Unholy Promises (18 page)

“Two minutes,” Henri answers, but his answer is a gasp as the screen suddenly shows us what Eva is facing … a hand-held circular saw.

A tear slides down her cheek, she shakes her head. The look in her eyes is now acceptance. She has accepted that she is going to die.

“Executioners of the past had such a messy job. Sawing bones wasn’t as neat and tidy. They didn’t have nice shiny tools like the chest separator on the table. It’s a wonder that they were able to keep someone alive long enough to see their heart ripped from their chest.” Liam moves into the shot, giving us a positive identification, more than enough to have him tried and executed as a traitor, though I see no reason for a trial. He kisses Eva on the mouth. She doesn’t react, doesn’t struggle. She just hangs there at his mercy.

“This isn’t going to kill you, Eva. No, seeing your own heart beating in your chest is just going to be the foreplay.”

The team is close … the team is close.

“Why aren’t they moving in?” I scream at everyone in the room and then I realize that they are waiting for Henri’s command to go. I turn on him with feral intensity. “Give the command, Henri.”

Henri watches the screen, like a man mesmerized and I know that he is waiting for her death before moving in. He’d as much as said that her next mission would be her last.

I turn to see the rotary saw inches away from her chest, knowing that my brother is at the other side of that saw and my only thought is, You aren’t dying today!

Jerking the headset from Henri, I speak into the mike, giving the command to move in, impersonating Henri’s calm voice, trying very hard not to scream into the mic.

Mass confusion erupts on both screens as the team moves in. The Agency feed focuses on a bare wall, the cameraman down. Cobra’s satellite feed scrambles.

I hold my breath and wait for the voice of the team leader. The agency-fed audio fills the office space with the sounds of human scuffle, grunts, screams, and furniture crashes, before finally the team leader gives the all-clear. As a delayed reaction, Henri jerks the mic back away from me, screaming, “You knew the plan.”

I give him my blink of innocence look and a shrug. “I never agreed to your plan.”

Lying in a hospital bed, she is barely conscious, but she is alive. I hold her hand and stroke her face. I tell her how much I love her, but the doubt put into her mind by Liam holds firm. I see it in her eyes.

“Henri said you’re leaving for San Francisco tonight,” she says softly, a statement, but I know in her heart it is a question. She wants it to be a lie as she stares at the ceiling, not looking at me.

“I know you won’t understand, Eva, but I have made a home there, and being there keeps me out of the way. You know as well as I that few retire completely from this business.” I try to explain it, but even I am having a problem with Henri’s insistence that I be on a government plane tonight. I lift her hand and am kissing the top when Henri opens the door to her room, insisting, “It’s time to go.”

“Stay with me,” she whispers, though I know she knows in her heart that what she asks is impossible.

Compared to her everyday suicidal assignments, I’m sure my post in San Francisco seems lame, but in the eyes of The Agency is every bit as crucial to international security.

I kiss her on the cheek, whispering, “Join me there. You’ve earned some time off.”

Her eyelids flutter and her eyes focus on mine. Whatever thought travels through her mind, I’m unable to read it. Turning her head to focus back on the ceiling, she dismisses me. “You have a plane to catch.”

When she closes her eyes, I feel her trying to shut me out of her life, but she’s stuck with me. I haven’t figured out how I’ll make it happen, but when she leaves the hospital, she’ll be coming home to me.

My thoughts immediately turn to the two I left in San Francisco.

Our threesome is still so new. We’re barely used to each other and how it all works.

How will they feel about my adding another to our group? How will Eva react to them?

I touch her face and leave a kiss on her cheek. “This isn’t over, Eva.”

In the hallway, Henri waits with two guards. I am handcuffed before I realize what is happening.

“Am I not going back to The States, then?” I try to keep a grip on my voice to not allow the panic in my chest to show.

“In due time, Thomas,” Henri answers before nodding at the guards. Their signal to take me to wherever they plan to take me, which to my surprise is a Physician’s Conference Room two floors higher.

I’d considered breaking free while in the elevator, actually my best bet of an escape, but my curiosity got the best of me. When I am forced into the room and find myself with a conference table being all that stands between me and my brother, I wish I had escaped when I’d had the chance. I fight the guards, seeing red, wanting to inflict the same pain on Nikkos that he inflicted on Eva.

The guards hold tight, though conference chairs end up turned on their sides and I end up a little black and blue for my efforts.

“I’m going to kill you!” I promise him.

“Boys, boys,” Nikkos says in our native tongue. “Would you cut off your own right arm just so your brother would feel the pain for a lifetime?” he challenges me in a strong firm voice, a voice from a time long ago. He recites the chastisement our uncle used so many times as we were growing up, each of us always trying to cause the other great harm. “You are each other’s blood forever; no one will ever love you or know you as well as your other.”

That is what Uncle called us … Other. He was mine and I was his other. The times when we rolled around as children in the tall grasses behind our house seems so far away, so remote, but there is still truth in our uncle’s words. Though that truth brings both gladness and pain.

I shrug off two of the guards, facing him squarely. “Would you have killed her?”

“I had no idea she was the one you loved. I promise you that.” He walks around the table, coming closer to me. “You know as well as I do that I could not have blown almost a decade’s work by this agency to save one operative.” He pauses when he gets near enough to put one hand on each of my shoulders. “But if I had known that she was yours, I would have made sure she lived. I’m sorry.”

It is then that I notice his eyes reflect the truth of every word. He also thinks she is dead.

“Cobra didn’t kill her. She lives,” I tell him and am surprised when he grabs me, squeezing me hard, saying, “Thank God, then.” He pulls back from me, searching my eyes, “But still your heart breaks?”

“Whether we have a future together or not remains uncertain.”

“You have many who love you,” he states.

I smile, answering, “I was always more loved than you.” I don’t doubt that several of the people in the room, if not all, can make out most of what we are saying to each other, but still, it seems important that we use Greek.

“I have lovers,” he quarrels.

“But I have love.”

“Enough love to heal you of the pain she causes you?”

I don’t answer, I shrug, the lump of uncertainty forming in my throat too painful, her almost death still too recent, her prognosis too unsure.

Henri makes tsking noises as he personally frees my hands. I am shocked into silence; my brother so transformed from the last time I saw him. My mirror image now barely even shares a resemblance.

When I last saw him, we both sported ponytails and goatees. He no longer sports a beard, having trimmed it down to a small patch of thick fur just beneath his lower lip.

Each of his cheek dimples sport a pointed silver stud piercing, making his face even more intriguing, and he wears not one set of small silver hoops in his earlobes, but four. He also pierced his tongue, my quick glimpse reveals a wide metal spider. My mind falls into the gutter, curious as to what other piercings his body hides.

“I’ve changed a bit.” Smiling, laughing, he turns in a circle, giving me the whole show, since I have obviously been struck dumb by his new appearance. His head is shaved with a Japanese-inspired tattoo beginning on the back of his skull extending down the back of his neck before disappearing under the edge of his shirt. Through the sheer fabric, I can tell his entire back and a large section of his chest have been inked, as have his arms down to his wrists.

“That’s an understatement, brother.” Free of the handcuffs, I hug my brother tight.

He is much thinner than the last time I saw him. The hug reveals that the six years have taken their toll on his body. His ribs and pelvic bones protrude prominently, and because of the thinness, his muscles seem longer and leaner, a fact not easily missed by his choice of clothing, a black microfiber long-sleeved T-shirt that clings to his solid pecs and six-pack abs. The changes make Nikkos look ten to fifteen years younger than me. Yes, he could easily pass for twenty-eight; however, a second glance reveals his age deeply engrained in his eyes, the windows to his soul revealing he has paid a very high price.

He traces the brightly colored flame tat circling my bicep. “Nice work, this is new.”

I smile, answering, “There are some awesome artists in the Bay Area, and yours…” I lift his wrist, to see the fine details of his own work. “Not sloppy at all, eh?”

“It seemed a good idea at the time. Long weekend in Shanghai…” He smiles and it is sad. “San Francisco, then? Is that where you’re going back to?”

I look to Henri, still unsure what fate lies ahead, answering, “Yes.”

I cannot take my eyes off Nikkos. It has been too long and the empty spot I’ve carried for six long years seems suddenly filled.

“You’re well?” I ask, meaning all of it—mentally, physically, spiritually.

“Yes, well,” Nikkos answers. “And you—you’re alive.”

“Alive, yes, but then you knew that, didn’t you?” I insist, still worried about Sean Paul’s earlier comment that he had believed me dead.

“I think your death would be more painful than the phantom pain from the broken bones we’ve shared.”

“Yes.”

He traces the flames again, “I felt this.”

I lift the edge of his shirt, silently asking him to pull off the long-sleeved T. He does.

I smile, seeing the evidence of why my body flamed for weeks. He spins slowly, proudly modeling the entire tattoo, striking in that it is an intricate design done completely in contrasts of indigo blue ink and bare skin.

“You felt me?” he asks, continuing to use Greek. For both of us, I think, it has been too long and it is the one link we share from happier times that makes this meeting bearable. He breaks into a wide smile. “I wanted you to feel me; I wanted you to know I lived.”

“I felt you,” I whisper, hugging him close. “I felt your darkness.”

Daring to hope he didn’t turn and yet, standing so near, I am no more certain than when we were an ocean apart.

“I felt your sorrow,” he replies.

For a moment, it is as if no time passed between us as we take turns reminding each other of our shared bond of pain. When Nikkos broke his collarbone at eight cliff diving, I felt it though I was miles away. Or when he experienced an episode of debilitating confusion while taking college entrance exams and couldn’t finish, arriving in the same emergency room I’d been admitted to moments before, following a motorcycle crash that left me with a severe concussion. Twins still, though no longer as obvious.

He looks at a clock on the wall. We’ve barely had fifteen minutes, but already I know our time together is over. Even before he says, “I have to go back.”

“For your coronation as King Cobra’s successor?” I try to make it sound light, but there is no hiding the anger I feel that my brother has been put in this position.

“That has always been the assignment.”

“It should have been me,” I tell him. “I would not have had your life turn out like this.”

“Put away your guilt, brother. This was my choice.” He hugs me tight, whispering against my face, “I was always the one who could tear off the butterfly wings. Do you remember? You just couldn’t do it.”

I hug him tighter, remembering the boy he was in the grassy field so long ago. I fight to hold onto him, even as he jerks out of my arms and rushes from the room. Heart pounding, I run after him, finding him still in the hallway, getting ready to enter the elevator.

“Alexiares and Aniketos!” I call out to him, stopping him in his tracks, making him turn to look at me. He smiles, but it is a sad smile as he holds open the elevator door, poised to climb in, and I know that he is remembering our childhood as I am—

grandfather teaching us martial arts on the beach, and a simple lesson that involved trust.

“You will keep each other safe and that is why you will need a word between you …

a word that is not used in everyday speech, so the meaning will not be misconstrued and never used as a joke. In an emergency, you will use the word and it will mean that you need help.”

The word we came up with that day was Alexiares and Aniketos, the twin sons of Herakles and Hebe. It seemed appropriate at the time, their names meaning respectively, he who wards off war and the unconquerable, lending much debate as to which of us was the peacemaker and which of us invincible. In all the years since, we’ve only used it once. We were teens by then and he called me from a party being held at a friend’s house while their parents were away on holiday. Someone had slipped him acid and he was having a bad trip when he called. I was mad and angry that he had gone to the party without telling me, and all night I’d known something was wrong but even with the phone call, I was willing to leave him there to his own devices … just to teach him a lesson. Until he used our shared word and I knew that leaving him there wasn’t an option.

All during the ride home he’d thanked me, thanking me so many times I just wanted him to shut up, even though I knew it was the drug making him so obnoxious.

“You don’t understand,” he’d said when I finally had enough and told him to shut up or I was taking him back to the party. Shaking beside me, still tripping badly, he’d sobbed, “I’m so scared!”

“It will be all right, Nikkos. I’m here now.”