The Girl Who Dared to Endure (The Girl Who Dared #6)

For several seconds, I was stunned by the vehemence of his response. I had expected guilt out of him, for losing control, but not this deep rage that seemed to be consuming him. Once again, I felt like I was being confronted by a total stranger, but that couldn’t be possible. This was Alex, my twin.

I considered what he said for several moments, trying to rationalize this new behavior, as I watched Quess straighten Baldy’s broken nose by pinching the bridge between two fingers. I could comprehend his anger to a certain extent; it was an understandable reaction to the injustices we had suffered at the hands of our enemies. But in my brother’s case, his rage was borderline unhealthy, a way of easing the pain inside through some form of immediate and violent action. But that wasn’t justice. It was vengeance. And if my brother continued down this path, I feared what would happen to him.

“You lost control, Alex,” I said softly. “I told you he wasn’t going to talk.”

“You were right,” he said before I could form any sort of conclusion, and a curious warmth curled through me. I was? “He wasn’t going to talk. And he’s still a threat. We should kill him.”

I pressed my lips together, disappointed that he wasn’t admitting to the fact that he’d lost control. Was he really blind to it, or did he believe that what he had been doing was right? I wasn’t sure, but either way, it was starting to scare me.

Especially because it was so shortsighted. “If we kill him, then we definitely lose any chance of getting the boy Tian brought back to help us, if we haven’t lost it already, after… what happened.”

“Yeah, about that,” Quess cut in, and I could tell from the discomfort in his voice that he was angling to change the subject. “Did you get an explanation from her as to how and where she found him? Were there others? Was she seen?”

I exhaled, trying to tamp down my irritation. The answer was that I hadn’t gotten an explanation, and the reason was that I couldn’t bear to see Tian’s or the boy’s faces looking at us like that anymore. I’d get the story from her later, once I got this taken care of.

“No,” I told him simply. “Let’s get through problems A through D first.”

Quess snorted as he pressed the bone-mending patch over Baldy’s broken nose. “We’d be lucky to have only four problems,” he muttered, and a startled laugh escaped me. There was truth in his words, and, Scipio help me, it made me tired more than anything.

The momentary levity slowly melted away as I heard my brother make an aggravated noise and shift his weight. “We’d have one less problem if you’d just stop patching him up and kill him already,” he snarled. “He’s a threat, he’s no good to us, and keeping him alive is dangerous. If he breaks free from this room and lets his people know what we know, they’ll hunt us down and kill us all. Why are we still talking about this?”

My lips formed a thin line, and I fought the rising urge to shake him at his continued shortsightedness and bloodthirsty attitude. It was really starting to scare me, but even more than that, it lacked any rationality. Even if we couldn’t get answers out of Baldy, that didn’t mean we couldn’t use him for something. Not to mention, the boy Tian brought in knew Baldy. There had to be a way to exploit that connection. But not if we just beat on Baldy for no good reason.

“Alex, he’s still valuable, alive or dead. You need to take a breath and slow down. We have a ton of information to go through from Sadie’s computer, and once Leo gets Jasper and Rose separated and back online, they might be able to help us learn what’s actually going on. We’re going to figure this out. Together.”

On impulse, I reached out to touch his forearm, to comfort him, but as soon as my fingers stroked over his uniform, he jerked away from me, whirling around to present me with his back.

“Alex?” I asked, concerned and hurt by his reaction.

He stood there for several seconds, his back and shoulders rising and falling as he tried to calm himself, catch his breath… something. I couldn’t tell what was going on. All I knew was that it was dark, turbulent, and seemed to be consuming him. My twin. The only other human being in the world I felt fully connected to.

“Alex,” I said pleadingly, my heart overflowing with worry and concern. “Talk to me. I know I’ve been a crappy sister, but—”

He whirled around, his eyes blazing behind his glasses. “I don’t want to talk. I want to do something. I want to find the guys who hurt you and killed Mom and make them pay. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Why are you hesitating now, after everything that has happened? Do you not care that they’re killing Scipio? Do you not care that thousands of people are going to die if they get what they want?”

My brows drew tightly together, and I took a step back, the sting of his words and insinuations almost enough to make me want to walk away. I tried to remind myself that this wasn’t Alex—that he was in pain and upset because things were moving too slowly.

But I was rapidly running out of excuses for him, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this person wearing my brother’s face, because it certainly wasn’t him.

“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I heard Leo say angrily from behind me, and a second later I felt his hands sliding over my shoulders, holding me upright just as I was about to falter. I shot him a grateful look, but he ignored it as he speared Alex with a glare. “She cares more about the Tower and the people in it than I’d wager most do, and I won’t let you say anything to the contrary! Of course she cares, and she’s working on it. We all are. But it isn’t something we can rush, no matter how much you want to, so stop attacking your sister. She is doing the best she can, and you should acknowledge and respect that.”

His words helped take away some of the pain from Alex’s words. But only some.

My brother glared at him, and then made an irritated noise. “You’re right,” he finally said, but there was still an angry undercurrent to his voice. “She is doing the best she can. I’m just… frustrated. I’ll go for a walk and try to clear my head.”

“You do that,” Leo said, and there was a firmness in his voice that said Alex was going to leave whether he liked it or not. I didn’t like it, but I realized that maybe he needed it.

My brother was already turning to walk away but grunted an acknowledgment over his shoulder, followed by an, “I’ll be back soon.”

The words filled me with an ominous dread, but I kept my mouth shut and let him go, hoping that Leo was right.





7





The juxtaposition of the nonstop adrenaline rush that had been the last twelve hours or so and the quiet waiting that occurred in the long hours after was like the slow twist of a dagger, agonizing in both its intensity and anticipation, as I wondered when the end would come. Even though we had more than enough to occupy ourselves while we waited for Sadie’s call to the council to report her quarters malfunction, it never seemed like quite enough to distract us from the relentlessly slow movements of the clock. In short, we were spread out, thinner than rice paper.

Staying busy was the only thing that kept me from freaking out as time churned on, and luckily, there was a lot to do. I started with putting the walls and furniture of the apartment back in place and added two modified rooms for our prisoners. I wound up fiddling with the details for an hour, trying to kill some time while I waited, but at a certain point it became annoying and tedious. I wanted to move on to something else, even though I knew it wouldn’t do me any good. Baldy, still unconscious from the beating earlier and bound using a pair of cuffs, went in one new room, and the boy, Liam, went into the other. Tian opted to stay with him, to see if she could convince him that we weren’t going to hurt him, but after what he had seen, I knew only time and space would allow him to see that.