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  But wasn’t that what the world once thought about me too?

  I’m blown back by the recognition to the point that Emma notices and takes over things. Thank God. “What did you do then?” she asks.

  “What could I do?” Tyce returns. “Staying for a leisurely lunch and a round on the putting green wasn’t an option, especially because I knew I had some work cut out for me. As soon as I got back to my place in Manhattan, I dove in. I started backtracking to the dates when your feeds stopped making sense.”

  Emma squeezes my hand tighter. She’s starting to realize what I do. This is going to be the difficult part to hear. Angie’s composure changes in the same way. She presses her lips into a terse line.

  Still, Emma gets out, “How far back did you have to go?”

  At once, I long to kiss her again. It’s the same question searing my mind, though I acknowledge the answer won’t mean anything. Inside the Source, every day was an eternity. After I escaped and went into hiding, it was strange to learn only six months of my life had been stolen from me.

  “A little under six weeks,” Tyce answers her. “But as soon as I made the conclusive call, the rest fell easily into place.” Both his temples tighten. “Almost too easily, I suppose—which should have thrown up a red flag for me. But maybe the flag was there, and I refused to see it.”

  “Which means what?” Again, the question comes from Emma.

  “That as soon as I spotted and identified the last woman Reece had been spending real time with”—he caresses Angelique’s hand from wrist to light-pink nails—“I pretty much wanted her for myself.”

  During his declaration, my regard switches to Angelique, where I see composure settings that the woman never dialed into with me. She’s trés gaga over my brother, proven all too clearly as she murmurs to Tyce, “And began to chase relentlessly.”

  Tyce kicks up half a smile. “Well, it made things a hell of a lot easier…” His voice dips at the end, turning into a rough breath as he meshes gazes with Angelique. They’re like that for a long pause, completely tied into each other, until he snaps away with a self-conscious head shake. “Sorry, man,” he mumbles. “Not trying to make this weird for you.”

  I chuff out a laugh before purposely landing my gaze back on my gorgeous woman. “We’ve all been through hell, brother. Sadly, there’s nothing like that to make a man see his true heaven—and appreciate it.”

  I speak the last words right to her. Into her. Emma absorbs them with such a powerful potency, I swear she’s about to glow. But the woman has been that way since the moment I met her, with those wide turquoise eyes reigning over soft, flowing features so full of passion and life. I’ll never see a sunrise or sunset that captivates me more. The only feeling more addicting for me is knowing I do the same for her—confirmed the moment she leans over in a sighing rush, forming her lips to mine. Within seconds, we’re a tangle of tongues and moans, with me hauling her into my lap just so I can have more of her near me, wrapped around me, pressed against me.

  “Love of God.” Tyce’s growl punches the air, confirming there’s still a healthy chunk of his sardonic bastard side left. “You two want to get a damn room?”

  “Have one,” I rumble while parting from Emma and sending a derisive side-eye across the table. “Ten feet away. So let’s do the rest of this, okay?”

  My dictate is met by more trademark Tyce in the form of his arrogant smirk—which comes as a welcome sight right now. The fucktards in the hive didn’t strip him of everything, though I sense we’re all about to find out how deep the rest of his damage goes.

  After he copies my move, tugging Angelique until she’s cuddled in his chair with him, he states, “So I’ll skip over all the parts where I chased this luminous creature around half of France and Spain with a perpetual boner…”

  “Yeah, please do.” Though my sarcasm fades the next second, as everything about my brother turns to unmistakable tension.

  “The fuckers grabbed me just after midnight, outside a bar in Madrid. Funny thing was, Angelique was there as bait for them to catch someone else, and she never knew what a prize they’d really gotten that night. To this day, I’m not sure how I was discovered or recognized. It had been about ten days, and I had a good beard grown in.” He snorts. “I even dressed like a tourist and wore retail cologne.”

  “Not that.”

  He starts a snigger but plugs it short. To the outside world, my levity might be disrespect. To the two of us, it’s a toehold on sanity. “Anyhow, they knocked me out damn fast. When I woke up, I was strapped down to a steel slab. They never told me how long I’d been out, and I knew better than to ask where I was.”

  He stops to get in a long breath. I take one with him, sharing our survivors’ version of a stiff shot. Inside the Source, there was no Señor Patrón or Madame Absolut to help with the hundred or so “rough spots” in each day. There was only the hope of another heartbeat. The solace of more air. The grit to hold on and reach through the pain. To get to the next breath.

  Another inhalation.

  Another long agony of letting it back out—because I know that pulling it back in will bring on more memories.

  And it does.

  And from the middle of those shadows, I finally reply to him, “Would it have mattered if you did know?”

  Tyce sits and listens to several lines of the song that echoes across the courtyard. As French Elton sings about clouds in eyes, several gray and white billows scud by overhead, temporarily turning the morning to twilight.

  Into that stolen moment of gloaming, my brother releases his bleak whisper.

  “No.” He slides one hand atop the table again. Palm down, fingers flat, tips pressing until they’re white. “It wouldn’t have mattered at all.”

  The clouds move on.

  The sun sends a new glow back into the room.

  But the tips of Tyce’s fingertips glow even brighter.

  Brighter still.

  And now I reach out to him.

  With a forceful slide, I bring my hand up beneath his, locking our thumbs and then our palms. As I wrap my fingers against the back of his hand, their glow emanates all the way up his arm.

  We’re silent, doing more of those deep-breath shots for another minute. The song from downstairs finally ends, thank fuck, and French Elton moves on to a new track: “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me.” Well, at least it’s not “The Last Song.”

  Maudlin tunes or not, my brother and I lock stares once again—in the mutual agreement that a crucial moment between us is finally here. It sucks, because we’ve both been in denial about having to face it until this moment—but now that it’s here, we both understand we can’t run from it any more than our own destinies.

  “Tell me.” I say it softly but command it with authority, recognizing it’s likely the only motivation he’ll be able to use for speaking the rest of this truth.

  His truth.

  Probably saying it aloud for the very first time.

  So after directing him, I brace myself—knowing this is liable to get fucking messy. Knowing I’ll likely have to tell him, more than once, what Emma was there to tell me when I finally trusted my story to spoken words. And unguarded confusion. And unhindered shame. And unbridled guilt.

  You didn’t ask for this.

  You didn’t deserve this.

  The pain is in your body, but it doesn’t have to be in your soul.

  And yeah, even the last one, which I’m still not sure I believe—but it’s become the reason I keep putting one heavy foot in front of the other, each and every day.

  It’s going to be okay.

  Eventually.

  Chapter Two

  Emma

  It’s another one of those surreal but all-too-real moments, stamping itself with darker ink onto the fabric of my existence. As these once-estranged brothers clasp hands, I share a look with the woman I once considered my bitter enemy—and the two of us share a new bond too. A moment of brand-new understandi
ng, empathy, connection…forgiveness.

  Two brothers. The two women who love them. Four hearts suspending their beats, giving bitter respect for the truth they’re about to endure.

  “Tyce.” Reece has steel armor on his voice now, ready to face off against the obvious growth of his brother’s remorse. “It’s all right, man. None of it was your fault.”

  Tyce caves his shoulders. Hangs his head. “Don’t you think I fucking know that?”

  Reece grinds the back ends of his jaw. I feel the no already fulminating in his chest, but he swallows it down and growls, “Then you know none of this crap was your fault. That the Consortium is a nest of messed-up maniacs with overblown god complexes and tiny dicks.”

  Tyce lifts one side of his head. Eyeballs his brother from the midst of Silly Putty flesh that’s now spidered with glowing cobalt veins. “And Faline?”

  Reece grunts. “She has a tiny dick too.”

  I swing a curious stare at Tyce. “So you know who Faline is?”

  “Oh, yeah. I know who Faline is.” The verbal dungeon of his voice is all the incentive I need not to ask how or why. I have a horrific feeling we’re about to find out anyway.

  “So she supervised your…experiments…too.” The pauses Reece stabs into it aren’t surprising. Beneath my fingers, the taut cords of his neck and shoulder still belie the noun he really wants to say.

  Torture.

  “Oh, I was one of her favorites,” Tyce relays. “But only because of you, man. I was like the B side of the Reece Richards chart-topping hit. She liked calling us her ‘exclusive Richards collection.’”

  “Cute.” Reece sets his brother free in order to sweep up his ale and knock back an angry gulp. “But if she was going for a matched set, she only snagged two out of three.”

  Tyce pulls all the way up. His face—both sides—is stony. “I’m getting to that part.”

  Reece slams his bottle down. His profile turns feral. “What?”

  “Breathe.” After waiting through the full minute it takes Reece to recompose himself, Tyce goes on. “Like I said, we were the exclusives. The elite. Whatever the Consortium wasn’t finding in the other Alphas, they’d found in our Richards DNA.”

  As I swivel to face the table more fully, my hand slides to the middle of Reece’s chest and lands right over his thundering heart. “Faline told you this?”

  “Not in so many words,” Tyce answers. “But yes.”

  The throb of Reece’s heartbeat becomes the snarl beneath his voice. “She never told me any of that.”

  “And disclose to you that they’d nailed me too? And that would have benefited her…how?” Weirdly, Tyce finishes it with a smirk. “You were the one that bitch was always the most paranoid about, Reece. The star she freaked the hardest about keeping roped down.”

  I squirm against Reece despite how he tries to comfort me—but despite my overwhelming urge to puke, I force myself to assert, “Because he scared her the most.”

  I don’t bother checking for anyone’s affirmation. I’m already sure of it as absolute truth. I might have only spent six hours beneath Faline’s thumb, but after just six minutes, I knew the enormity of the woman’s obsession for my man.

  But Reece’s baffled scowl also confirms more of what I already know as fact. This is total news to him. Well, peachy. Guys really can be that dense sometimes.

  “I scared her?” He snorts. “In what world is that logical, considering she had needles in my balls?”

  “The needles were because of her fear.” Tyce matches my certainty. “Obviously, the bastards were getting different outcomes with every new subject they experimented on. With me, they got an electronic shapeshifter able to bring them one of three new faces at will. One day, I heard them talking about one of the Omegas being able to jump sixty stories in a single bound. Another can stretch her arms by ten feet apiece. As they’ve played with voltage and treatment duration, each guinea pig has returned a different result.”

  Reece’s lips twist. “Even death.”

  “Oh, especially that,” Tyce asserts. “At least a couple of dozen before we came along, according to Faline.”

  “If she can be believed,” I mutter.

  Tyce tilts his head. “Even if she’s right by half, that makes the Consortium a posse of scary fuckers.”

  Angelique, who’s been carefully quiet through the exchange, releases a watery sigh. “They believe in their cause the same way religious zealots do. Even Faline, in her strange way. They view the dead as martyrs for the greater cause of mankind.”

  “And the escapees as traitors.” Tyce’s edict corresponds with a new song on the air from French Elton John. More specifically, “The Last Song.” I glare out into the courtyard, silently wondering if the downstairs DJ needs a hug or two hundred. As I pull my focus back inside, Reece curls his extended hand into a taut fist against the table. The stench of fried electricity invades the air as silver and blue sparks pop free from the gaps in his fingers. The tiny explosions hop a few times along the table before fizzling out. Thank God for protective shellac.

  “So,” Reece finally ventures. “You found a way out too?”

  Tyce’s nostrils flare as he pulls in a deep breath. Then another, twice as deep. “Not exactly.”

  Reece’s inhalation is equally ominous. “So you’re still on their goddamned radar?”

  I lurch off his lap, already knowing he’s going to follow me. Pacing is the only way he’ll be able to burn off his fury. Some of it, at least.

  Dear God, I hope.

  That outcome depends a lot on what Tyce has to say. The bouncing ball of logic isn’t landing him in the home court of believability anymore.

  “Not…exactly.”

  And so not the words to help cool the nuclear reactor of Reece’s wrath. “Okay, brother,” he spits. “So, what exactly, then?” He’s already covered the length of the kitchen in three furious bounds and whips back around in the archway to the living room, hands laced at the back of his head. “You here as their fetch dog, like she was back in LA?” He jerks his chin at Angelique. “At least she brought gifts. Or are you hiding the cufflinks in your back pocket?”

  Angelique surges to her feet. “Fils de pute.” Her gaze is green flames. She rolls her shoulders like an Amazonian on a mission. “Do you see what those connards did to him?” Her voice pitches higher. “I thought he was dead!”

  “I almost wished I was,” Tyce mutters, reaching over for her before he’s done. “I’m sorry, Angelique, but I did. I was certain I had nothing left to live for. That they’d dealt the same treatment to you, only worse.” He clutches her against him with a big hand at the back of her head. “They hinted at it in all their taunts. Told me how they’d violated you, burning your face off as they did, until you begged for your life. They used it to make my tears come, so the salt would run into the flesh they were rearranging.” He yanks her closer before croaking, “Dario’s flesh.”

  “Putain!”

  As hoarse and hurting as Angelique’s grief is, I’m glad for it. While I knew none of this would be easy to hear, the pit of my stomach rolls over on itself, and I clutch hard at the pain. When Reece rushes over and pulls me close, I twist my free hand into the front of his Henley. “Dario’s flesh,” I echo in a rasp. “The face he was wearing when she first met him, inside the hive. The face she first fell in love with.”

  For several long minutes, we’re no longer four people in one room. We’re two completions of souls, unities of spirits, and symbioses of love. Needing each other. Healing each other. Though our men give us shelter in their arms, Angelique and I are the quarries from which they gather their strength and rebuild their ramparts. Neither can exist or edify without the other.

  As “The Last Song” ends—thank God—and gives way to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Angelique relents her hold on Tyce by enough to tell him, “They did none of those things, mon amour. This I give you as truth. They likely thought me sufficiently broken by the news of your death,
since I pleaded so convincingly for them to keep me in the fold.”

  “Which was a brilliant move.” Tyce adds to the praise with a fervent kiss to her forehead. “Brilliant but fucking dangerous.”

  “Said the bull fighter to the sky diver?” Reece charges.

  Tyce swoops a glare over. “You talking to me, Monsieur Bolt? After spending months facing off with the finest asswads of LA’s underworld?”

  “Not a time clock I’m punching anymore, man.”

  Tyce’s response to that is strange. Resignation grabs at his shoulders but intensity claims his stare, as if his will alone can change what Reece just said. “Not regularly,” he echoes. “But still often enough, right?”

  Reece scowls. “Meaning what?”

  “That you’re still retaining the badass moves? And you still know what you’re doing around thugs and henchmen?”

  “Yeah, maybe.” The furrows deepen between his eyebrows. “Okay, probably. But why?”

  “Because they might be needed.”

  “For what?” I add one hell of a forward stomp at the end of my demand. Something tells me I’ll need the extra steel in my stance—and not in a bring-on-your-shit-I’m-Wonder-Woman-and-can-take-it kind of way.

  That dread in my instinct is only confirmed by the harsh lift of Tyce’s chest as he squares his own posture, which jams his gaze to the same latitude as Reece’s.

  “Because Dad is in collusion with the Consortium.”

  And then drops that fun tidbit on the air.

  And, if the warring blue lights in his eyes can be believed, isn’t even done yet.

  “They’re going to use the dinner party for the Virage opening team as a cover for their trap.”

  Reece’s gaze fires like a Tesla coil. “Their trap for what?”

  “Not what,” Tyce returns. “Who.” He swallows hard. “It’s been their plan all along—to get the three of us in one place at one time. They knew neither you nor Chase would be able to resist the invitation. For you, it was a matter of shedding your black sheep wool once and for all. Luring Chase simply meant making the deal interesting—and lucrative.”