Dan doesn’t move, not an inch, but something about his demeanour makes me grab hold of my mum and shove her behind me before she can protest.
“I’m not here because OI ordered me to come,” Dan tells me, and there’s an insidious implication to it I don’t understand but feel the instinctual need to be wary of. “I’m here because I have some unfinished business with my brother that you are, unfortunately, going to bear the brunt of.”
I open my mouth to ask what he means by that, but before I can get a word out, Dan is swinging around and pointing his gun at the doorway with alarming speed and agility. It happens so fast it takes my mind a second to pick up on the reason for Dan’s sudden switch of attention.
“Come in, little brother,” Dan coaxes, sounding somehow both calmer and more on edge than before, like evenhedoesn’t know how to feel, two parts of him coming to blows inside his mind.
A second later, Jack appears, moving steadily into the kitchen, wearing his black cargos and holding a gun. It’s Siggy. He must have smuggled it out of the FISA base instead of turning it in to the artillery. I’m low-level glad about it although I’m not sure if adding another gun to this situation is going to make someone getting shotlesslikely.
Jack’s face is set in stone, eyes fixed on his brother. He darts once quick glance at me, and a flash of emotion comes and goes so quickly I almost don’t have time to read it. But after so much time spent in close proximity to Jack, I’m just about able to see the abject terror for what it is. He must think we’re more in the shit than I do.
“Stand down!” Jack growls at Dan, aggression corded through the set of his shoulders.
Dan reaches up to pull back his hood, revealing his face and causing the parallels between him and Jack to become almost overwhelmingly eery. I know they’re identical twins, and I saw them together on the roof of the facility, but there’s just something so strange and unnerving about seeing them together like this.
Part of that could be the fact they’re pointing guns at each other. Fuck’s sake. I swear if Dan says something like, “So, we meet again,” I’m going to give myself an aneurism by rolling my eyes too hard.
“Or what, Jack?” Dan goads maliciously. “You’ll shoot me? You had your chance before, and you bottled it, you fucking coward. Seems like you need some motivation to follow through on that one.”
Jack sucks in a pained breath. His gun doesn’t waver, his hand doesn’t shake, but there’s clear reluctance in the slope of his shoulders and the grit of his teeth, obvious enough for Dan to see as evidently as I can.
This is so stupid.
“Hey, can both of you stop being ridiculous and put the guns down?” I ask, sighing in exasperation. I really do not want anyone to wind up bleeding out on my kitchen floor tonight.
“Leo!” Jack barks at me. “Not the time to play mediator, okay? Have some respect for your own goddamn life. For my sake.” He adds the last part like it’s a plea, that same fear leaking into his voice that I saw flicker across his face when he looked at me before.
Dan’s reaction is far less emotionally expressive but no less telling in my opinion. He narrows his eyes at Jack, his face going tight, every muscle seeming to lock up, that fury rushing to the surface and spoiling for a fight.
I’m not certain of the origin of his anger. It’s centred on Jack, though, and has somehow been linked to me.
Dan uses Jack’s distraction to his advantage by swinging his gun back around to point in my direction.
Mum is clinging to my back, making no noise, but the coil of her body evidences her nervous energy. She tenses up even tighter when the gun is aimed at me again. Her grasp becomes clawing, manicured nails digging into my bare skin. My naked upper body isn’t helping me feel any less vulnerable in this situation.
“Don’t!” Jack snarls at his brother. He inches forward, gun still trained on Dan. His finger moves to the trigger. Ready.
Dan ignores Jack and locks eyes with me. He jerks his head, motioning for me to move towards him. “Come on, Leo Snow,” Dan encourages when I don’t immediately obey. “I won’t bite.” He flashes a smile, which is all perfect white teeth, almost gnashing like a wolf from a fairy-tale story.
I’m still not afraid of him.
To prove it, I sigh heavily and give him one of my best unimpressed frowns. “I’m not worried about what you’ll do tome, Dan, you actual nightmare. I just don’t want you to get all excited whilst high on Obsidian Inc. drugs and shoot my mum.” I nod at Jack. “Or your brother.”
Dan’s mouth twitches at one corner, almost like he’s tenuously amused or could be if he wasn’t so hyped up on some messy rage that could be real or could be medically induced. He regards me thoughtfully for half a second before tipping his head at the kitchen door.
“Your mum can leave,” he allows with unsettling casualness. “She’s not part of this.”
There’s a short pause where I try to decide if I heard him correctly.
“You serious?” I ask, not sure if I should trust it. But if I can get Mum out of here, then that will significantly improve the odds of no one I care about getting shot. “This isn’t some melodramatic thing where she’ll go to leave, and you’ll shoot her in the back whilst cackling manically, is it? Because, mate, I am not in the mood to deal with that noise, okay?”
The thought of having to mourn my mum is an exhausting prospect, and I know that’s a fucked-up thing to think, but it’s true. Mum dying would probably force me to confront stuff about her and our relationship, and I was kind of hoping to put that shit off until I’d matured to the point of being able to handle it with any semblance of emotional competency.
Dan tips his head at the door again, impatient. “Offer expires in exactly ten seconds, Leo Snow. Get her out of here, now!”
I’m surprised by his vehemence. It seems genuine, which is just odd given the circumstances.
Jack’s told me once or twice that during their joint missions together for OI, it was often Dan who insisted on being mindful of collateral damage. Seeing evidence of that is bizarre in this context but also heartening. It only strengthens my resolve to do whatever it takes to stop him from doing something he might not be able to come back from, such as killing his own twin brother in an OI-imposed revenge mission.
