Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games #2)(80)

He snaps his fingers. Poof! “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

I open my eyes and glare at Shaggy. “News flash: I hate rhetorical questions. Fuck off.”

“You had evidence that your half brother caused a plane crash that killed two hundred thirty-five people, including your own parents, and you did nothing with that information.”

“Incorrect. I told the police about it. They thought I was nuts. At the time of the incident in question, he was thirteen.”

“And by all accounts already a sociopath.”

“All accounts? Like whose? The FBI didn’t even know he existed until a few days ago.”

“We aren’t the FBI.”

No, they aren’t. The NSA is the agency that has the entire planet wire-tapped. Emails, Facebook posts, instant messages, phone calls—they record it all in cooperation with every major technology provider and sift through the data at a speed of seventy quadrillion bits per second. It would take the average home PC twenty-two-thousand years to do what their supercomputer at their headquarters in Maryland can do in the blink of an eye.

They’re Big Brother’s big brother.

I can’t sit anymore. I jerk to my feet, start to pace, chew a hangnail on my thumb. Shaggy isn’t concerned by my sudden need to rove around. He just watches me, tracking my every move with those cagey alley cat eyes.

“When I knew him—”

“At MIT.”

“Yes! Shut up, will you, I’m getting things off my chest! Where was I? Oh yes. When I knew him, S?ren was always taking credit for things. Anytime anything malfunctioned anywhere in the world—a roller coaster that went off its tracks at an amusement park in Paris, a broken water main that flooded a subway tunnel in Amsterdam, plane crashes, train derailments, terrorist bombings—you name it, he claimed it was his doing. If he could’ve figured out a way to take credit for going back in time and shooting JFK, he would have.”

I swing around, enraged by all the memories, and look at Shaggy. “I thought he was full of shit!”

Shaggy replies calmly, “Until you found out he wasn’t.”

Yes. Until I found out he wasn’t. Which is when everything fell apart.

I turn my back, fold my arms over my chest, and stare at the cement wall.

Shaggy keeps talking in this light, casual tone of voice, like we’re two girlfriends having tea. “The FBI’s theory is that you two met at MIT, and then lived together and hacked together until you had some kind of falling-out. After which S?ren got payback for whatever you’d done to piss him off in the form of pinning the Bank of America job on you, and then he vanished. It’s a solid theory, but the real question is, what caused the falling-out?”

When I don’t respond, he asks, “Would you like to hear my theory?”

“Fuck no with a capital F-U-C-K.”

“I think you tried to kill him.”

Shaggy, you dick. This guy has X-ray vision. He sees through me even better than Connor does.

I exhale, hard. “In my defense, he really had it coming.”

He ignores that. “I listened to the tape of the call between you two. Creepy stuff. ‘Pet?’ ‘You’ve made me wait so long?’ The way he said your name? I think your brother was in love with you, to the point of obsession. Still is, by the sound of it.”

Between gritted teeth I say, “Half brother.”

He ignores that too. “I think he constructed an elaborate web of mind f*ckery with you, little fly, right in the middle. And by the time you realized that everything in your life had been manipulated by him, that he’d been pulling the strings all the way back from the deaths of your parents when you were eight years old to the death of your uncle when you were seventeen—which led to the foster home, which led to him rescuing you from the foster home—you were so far down the rabbit hole, you didn’t know how to find your way out. And so, like every wild thing does when it’s cornered, you lashed out.”

“You got all that from reading a file, huh?”

Apparently his little speech is over, because he doesn’t add anything else or answer my question. He just sits, waiting.

And because this game is coming to a close, I decide to tell him the truth.

I turn to look at him. “Are you familiar with 50 Shades of Grey?”

Shaggy doesn’t bat an eyelash. “The kinky sex book. My girlfriend loved it. Used to read it out loud to me in bed. Good stuff. And?”

“And,” I say, looking him in the eye, “S?ren Killgaard makes Christian Grey look like a Disney prince.”

Another pause while he absorbs my words. “So in addition to being a sociopath, he’s a sadist.”

“If the Marquis de Sade and Steve Jobs had a love child, it would be S?ren. He’s brilliant, he’s brutal, and he likes to break things.”

“Again, and?”

“And he consumed me.”

Shaggy waits, those amber eyes burning.

I turn back to the wall. Every beat of my heart is a little earthquake inside my chest.

“There’s no other way to describe it. He fed on my loneliness like a snake feeds on a mouse. I was blinded by him. By his brilliance. By his mind, the way it worked. At the beginning—even though I knew something was wrong with him, that he was broken—I was so grateful that he took me in when I had no one else, that he protected me from something so terrible and stood up for me when no one else would, that I pushed aside my doubts. I went to live with him—”