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And here was Travis, another piece of Miles’s machinations, although this was a personal matter for her old friend. She should have expected it. He’d never forgiven himself and he wouldn’t rest if he didn’t fix this.
Her heart squeezed in her chest and some part of her almost laughed, even, thought maybe she’d tease the old bastard, ask if he’d haunt them both if they refused to give him what he wanted.
But in her heart ...
Isabel sighed and tucked that thought away. She was having too many realizations today, far too many.
“Enough of me,” she said as the wind kicked up over the water and blew her hair back. “This is supposed to be about you.”
“I can’t talk about how I got into it without discussing you, though.”
At those words, she turned, the knot in her gut drawing tighter. It was like that knot pulled some latent anger out of hiding and she had to struggle to lash it down. The anger wouldn’t help. Sheknewit wouldn’t.
And shetriedto control it. Oh, she tried.
Tension still arced between them, heady and intense, and all it needed was a spark.
“Elaborate,” she ordered.
He inclined his head.
“I went to Miles a year after he came to see me, tell me that he’d ... been wrong about you.” He cleared his throat. “I was drowning. I’d been planning on going to law school or maybe medical school after college, but ... ” He shrugged, a restless twitch of his shoulders. “I’d already lost interest in both of those fields and ended up switching my majors. Criminal justice and accounting. Accounting ... well, it was easy and let me really focus on criminal justice. I guess some part of me already knew what I was planning. Once I’d graduated, I went to Miles and I told him I wanted in.”
“And he justletyou,” Isabel said with a disbelieving scoff. She sank back down onto the Adirondack chair she’d occupied earlier, her entire body feeling far too weary now, older, as if she’d aged a few years in the span of the past ten minutes. “You with that pretty-boy, semi-famous face fresh out of Malibu? He justletyou into the FBI? Agents have toblend, Travis. You don’t blend.”
He bared his teeth in a savage smile. “You’d be surprised. And there are various places they need people toblend, Iz. Every Day Average Joe isn’t going to blend into the places a pretty boy fresh out of Malibu can ... at least not without a hell of a lot of training and work.” Scraping short, neat nails down his jawline, he added, “And as to a semi-famous face ... we found a way around that.”
“Yeah?” She snorted. “Like what? Erasing yourself?”
His eyes went hooded and she half-expected him to change the subject.
Instead, he paced closer to her seat and he bent over, bracing one hand on the arm of the chair. He wrapped the other around her wrist. She let him, curious. He guided her fingers to his hair. “Feel behind my ears.”
She did so and when she felt a thin, narrow scar, she stiffened. “What’s that?”
“Surgical scar.” A ghost of a smile danced on his lips. “One of several. I’ve had a couple of different plastic surgeries, Iz. Minor changes, just enough to confuse facial recognition scans—otoplasty to alter the position of my ears, and slightly change the shape of my earlobe and the helix.” He let go of her wrist and reached down, brushing the tip of his finger over the upper arch of her ear. “This part. Ears are as unique as a fingerprint. Changing mine meant there wouldn’t be any way of linking me to my twin that way. I also had work on my jawline—it’s more square than it used to be. A few years later, I had work done on my nose. A Not long after that, my cheekbones.”
“Didn’t your family notice?” She was appalled, disgusted to think he’d had such drastic changes done to his body, all so he could work for Miles. Andwhy?
“They did.” He lifted a shoulder. “They were told I’d been in a car wreck while traveling in Europe.” Rubbing his nose, he added, “As to later surgeries, I let them think there were complications and I was having issues with headaches and breathing a few years ago and the doctors did the nose work then, claimed they’d missed something and had to fix the damage which explained the nose work. They didn’t really notice the cheekbones. I ... haven’t been around a lot.”
“Must be hard lying to your twin, your brothers ... yourmother,” she said. And she could hear the anger pulsing in her voice. She couldn’t hide it any more than she could hide the shaking in her fingers when she shoved her hands into his hair. “Why did you do this to yourself, damn it?Why?”
“I had to.” He went to his knees in front of her, closing his hands around her wrists. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Explain it to me,” she demanded, tears burning her eyes again and she couldn’t hold them back. “Makeme understand.”
––––––––
Her voice cracked andthe pain he heard was like claws dragging into an open wound. He’d rather take another bullet in his side, deal with another infection that left him shaking with fever and out of his head than be the cause of this pain—herpain. Again.
And he knew he was going to add to it.
Letting go of her wrists, he shifted his hands to her face, cradling her cheeks so he could look into her eyes.
“I hated myself after what I did to you,” he said, emotion roughening his voice. “I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror. There were days I couldn’t even stand to face my twin because it was another damn mirror. Every day, I thought of the pain in your voice when you called, thought of the messages you’d sent me, thought of how alone you’d been when you testified against him ... and how alone you’d been when that Beresford fuck had touched you. And I couldn’t do shit to help you. But I had to dosomething. I couldn’t help you, but maybe I could help somebody else.”
Tears spilled out of her eyes.
