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DOUBLE TROUBLE
SARIEL
“Auren.”
I sounded like a broken record, but— holyshit.
My angel was equally stunned, silent but watchful as the weight on my chest threatened to send me into a complete panic attack. This wasn’t possible.
“Sariel.”
It’s strange hearing my brother’s voice again. Aria rubbed at my arms, clearly trying to soothe me while I processed everything.
Auren was juststaring, his pursed lips and a small wrinkle between his brows being the only signs of his distress. “It’s… good to see you.”
Irrationally, I couldn’t help but think about how pissed off Mikey was going to be. If he’d been upset about how I’d made our mother feel, I could justimaginehow he would take this news. I might have distanced myself, but Auren hadfaked his death.
“How are you alive?” I asked.
I’dseenhim die. He’d been bloody and broken when they dragged him away; the sound of him being beaten and tortured had been the soundtrack of my nightmares for years.
My body finally started to right itself, and I scrambled to my feet as my shock began morphing into disbelief and then anger.
Auren fixed his aviators back into place and shrugged, hands tucking back into the pockets of his leather jacket. His jaw flexed for a moment, and I knew immediately that I was not going to enjoy this story.
“Luck, mostly,” he began with a sigh. “I don’t really know how or why; it’s all a blur now, but I woke up washed up on some random creek bank. Figured they must have thought I was dead already when they tossed me in, though I was mostly healed by the time I woke up. Limped my way through the woods for a couple of hours before Kiyomasa found me and patched me up the rest of the way.”
“So why didn’t you come home? You were alive all this time, and we weremourningyou.”
My throat tightened, remembering the grief that had consumed our family—and he’d been, what? Playing house with the Resistance?
A wave of dizziness hit me so hard that I nearly collapsed again if it weren’t for Aria tucking herself under my arm.
“It wasn’t that simple.”
“It should’ve been!” I shot back instantly, louder than I meant, watching how he rolled his neck.
Take a breath, Sariel—Aria soothed, and I tried, tightening my arm around her shoulders until she was forced to step into my chest. She went without resisting, letting me hold her as he continued on like I hadn’t even spoken.
“The Resistance has had eyes on Azazel for years, even before I took over. When they caught wind of what he and Tyler were planning, they’d hoped to intervene before it came to fruition, but it didn’t work out that way. After they showed me the recordings….”
Auren blew out a long gust of air.
“Ididgo home, Sariel. I devised his big scheme to get mom and you guys out and bring you back to the Resistance camp with me, but I was a kid, and the man had tried to kill me. I only got to the front gate before I lost my nerve. By then, Azazel was already making a spectacle of my untimely death, so it was easy to go into hiding.”
I’m sickened at the thought of teenage Auren having to go through that and making achoicelike that. But it’s adult Auren that’s standing in front of me, and I couldn’t handle the idea that he never thought to at least reach out to me. I was the one they’d forced to watch him be brutalized—if he couldn’t have spared us all the pain of his absence, he could have saved me the guilt of his death.
Aria squeezed me, and it’s probably the only reason I didn’t completely break apart at the seams. My angel was stone still as if he hadn’t been screaming for me to put together who this man was when we walked up to this cathedral.
There was a long silence while I processed what had been said, trying and failing to work through the millions of emotions threatening to bubble out of me.
I should have been relieved that Auren was alive, not fucking furious, but anger is the emotion I settle on.
“You should have come to me, Auren,” I snapped. Aria squeezed me again, but I barely felt it. “Why didn’t you come to me? I would have helped you get them out. We could have—”
I wanted to launch myself at him when he started shaking his head. I didn’t know if it was to hug or strangle him, though.
