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Winking at him, James stood but didn’t step away from his seat. “Oh, I think you’re going to be happy to help me when the time comes. But first we gotta take care of that mess you made of our face.” Dom opened his mouth to ask what he was planning, but James was shouting across the room. “Slaney! Get your sexy ass back in here and bring that mirror you found.”
A few seconds later, heavy footsteps echoed across the room. Dom looked over his shoulder as best he could to see the man he’d beaten up in the nightclub bathroom with a large mirror in his hand.
“You sure about this, babe?” Slaney asked as he came to stand next to Dom.
“Yeah, this dumbass went and got himself hurt. But we can fix it up easily enough.” Reaching into his back pocket, James pulled out something black and gave it a flick with his wrist. A long silver blade slid easily out of the matte black handle and caught the light hanging over the pool table. With his free left hand, James dug a lighter out of his front pocket. A spark from the flint caught the fuel and a teardrop of light burned in front of Dom. His heart was pounding so hard in his chest; he could barely swallow.
“You can’t fix my fucking face, James!” he desperately said. He struggled against the bindings holding him in the chair, but there was no getting free. Digging his heels into the floor, he pushed backward, trying to shove the chair farther away from his brother, but Slaney moved just enough sideways that his body was blocking his path. There was no escape.
“Grab his head and hold him still,” James said.
Large fingers threaded through Dom’s hair, getting a good grip before tightening. Pain lanced through his scalp and brought tears to his eyes. Slaney pulled back and to the right, forcing Dom to turn his head to a particular angle or risk having a huge chunk of his hair ripped out.
James moved the flame back and forth over the edge of the blade, heating it while staring at Dom. “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices if we want to keep our edge,” James said.
He looked over to the mirror that Slaney was holding up in his free hand. James’s wild green eyes jerked back and forth between the mirror and Dom’s scarred cheek. He took a couple of deep, ragged breaths before tossing the lighter to the ground. Lifting the blade to his own left cheek, he dug in deep, cutting from his temple, across his cheek, to his jaw. Flesh hissed and burned under the hot knife. Spittle ran from his brother’s open mouth, but his hand never wavered in its course as he copied the long, ugly scar Dom had acquired in the service to his friend Sven.
Dom couldn’t draw his eyes from his brother’s madness. His heart ached, and his brain shied away from what he saw. How had it come to this? Why couldn’t he just leave? Pretend he’d never seen Dom?
James lowered the blade to his side and smiled at his handiwork. There was only a little blood running down his face from where the knife had cooled too much to close the wound again. While the wound was angry and fresh, it was nearly the same shape as the one on Dom’s cheek. In a short time and with a little makeup, the wounds would be completely identical.
Looking back and forth from Dom to the mirror, James frowned. “Keep holding him,” James ordered as he wiped off the knife on the leg of his pants and brought it back to the flame.
Dom tried to jerk his head, hissing when Slaney’s hand dug harder into his scalp. The man put the mirror on the floor and clamped down on Dom’s chin, holding his head tilted up toward the light.
The low chuckles that left James’s mouth as he bent over Dom made his skin crawl. Mad. His brother had gone completely mad.
Searing pain slashed through him when James dragged his knife along the healed scar on Dom’s face. The smell of burning flesh clogged his nose and his stomach heaved. He tried to scream, but Slaney held him too tightly to even open his mouth. A low, throaty moan filled the bar.
“Be still,” James snapped as he kept drawing the knife down Dom’s cheek. “It needs to look fresh like mine!” He picked up the mirror once again, then nodded. “There. We’re the same again. Back to the way it should be.”
Slaney released Dom’s head and he shut his eyes, the pain and fury so intense that he shook with it. “No,” he gritted out, his cheek on fucking fire. “We’re not the same. We may look the same, but we are not the same. I’m not you.”
