Legacy (Sociopath Series Book 2)(56)

“The guy looks like you. The FBI happen to be interested in the clip. We need to stop assuming this is all a big bunch of coincidences.” I reach out experimentally, dragging a fingertip down the damp plane of his cheekbone. “We’re safe to talk about it here, right? Or do you just not want to talk?”

“I know it isn’t a coincidence.” He closes his eyes. For a moment, he ripples toward my touch like liquid; the sunlight plays with his features, just as I do. We’re both inexplicably drawn.

“You feel powerless,” I murmur, stroking him. “It’s why you brought us all here.”

He flinches. “No.”

“It’s okay, you know.”

“Help me out here, smart ass. The guy’s only going to look like me if we’re related. Yes? I played Super Mario while my mother buried my dad—”

My stomach lurches, all the nausea from the plane resurfacing in one bile-flavored punch. My hand drops from his face.

“—So I’m left with the highly plausible theory that this is some kind of government conspiracy, and he, Ash and I are genetic clones, spaced out and tested in various environments to see if we’re all still sociop—” He cuts off. Just bites the word in half.

The room pulls silent around is. Squeezes us in its fist.

I peer over the cushion at Aeron; he watches me with the eyes of a hunter. His chest falls and rises in breathless panic.

“You can say the word,” I tell him. “It doesn’t change anything between us.”

He doesn’t say it. Instead, it hangs there like the slithering knot of sounds that it is, and I turn it over in my mouth, taste the fear in it.

“Aeron.” I swallow. “Is there absolutely no chance your dad survived?”

“She. Buried. Him,” he says through his teeth.

“But did you see that part? I know this is hard…I’m sorry.”

“I saw her drag his body into the woods, and she came back covered in dirt. The police investigated when she reported him missing a while later. They found nothing and suspected he was dead.” He exhales slowly. “There was a plastic bag on his head, but I know it was still him. I saw.”

I breathe with him. Try to calm myself. “Okay. Okay.”

“The guy in that photograph looks nothing like my dad, Leo.”

“But he looks like you.” My heartbeat skitters. “And he looks like Ash. That’s who they wanted the sample from. Did your mother have siblings?”

“No.” He gives a jerk of a shrug. “Not that I knew of. She had parents, but we hardly ever saw them…it was all f*cked up. I don’t know.”

He does feel powerless. He knows how to shape the future, but he’s helpless to manipulate the past.

“If the second guy on the pictures is Blood Honey, then he’s related to you. That, or he’s made an effort to look like you. He wasn’t at the airport by chance. And the email…well. We don’t know about that. But there have been no more murders.” I run my tongue along the sharp edge of my canine tooth. “He could’ve easily left for Russia.”

“And the FBI wondered if I’d go find him, so they gave me a little push.”

“They think you’re in cahoots, somehow. Or at least that you know each other.” I pause. “Because that email seemed to contain a secret.”

“It did.” He fingers the matted scar of his bullet hole absent-mindedly; heat rushes along my inner thighs, tightening swollen flesh. “They just have no evidence.”

“So…so what do we do now?”

“We stay put. We’re safe here. Even if they decide I’m somehow guilty, they can’t extradite me if they can’t find me.”

“And what about him?” I reach over and cover his fingers with mine, grazing my nails over the faint pink line bisecting his belly. We’re scar petting. I should probably be more worried about this. “We just…we just do nothing?”

“I don’t know, sweetheart.” He caresses my wrist. Squeezes it. “He kills three times in three weeks. Then…nothing. Maybe he realized the FBI had an ID on him, and ran off before they could catch him. Maybe this is all part of something bigger. Or maybe we’re wrong about everything and he’s never going to be caught.”

I have a theory, of course.

I just can’t share it with him until I’m sure.

“You still want to take that shower?” I ask. Our luggage arrived as Gwen left, and clean clothes call to me.

“Only if you promise to spend most of it on your knees.”

I push along his scars in rough patterns; he arches up to my touch, his eyes falling closed. Such therapy. The more I stroke him, the wetter I get. “That can be arranged.”

Feels like we’re on borrowed time. The blows keep coming, the bruises keep baulking, and eventually, the skin of us will break. Until then…I’ll indulge him.

Indulge sounds so much better than love.

***

I can’t remember the last time I did absolutely nothing for days on end. On the island, there’s so little to do, you’re forced to relax and just…be.

We swim a lot—the afternoon finds us around the infinity pool, and in the cooler hours of the morning, we brave the ocean. We laze about on the beach, reading books and drinking cocktails and helping Ash to catch the tiny white sand crabs that scrabble across the dunes. We eat in the island’s restaurant villa, throwing scraps of bread and fish down for the slow-circling rays, and we walk through the ragged clumps of ferns and palms, though none of it takes long. You need ten minutes, if that, to get from one end of the island to the other. There are six of us and maybe eight members of staff—everything is just so quiet.