Prologue

prologue

In Washington,DC, even the moon looked like a lie. The man stood on the balcony and stared at the red disc that seemed painted right onto the night.

His sister came and joined him at the railing. The sounds of wedding laughter and dancing filtered in from behind them. “Well?” she asked.

“My plans haven’t changed.”

She didn’t think so. She wondered how much he knew. Him, the man who knows, who’s made his business knowing. But it was her business to know too, and the fact that they were twins only made them perfectly matched for the contest. Not that they were always at odds, of course, but her brother played his own game, with his own rules, and with stakes raised higher than any sane person would accept.

She didn’t like to think of the consequences if he ended up losing. She had a wife to keep safe after all, a whip-smart chatterbox who wanted to save the planet with wind turbines and low-carbon diets. She had people at her job who counted on her. She had her own legacy to think about.

“Blanche can’t be hurt by any of it,” she said finally, turning back to gaze at the wedding through the open doors of the ballroom. Their older sister, Blanche, was dancing with her new husband, her face glowing with joy, her fingers twisted in her husband’s jacket. Although Blanche had fallen for Ricker Thomas, a hawkish brigadier general, she was as soft and gentle as they came. She was a pediatric nurse who spent her weekends socializing shelter dogs and doing thankless river cleanups, and she was the kind of doting, generous person that invariably had park benches dedicated to them after they died.

Unlike the twins, she was good, and they’d recognized this from an early age, forging an unspoken pact to keep her as free from the shit of the world as possible. It was unusual for younger siblings to protect an older, but Blanche shone like a candle in winter, and the twins would kill anyone or anything that made the flame gutter. Including each other.

“Blanche will be safe.”

She didn’t believe him, but he already knew that.

“Your plan is stupid,” she told him instead. “And if it hurts Ricker’s son, it will hurt her too.”

Her brother joined her in turning now, and she knew who he was looking for.

Tall and dark-haired. Fair skin that had been suntanned by four grueling deployments to Carpathia. He had a straight nose, high forehead, slashing brows, and a mouth that was unfairly pout shaped. Even though he was only in his late twenties, his forest-green eyes held a lifetime’s worth of sadness and anger.

Tristan Thomas. Blanche’s new stepson. No longer a soldier as of two weeks ago, but still a hero, with all sorts of shiny medals and bright ribbons pinned to the jacket of his dress blues.

She looked over at her twin, not that it mattered. His ruggedly handsome face was unreadable, as usual.

“You could find someone else,” she pointed out.

“It needs to be him,” her brother said.

She didn’t bother arguing with him. He already knew all of what she would say. “And if you succeed? If all this works and you stab Ys through the heart, what then? What happens to Tristan? Your future wife?”

Her brother, Mark Trevena—owner of DC’s wickedest kink club, and once the most feared operator in the CIA—straightened up and buttoned his tuxedo jacket. “There’s time yet to think about it. The wedding isn’t for several months.”

She narrowed her eyes. “A lot can happen between now and then.” Of anyone, Mark should have known that people weren’t pawns. Not that people weren’t meant to be used as pawns, no, no, she didn’t mean that. She was a deputy director of the CIA, had come up as an officer gathering human intelligence. People were meant to be used.

But the trouble with people was that they weren’t inert pieces willing to stay where they were put. They had their own thoughts, however paltry and cliché, and they had their own tender little hearts, and their own little loyalties and patriotisms and gods. Mark might think he could move Tristan Thomas across the board like a pout-mouthed little knight, but Tristan himself might have other plans.

This mysterious future wife of Mark’s might have other plans too.

But Mark wouldn’t move on this, and maybe she wouldn’t have either in his shoes. Tristan was very pretty. And if she’d lost what Mark had lost, she would burn the world down too.

“Just promise me you’ll be the one to answer to Blanche if you corrupt her new stepson,” she said finally.

“Why, Melody,” her twin brother said, his teeth flashing white in the dark, “I would only ever corrupt someone who wanted it.”