Chapter 7: The Boys Ask Questions
Amara did not cry in the taxi ride home from the Logan Square diner.
She did not cry while walking up the three flights of stairs to her apartment. She did not cry when her keys jingled against the deadbolt. She maintained the fierce, impenetrable armor she had worn every single day for fifteen years.
She finally broke the moment she locked the bathroom door behind her.
She turned the exhaust fan on high so the twins wouldn’t hear, slumped against the cheap linoleum tile, and wept into her hands. The ghosts of her past had finally kicked the door down, and the terrifying reality of Michael Kane was sitting right in her living room.
Outside the bathroom door, Daniel—the taller twin, born exactly seven minutes earlier—pressed his ear against the thin wood.
“She’s crying,” Daniel whispered, turning to his brother David, who was sitting nervously on the hallway carpet.
“Because of that guy at the jewelry store?” David asked, his brow furrowing deeply. “Did you see the way the security guards looked at him? He wasn’t just some rich guy, Dan. He looked dangerous.”
Daniel hesitated, looking at his younger brother. “He looked at us like… like he had seen a ghost. He looked at us like he knew exactly who we were.”
Both boys fell into a heavy, uncomfortable silence.
“Did you see his eyes?” David finally asked, voicing the terrifying thought they were both having.
Daniel had absolutely seen them. He saw those exact same dark, calculating eyes every single morning when he stared into the bathroom mirror.
When Amara finally emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later, her face was scrubbed clean. Her brave, warm smile was perfectly locked into place, and dinner was rapidly cooking on the stove within twenty minutes.
She served baked chicken, rice, and roasted vegetables. She moved around the cramped kitchen the exact same way she always did—efficient, fiercely loving, and aggressively present.
But the boys had grown up expertly reading her silences.
“Mom,” Daniel said, suddenly setting his fork down with a loud clink. “Who was that man?”
Amara’s hand paused in mid-air holding a water pitcher. The silence in the kitchen became absolute.
“He is someone I used to know a very long time ago,” Amara answered softly, refusing to look away from her son’s piercing gaze. “Before we moved here. Before I had you two.”
She did not technically lie.
Amara had promised herself the rainy night she gave birth in a charity ward that she would never, ever lie to them about the world. Even when the truth was a jagged knife.
But she had also promised herself that she would not poison their hearts with the toxic hatred of the Kane syndicate.
“So why did we run out of the store?” David pushed, leaning forward over his plate.
“Because he was someone I loved very much,” Amara explained, her voice cracking just a fraction. “And he chose a very different, very dangerous life. That is all you need to know. Now eat your dinner.”
The boys slowly picked up their forks and resumed eating. But Daniel’s dark eyes did not leave his mother’s exhausted face.
Deep in his blazer pocket, Daniel’s smartphone violently buzzed.
He carefully pulled it out under the table, shielding the screen from his mother’s view. It was a text message from a highly encrypted, unknown number.
Daniel. I know I have absolutely no right to contact you. But please, give me five minutes to explain. – M.K.
Daniel stared at the glowing screen, his heart hammering in his chest. He slowly locked the phone and shoved it back into his pocket.
He did not show his mother the message. Not yet.
If you were a teenager and a dangerous billionaire secretly texted you claiming to be a part of your past, would you reply, or would you show your mother?
