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ISBN : 978-1-101-51716-1

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T
o my mom, who suggested why not give my old dream of writing a go. Who knew she harbored such inner rage toward her own child? To Shannon, best friend and sister with a black belt in tough love; to my patient editor, Anne Sowards; to the infallible Kat Sherbo; to Brian McKay, ninja of the dark craft of copy writing; to Agent Jeff Thurman of the FBI for the usual weapons advice; to talented artist Aleta Rafton; to Lucienne Diver, who astounds me in the best possible way at every turn; and to great and lasting friends Michael and Sara, as well as Linda and Richard (who give new meaning to “Been there, done that, then went to China and did it again during a total eclipse of the sun”).

—Francisco Goya, 1799

—Samuel Butler, 1835–1902

O
n the day a nine-year-old boy killed Stefan, he didn't see his life flash before his eyes.

It's what they say you'll see, but not him. Clichés, who needed them?

That this was the second time in his life he'd thought the same exact thing would've been worth mentioning . . . if it hadn't been for the actual process of dying. That tended to be distracting from pithy observations. He was aware that he was lacking in the last-thoughts, much less last-words, department. He knew . . . but what could a guy do?

Life is like that. Sooner or later, it boils down to “What the hell can you do?”

His brother, Michael, once told him that when he had no hope, he dreamed of sun, wind, and horses. They were a part of his past—in a way, the best part. Every night he had dreamed of them—sun, wind, and horses. When Stefan had no hope, because dying doesn't leave a person much, he saw the same.

Sun, wind, and horses.

Stefan felt his heart stutter and skip. He wouldn't have thought that one or two missed beats would hurt that much, but they did. Invisible fingers of agony fastened around that beating hunk of muscle and squeezed once, twice, as his lungs staggered in sync. Then red, as scarlet as a field of poppies, bloomed behind his eyes, and he was on the beach. There were pounding waves, pale sand, and a sky so blue it couldn't be real. It was a child's painting, carefully covering every bit of the paper; it was blue and dense enough that you could probably scrape a thick peeling of color away with a thumbnail. He could smell the salt that stung his nose, feel the water that soaked his legs, and the warmth of the horse beneath him, the coarse mane he hung on to as he galloped through the surf. The wind in his face made him feel that he could fly. It was one of those moments no one forgets; the exhilaration, the sensation of wind, water, and sun branded forever in the mind of the fourteen-year-old kid.

He couldn't see his brother, but he could hear him laughing in the way only a seven-year-old can laugh—with all his being. He was on his own horse behind Stefan, sharing the adventure. It was a great memory, there, then—before the blood. Before the red coated the rock and sand, it was better than great—it was the perfect memory. Time spent with the strippers in his old
Mafiya
haunts didn't beat that. Even the first time he fell in love didn't conquer that. Didn't come close.

The next flash was when he'd saved his brother ten years after his abduction on that same beach. Stefan didn't see him through his own eyes this time. He wasn't Stefan anymore. He
was
his brother. He saw himself from his brother's point of view—a stranger all in black standing in the doorway of his prison, then pulling him out of a place of horror. He felt his confusion, his lack of trust, but years of brainwashed obedience had him allowing the grip on his arm and the tug and the run to freedom. The gravel and glass under his bare feet, the pain of the cuts, the ear-ripping explosions of firing guns, and the stars; Stefan felt and saw it all. Pain, blood, and flying bullets; he'd thought that would be what would stick with the kid—Michael—but it was the stars he remembered the most. The students—the prisoners—of the facility weren't allowed to wander the grounds at night, and they didn't have windows in the small cell-like rooms. Death behind him, and, for all he knew, death in front of him, but it was the stars that he saw. Far from any city, deep in the Everglades, the sky might be the color of the Grim Reaper's cloak, but Death's robe did make the ideal background for a hundred stars.

Brilliant light that shone down on you and could almost make you believe in miracles.

A light that could almost make you believe escape could be real and life was more than being trained to kill, turned into a weapon with no will of your own.

A light that was worth dying to see.

Only Michael had it in him to think that, which was unbelievable too. A wonder. He was a good kid. A damn good kid. The best. Even while dying, Stefan knew that as well as he knew anything in the goddamn world.

Michael left the bullets and the stars behind. The next was a string of emotions: fear, confusion, exasperation, more confusion, bewilderment, denial, annoyance, finally a reluctant acceptance, contentment, and a sense of belonging. All those emotions had been caused by Stefan, and while he wished the ones at the beginning could've been avoided, he was damn proud of the ones he felt . . . that his brother felt at the end.

Aside from emotions, there was also life in the world outside a concrete/razor-wire wall of the worst of prisons. Movies, TV, books, people that weren't instructors or torturers, restaurants, pizza, girls, a smelly ferret, making his own decisions—a life. A real life, something he'd thought impossible. And family, something he thought a fairy tale. Michael had been stunned by that. Amazed. He had family, a concept that even a genius like him could barely comprehend and could never have imagined applied to him. Someone cared about him. Someone told him he belonged. Someone would give up everything for him. Someone would give up
their
life for him. He wasn't alone.

He had his brother. He had Stefan.

Almost impossible to believe, but it was true.

If someone could like dying, Stefan liked that he was reliving Michael's life and not going through a rerun of his own. This way he didn't have to wonder if he'd done good by the kid, done good by his brother; he knew. He absolutely
knew
he'd done good. No doubts. Not a one.

The kid could've done better than him, he thought in disjointed chunks as he faded further into the darkness, but it was something; it truly was . . . what Michael thought so fiercely as that Grim Reaper's cloak from the Everglades came to wrap tighter around Stefan.
Family. Brother. You always watched out for your brother, no matter if he was the older one. You held on to your family because having one was a luxury no one . . . goddamn
no one
could afford to take for granted. You didn't let your family down and you didn't let your brother down, no matter how many times he called you a kid.

How did Stefan know that? How did he know what his brother had experienced thought by thought years ago? What he was thinking now? How did he know Michael felt that way—even down to his annoyance at being called a kid? His absolute fury that Stefan would dare die on him? How did he get that last gift?

That was easy.

Because on the day Stefan died, that kid proved what his brother had known about him all along.

That damn kid . . . he was a miracle.

“H
ey, kid. I'll take a black coffee, large. I need something to keep me awake in this boring-ass town.”

I didn't bother to look up from my book resting on the counter. “I'm not a kid.” I repeated that every day to my brother, not that he listened. I turned a page. My name was actually Michael, but I couldn't tell the customer that; I couldn't tell anyone. “And it's already waiting for you at the end of the counter. That will be three fifty.” I'd seen him come in, a flash in the corner of my eye, and heard his loud voice from the sidewalk long before he'd entered. If he had been a regular, I'd have given him my immediate attention and the service-friendly smile that exactly echoed that of the former employee of the month, whose picture was framed on the wall. It was the right kind of smile . . . friendly but not stalker-friendly. It said, “I make minimum wage, but it's a nice day, and you seem like a nice person. How can I help you?” It was natural, nonnoteworthy, and appropriate for the job. It took me two tries in the bathroom mirror to copy it, and I'd used it for every patron since the day the coffee shop had hired me. It was the expected smile—the normal smile.

It was important to be normal.

At least, it was important that people think that you were normal.

I wasn't normal.

This tourist was my first exception to pierce my mask of prosaic, run-of-the-mill normalcy. He'd come in every day for a week, ordering the same thing, tipping the same amount—nothing—and saying the same insult: boring-ass town. Cascade Falls was not a boring-ass town. It was a nice town. It was small and inconspicuous and no one had tried to kill me or my brother here, not yet. That made it the perfect town really, and I wished that this guy's new wife—it had to be a new wife; he wasn't the camping type—had planned their honeymoon elsewhere, because I was tired of hearing him carp every morning. I was tired of him, period.

Also, only my brother could get away with calling me kid.

The man was five foot ten, about forty to forty-three, mildly thinning blond hair greasy with the sheen of Rogaine, hazel eyes that blinked with astigmatism or too much alcohol the night before, twenty-two to twenty-five pounds overweight, and with a small crease in his earlobe that indicated possible heart problems due to his body's inability to cope with his diet. He glared at me over the top of sunglasses he hardly needed on a typical Oregon day in the Falls and tossed down three dollar bills and two carefully fished-for quarters. He snorted and flicked the tip jar with a finger. “Like you caffeine pushers do anything worth a tip.”

He made his way down to a cardboard cup of coffee, still steaming, that was waiting for him, grabbed it, and headed for the door. I could do something worth a tip, quite a few somethings, if that was his complaint, but I doubted he wanted to experience any of them. Although, making him impotent on his honeymoon would be a poetic punishment. . . .

I shook my head, clearing it. Simply because I could do certain things didn't mean it was right. I knew right from wrong. My brother, Stefan, had commented on it once—that I knew right from wrong better than anyone raised in a family of Peace Corps pacifists descended from the bloodlines of Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Considering how I'd actually been raised, what I had been molded for and meant to be, he said that made him proud as hell of me. Proud. I ducked my head down to study my book again, but I didn't see the words, only smears of black ink. Stefan was proud of me and not for what I could do, but for what I refused to do. It was a good feeling, and while it might have been almost three years since he'd first said it, I remembered how it felt then—and all the other times he'd said it since. It was a feeling worth holding on to. I concentrated on that rather than on what I wanted to do to the rude tourist.

Stefan also said that despite his former career, he knew right from wrong too, but before he found me, he was beginning to lose his tolerance for it. It was a lie—or maybe a wish that he could do away with his conscience, because what he'd once done had to weigh on it. He'd worked for the Russian
Mafiya
. He'd done bad things to . . . well, probably equally bad or corrupt people, but the weak too. The weak always got in over their heads in dark waters. What Stefan had done, he didn't want to tell me and I didn't push, but I did my research. You didn't work as a bodyguard in the Russian mob as Stefan had without doing some serious damage to people who may or may not have deserved it.

Regardless of that and regardless of the things Stefan had done for me, under that ruthlessness to protect, and the willingness to kill if that was what it took to keep me safe, there was a part of him that wanted to believe in a world that was fair. He wanted to believe that concepts like right and wrong could be viable. Despite all he'd done and had been forced to do, he wanted to believe, though he knew better. Stefan had a heart and he didn't realize it. Why else would he search for a kidnapped brother for ten years when his—our—own father had given up?