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

I needed to make him see that. He needed to know what the rules would be if we went any farther together. It was time to establish some boundaries.

“I don’t know that I want you involved in this, at this point,” I announced into the quiet of the shaft. His dark eyes flicked over at me, and he shifted. “You’re becoming a liability. Your temper is out of control, and you’re not looking at the big picture. You need—”

My brother made an irritated tsk, and anger started to creep up my spine, cold and hard. I turned toward him and peered at him over the boxes I held. “I mean it, Alex. You’re going to follow my lead, or I’m not letting you back into my quarters, and I will revoke your access to the Citadel.”

His eyes snapped to mine, dark with anger for several seconds. “Why am I not surprised?” He scoffed. “You were already cutting me off before, so why not just continue with it? It’s not like I’m your twin or anything.”

His words upset me. I had explained my position, but he was clearly trying to make it personal. “It’s not like that, Alex,” I informed him. “I have the others to think of, and I have an obligation to keep them safe from all dangers, both inside and out.”

“An obligation,” my brother repeated, his eyes narrowing. “An obligation? To them? What about to me? What about to our mother, who died helping you fight a machine that your enemies sent after you? The same machine, I might add, that we encountered before and that you did nothing to stop!”

That was a blow too low, or maybe too close to the truth for me, but either way, it hurt. Deeply. So deeply that I had to turn away from him for a second to try to regain my composure. He was right—I had known about the sentinel and had failed to stop it. There had been reasons at the time, but in retrospect, they didn’t seem strong enough compared to what had been lost. I took a deep breath and tried to push my guilt aside, but it was hard.

“Alex, you need to stop talking about crap you don’t understand,” Maddox grated out. “You’re acting like a complete and utter tool right now.”

“You don’t even know me,” he bit out. “And you need to stay out of this.”

“The hell I do,” she shot back. “She is the only reason any of us are still alive right now, and I am not going to stand here and watch you attack her like this. She’s your twin, your sister, for crying out loud! Why are you angry at her?”

The elevator was slowing to a stop, but I ignored it and turned a half-step to look at my brother and see what his answer would be.

“Because I’m scared for her!” he roared, and his answer was so unexpected that I took a step back from him. “She’s been out there risking her life trying to find the people who killed our mom and hurt Scipio, and I have been stuck in IT, under surveillance, doing nothing to help. And then when I do, when I insist that we should kill Baldy, everyone looks at me like I’m a monster! I mean, she grabbed him on impulse and then decided it wasn’t a very good idea after the fact?! And you support that, but my idea to keep everyone safe was just dismissed out of hand?”

Maddox’s green eyes didn’t even bat a lash, but her chin went up several notches higher. Pride and gratitude burst over me at her willingness to defend me, even if a small voice told me that it was only going to make Alex angrier. “Absolutely. We all make mistakes, and when we do, we adapt. But you need to own up to your part in all this and admit that you didn’t have everyone’s best interests in mind when you suggested killing him.”

“What are you talking about?” he demanded belligerently. “I did what I could to try to find the bastards who killed my mother and hurt my sister, and I refuse to apologize for that. He deserves death for all the things we know he’s done, and I’m betting there is a lot that we don’t know! You want to keep him alive? Sleeping only a few precious feet from your rooms? Trying to escape, get revenge, whatever?” He took a beat in his impassioned rant to give her a cold and pitying look. “If you think that’s a good idea, then maybe you need to reevaluate your priorities.”

“That’s enough,” I said, both to him and to the churning and frothing mass my stomach had become as he spoke. Maybe he has a point. Maybe keeping Baldy alive was a mistake, a small, doubting voice whispered. But then again, this doesn’t sound like my brother at all. He might have convinced himself he was doing it for us, but the more he argues for this, the less I believe him. I looked up at Alex, trying to search for some semblance of the man I had known before Mom’s funeral, but found only anger and hate. The confines of the elevator felt uncomfortably tight just now, so it was a relief when it stopped.

The change in my brother had left me ice cold, and I needed time to think about how I was going to even begin to talk to him about his behavior. For now, it was time to simply reiterate my point and escape. “I set out my terms,” I told him numbly, trying not to let the discomfort he had stirred in me show. “Follow them or don’t.”

I stalked forward, needing freedom from the tight confines of the elevator and my brother. I expected him to take a moment to think about what I said, but when he started following, I realized he wasn’t going to.

And that he knew my threat had been a bluff. I didn’t have it in me to cut him off yet, especially now that I realized something was wrong with him. And maybe he even had a point. I had made many mistakes. Was I just messing things up? Was I making things worse for us?

I considered the possibility as I turned left down the hall and followed the curve around until it headed down a short staircase to a wide-open conference room, where I would host my Knight Commanders meetings when I eventually had them.

It took the span of crossing the room for him to start talking again, only this time it was directed at me. “So what’s your next step, then? What do you plan to do with Baldy?”

His words only added to the flames of doubt that he had breathed into me, hitting a topic I had already spent hours worrying over with no real result. I didn’t have a plan beyond going through Sadie’s files to see if we could find any incriminating evidence. And if she had been paranoid enough, she might have hidden all of that somewhere else. We might get nothing, and if that happened, I had no idea what the hell we were going to do.

Alex was waiting for an answer, and I had to give him one. I decided to hedge. “Alex, right now I am just focusing on making sure our tracks are covered. We still haven’t heard from the council about Sadie’s quarters, Jasper and Rose are offline, and I have two prisoners that I’m not entirely sure what to do with.” I paused, realizing that bringing up Baldy wasn’t a good idea, but it had already been said.

“I’m telling you what you should do, Lily,” my brother replied, this time sadness cutting through the anger. “You just don’t want to hear it. And I get it. You killed those people in Sadie’s office a few hours ago, and you’re having regrets. But you can’t let that get in the way of what needs to be done here.”

My fingers tightened around the boxes I was still holding, and I stopped in the hall just before the kitchen. That wasn’t the same at all. If those people had caught Leo and me, everyone would’ve paid the price—including Alex. I’d had to kill them. Yes, taking Baldy had been a spur-of-the-moment decision that I regretted, but killing him now would be a lot different from killing those other people. We were different from that.

“It’s not right, Alex,” I told him finally.

“Liana, please,” he pleaded, coming around to take one of the boxes off my stack. “Can’t you see how dangerous he is? He almost killed you. Do you want him anywhere near the people you care about?”

His words were reasonable, his tone sincere, but I wasn’t swayed. If anything, the fact that my brother was pleading with me to kill a helpless man I had locked up in one of the bedrooms made him a stranger to me. I hated that.