’m wondering what that alternative is too. Are they just going to kill me after going to all of this trouble of keeping me alive?
Shane turns back to me. “You can walk out of here today. But in order for us to allow that to happen, you’re going to have to tell us the truth. Now, I appreciate that’s like asking the rain not to fall, but you can manage it sometimes, right?”
“You keep talking about me lying to you, Shane. But I only ever lied about who I was when I first met you,” I snarl at him. “You are the liar. All of you are.”
He rolls his eyes while the other three frown at me.
“Who are you working for?” Shane asks.
“Nobody. I told you that.”
“You’re lying.”
“I am not! Who the hell would I be working for? What do you think you have here, the codes for Fort Knox or something? So, you have money? Anyone can take your money if they want it bad enough. What the hell would I be doing here for months?”
“Then why were you holed up in the fortress of Alexei Ivanov? The head of the Russian mob?” Shane snaps.
I frown in confusion. Who the hell is Alexei Ivanov? “If that is his place, then I was just staying there with someone.”
“Who?”
“None of your damn business.”
“Really? Don’t you think you owe us that much, Jessie?”
“Owe you? I owe you nothing. I have never done anything to harm any of you. I did the jobs you asked me to do. I never asked for anything from any of you. What we did… I never,” I shake my head and don’t finish the sentence because thinking about what we were is too painful.
“For fuck’s sake, Jessie. You walk out of here with some Russian, holding his fucking hand. You won’t tell us who he is, and you expect us to believe that you weren’t up to something?”
“I didn’t even know he existed until that day.”
Shane frowns. “What? You didn’t know him, and you just strolled out of here holding his hand? You expect us to believe that?”
I shift in my seat. “I did know him a long time ago… It’s complicated.”
“Then uncomplicate it, Jessie, or I swear to God, I will put a bullet in your head right now,” Shane snarls.
“How are you going to get your money from the Wolf then?” I challenge him.
“What the fuck are you on about?” he scowls at me.
I clamp my lips together and sit back in my chair as Conor leans forward in his. “Is he worth losing everything for, Jessie? Tell us who he is and why you went with him and you can walk out of here.” He stares at me with those deep brown eyes and I remember all the times I looked into them and the love I felt. How did all of it come to mean nothing? Did it ever mean anything? Suddenly, I am so tired of everything.
I can’t do this anymore. I have been fighting for so long.
“You promise?” I ask.
“Yes.”
I take a deep breath. I don’t know who I trust or what I believe anymore, but what have I got to lose when I’ve already lost everything? “He’s my father,” I stammer.
All four of them stare at me with their mouths open.
“So, your father wasn’t the guy who was killed by the Wolf?” Conor asks.
“Yes. But he didn’t die. He survived.”
“No. That’s impossible. I saw the police reports. You’re lying,” Shane snaps.
“I appreciate that it seems impossible. But it’s him. He managed to escape and there was some kind of coverup.”
“Jessie!” Shane interrupts me. “You saw what the Wolf did to him. You’ve seen those police reports. The autopsy reports. Your father is dead.”
The tears prick at my eyes. “I know. But he was here. That day I came back from the salon, he was here. He said he’d been looking for me all this time.” I sniff as I wipe the tears from my cheeks. “I know it sounds crazy, but it was him.”
“But why did you go?” Conor asks. “Why didn’t you wait for us?”
I swallow hard as I look at them. I suppose I’m all in now, anyway. “He told me that the reason he’d found me was because you were trying to reach out to the Wolf. So you could sell me back to him.”
“And you believed him?” Conor snaps.
“He’s my father!”
“No, he’s not!” Shane interrupts me.
“You don’t understand,” I say with a shake of my head. “I thought he was dead. And then he was standing there. Right in front of me. I was in shock. I wasn’t thinking clearly. And then he told me that was how he found me and I… I didn’t have time to question him. He said we had to leave.”
“Red,” Mikey says. “You can’t honestly think that we would do that?”
“Really? The four guys who kidnapped me and kept me in a cell for days with hardly any food or water?” I snap. “No. You would never do anything like that, would you?”
“But that was because we thought you were working for the Russians. We came home and you’d left that stupid fucking note. You didn’t think we’d check the security feed and see you walking out of here holding some guy’s hand? What the fuck did you expect us to do, Jessie?” Shane snaps.
I blink at him. I’m so damn confused. “I don’t know,” I look down at my hands. “But why would he lie to me? And how did he find me if it wasn’t because of you?”
“The guy from Balthazar’s,” Conor says with a sigh. “He didn’t die, Jessie. At least not for a few days. And he obviously recognized you as your mother’s daughter. That must be how Alexei found you.”
“What?” I look up and blink at him, trying to process this newest piece of information.
Mikey whispers something to Shane who nods at whatever his brother said before he pushes a piece of paper across the desk to me. “These are the results of the urine tests the doc did on you yesterday. She double checked them in the lab and emailed these this morning. You see all of those drugs that were in your system?”
I reach for the paper and read over it. Barbiturates. Ketamine. PCP. Xanax. Some drugs that I can barely even pronounce or have ever heard of. I shake my head. “You gave me something,” I frown.
“We gave you a fast acting sedative that wouldn’t show up in any tests after forty-eight hours. That’s why we use it.”
“So?” I peer down the list. “Ketamine? That’s a hallucinogenic, right?”
“Hallucinogens can also make you more susceptible to suggestion,” Conor says.
“You’re saying I’ve been drugged?”
“That’s what the results say,” Shane replies. “Unless you took them willingly?”
“I don’t do drugs,” I snap. “And besides, this could be falsified. How do I know I’m not drugged now and you’re making this shit up to confuse me?”
Shane lets out a long breath and shakes his head. “Forget the drugs then. Why would we hand you over to the Wolf, Jessie? Discounting the fact that he has disappeared and nobody has a clue where he is, I offered you your freedom, remember? The car and the money and you told me to stick it up my ass.”
I stare at him because I don’t know how to respond. None of this makes any sense. Except that it does, doesn’t it? The zavarka in the car on the way to Connecticut. All of the tea and soup I was constantly given to make me feel better when I assumed I was coming down with the flu. Shit! The rational part of my brain is telling me that it all makes perfect sense, but I’m not ready to acknowledge it just yet.
“We put your fingerprints in our system. You weren’t a fucking prisoner here. We made you one of us. Why the hell would we do any of that? And selling you? In case you haven’t noticed, we’ve got plenty of money already,” Shane snaps.
The tears run down my cheeks as my brain forces me to confront the reality of what has been going on for the past week.
“Did you think that everything we did and told you was a lie?” Conor asks.
I look up at him through tear-filled eyes. “Did you?” I sniff. “Because you were just as quick to assume I was working with the Russians.”
He sits back in his chair and runs a hand over his jaw and all four of them stare at me as my world comes crashing down around my ears once again.
“All I know is my father was standing in front of me, asking me to go with him and telling me that I was in danger and you were betraying me. I was confused. I…” I shake my head. “I’m sorry.”
“He’s not your father, Jessie,” Shane says again.
“Then who is he?” I say. “Because he looks just like him. He has the same voice. He even feels like him.”
“Red,” Mikey says softly and suddenly, the last piece of the puzzle falls into place.
“My brothers were twins.” I put my head in my hands. “They run in my family and I still didn’t think. I just saw his face. And he was so convincing. He swore he was my father.”
“Perhaps he is?” Shane suggests. “Just not the one you know.”
“So, you’re not planning to hand me over to the Wolf?”
“We’re not planning on handing you over to anyone, Angel,” Conor says, and my heart starts beating so quickly that it feels like it might burst out of my chest.
I sit there, blinking at them as the tears stream down my face. I don’t even know what to say or where to begin, but I don’t have to, as the sound of an alarm pierces the air.
“Shit! We got company,” Conor shouts as Liam and Mikey open the huge safe on the wall.
“Looks like your daddy has come to take you home, Hacker,” Shane raises an eyebrow at me.
“Then you’d better give me one of those guns,” I say as I wipe the tears from my face and nod towards the array of weapons that Mikey has started laying on the table.
“Not a chance,” he shakes his head, but Liam tosses me one anyway and winks at his older brother.
“If she wanted to shoot you in the head, she’d have done it weeks ago,” Liam grins.
“You know how to use that thing?” Conor asks.
“Sure do,” I reply.
“This is fucking insane,” Shane mutters under his breath.
As the adrenaline courses around my body, I take a deep breath and tuck the gun into the back of my jeans, before following Conor and the twins out of the kitchen.
