Page 26 of Entwined With You

“I like gin,” I say, kicking myself for almost saying I still like gin. “Whichever is easier.”

He waves me toward the couch, and I take a seat. The kitchen is in front of me behind a breakfast bar, and I can see everything except the refrigerator and, I assume, a pantry somewhere. I hear the fridge open and see the dim kitchen brighten as it does. The light fades, and a moment later he’s back at the couch with a bottle and two glasses.

He uncorks it and pours, then hands me my glass. I expect him to sit on the sofa next to me, but instead he sits on the coffee table so that our knees are almost touching. He leans forward, and I almost wish I could ease back and disappear into the cushions.

It’s not that I want distance from him, it’s the fact that I don’t want the distance. That I want him to keep leaning forward until he has to put his hands on my knees to balance himself. I want to feel his touch again. And I am more than a little afraid that I’ve overestimated my ability to pull off this con.

“Can I ask you something?”

My stomach clinches, but I nod. I tense in anticipation of him asking if I’m really Sabrina. I’m certain I must have screwed up somehow. How could I not? He clearly knows me so well. Just as I know how smart this man is. How clever. How quick to see beneath a con.

But that’s not what he asks. Instead, he says, “Why weren’t you two traveling together?”

“What do you mean?” I know exactly what he means.

“You two were clearly close. Like ridiculously close. And from what I can tell, you know your way around a con. So I’m guessing that was in your repertoire before you left home, just like it was in hers. So why didn’t you leave together? Work together. I can think of a dozen cons that would go brilliantly with identical twins.”

I almost laugh at that. Instead, I ask him, “What do you know about why Sabrina left home?”

Of course, I already know the answer to this. I’m the one who told him, after all. But Samantha doesn’t know what he knows. And besides, I want to watch his face as he tells me my own history.

He does, repeating to me the story and details I’d told him over the years. About the abuse I—well, Sabrina—suffered at the hand of my father. About the way he would beat her. Hurt her. Rape her. And then how he would use me as part of his schemes and cons, often trading me to anyone for any purpose if it would get him positioned so he could pull off a job.

When he pauses in the story, I nod, feeling tense. I shouldn’t have asked. Those are years I’ve tried desperately to forget. “All that’s true,” I say, shocked my voice sounds normal.

“I’m guessing he did the same to you,” Brax says.

I nod.

“Sabrina told me about the night she left. How did it really happen?”

I swallow, wishing I could tell him that I never kept anything from him. But I have to keep up the pretense.

I have to, because otherwise I’ll never learn the truth.

I draw a breath. “One day he went too far. He was beating me with a whip, and I was in so much pain I was about to pass out. He finally let up and then he went and drank himself into oblivion. That’s when Sabrina said she was going to end it. That she was going to kill him. And she did. She took care of it for both of us.”

“And you?”

“I didn’t have the stomach for it. But I watched. And I helped her clean up, of course, and then we ran. We watched the news for weeks after. And that’s how we learned that the police were looking for us. For twins.” I shrug. “We knew people would expect us to stick together. So we decided we had to split up.”

“That must have been incredibly hard,” he says.

“I think it was the hardest thing I ever had to do.” The words are true, but I’m not thinking about my fake twin. I’m thinking about him. Because the hardest thing I’ve ever done was walking away from him. Even though I believed he’d tried to kill me, leaving just about killed me.

I keep my voice level as I continue with the story. “It was hard, but we stayed in touch. We had a protocol.”

“What protocol?”

“We would switch out our burner phones every two weeks at a minimum. And we would call each other every Wednesday and Saturday at least.”

“So you would share the burner phone number in the conversation before you tossed previous one?”

“We tried, but that was a little complicated. So we built a website.”

“What?”

I shrug. “We built a shady little website in basic HTML.” I’m desperately trying to remember what the internet was like when I ran. “Anyway, we’d go onto the site and leave each other our burner numbers whenever we changed.”