The Espionage Effect(81)

With every scrap of discipline I had, I fought the urge to spin around to see Alec’s expression. I held an impassive one, forced my breaths to remain even, refused to give an ounce of reaction to the man clearly baiting me for one.

“Ahhh, guess not. She said it wouldn’t.”

She?

Again, my brow wrinkled. Confusion was okay. Went along with my needed role of playing dumb. But I was confused. “You’re making no sense. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I definitely didn’t. What in the world could Anna have known…and why?

“Of course you don’t, Devin.” Escobar turned toward me. His hand lifted and cupped my cheek.

I jerked my face away, scowling.

He pinched my chin painfully between his fingers, yanking my head back to face him. “You’ve been a pawn in a game, my sweet Devin. Genius IQ from birth. Trained in martial arts, archery. Excelled in mathematics. Physics. Biology. Stop me if I get anything wrong.”

My eyes narrowed, hate surging through my veins. I focused on the dark pupils of his eyes, wishing lasers would shoot from mine to incinerate his. Unfortunately, of all the correct abilities he’d listed, the god-like powers of Superman had not been among them.

“But what you didn’t learn, what you’ve never known…is that Anna is a spy.”

Stunned, my lungs froze midinhalation. Then I forced them to expand and draw in a deep breath; I needed that oxygen to clear my dazed brain.

“That’s right, shocking, isn’t it? To find out the best friend you’ve trusted, someone you’ve been living with for years, isn’t exactly who she’s made you believe.”

I glared at him. “No way in hell I’d believe you over her.”

An evil smile curled his lips. “The beautiful thing is you don’t have to. We recorded her entire confession.”

He reached toward the keyboard, clicked several keys, then forced my head to the right to face the center monitor. A blurred frozen image flickered into motion, video playing forward. Anna sat in a chair, her head lolled forward until a hand appeared and gripped her hair by the roots, yanking her head upright.

“What is EtherSphere One?” Escobar’s voice came through the monitor’s speakers, from somewhere offscreen.

“I told you,” she slurred, eyes drifting shut. “It’s an international intelligence organization.”

“And you work for them.”

“Yes.”

“But Devin doesn’t.”

“No. Not yet. Her parents didn’t want her to know.”

My heart plummeted to my stomach. Too much. Like a nightmare-come-to-life, the world as I knew it kept twisting into a different truth, some other version of the lie I’d believed.

“Her parents didn’t want her to know what?”

“That they are a part of EtherSphere.”

I closed my eyes, trying to block it all out.

The grip on my chin tightened painfully, then jarred my head with a brutal shake. “Look!” he barked, then took a slow breath before his voice calmed. “Listen to the truth of it. Of the lies they’ve told you.”

“What part of EtherSphere?” Escobar’s voice from the monitor prompted.

Anna swallowed, eyes fighting to open. Her brows drew together as she tried to focus on a point off the screen before her eyelids closed again.

“What part?” the voice demanded.

“The upper echelon.” She paused, swallowing again. “They’re a part of the High Council.” The image froze, but a tornado twisted to mighty life inside my head, deadly, yet funneling to a focused point, searching for a path of reason.

Forced to watch a betrayal—of everything I’d believed to be true, everything I’d ever known—I let my mind spin into chaos, allowed the logic to take hold, sifted through my past in a split second’s time, trying to make sense of it all.

My parents were EtherSphere One?

Always had been?

No wonder they’d closed off and clamped down after my sister had been kidnapped. It was supposed to be me. Maybe someone had caught wind of their identities and wanted to steal one of their children as blackmail leverage. Or maybe someone within their organization needed to keep them in line. Possibly a counterpart decided too much power in one household put the rest of their group at a disadvantage, decided to even the odds.

“I hear the gears in your head turning, Devin. Does it really matter how or why it happened? It happened. And it shaped you into an even better instrument than any one of them could have dreamed. The anger. The vengeance. Wrath becomes the best tool, an instrument whose blade sharpens into an edge like no other. Trust me—I know this.”

Muscles that had tensed in response to the shocking revelation began to relax as my familiar darkness wrapped itself around me, orienting to his voice and the meaning behind his words. He spoke the truth, the only one I’d ever known.

“Long ago you were simply the brainchild, the potential weapon.” His vice-grip on my jaw relaxed too, as if he sensed my spine hardening while realization flowed into my mind, coursed through my veins. “Now you’ve become invaluable to them—worth orchestrating a vacation as a ruse to convince you to be a spy with them, according to Anna.”

With the click of a key, Anna’s image flickered into motion again, the video playing.