CHAPTER 11
Two Peas In A Pod
~LUCIEN~
I’m whistling.
Not a song, specifically—not something with a title or a composer or a place in the catalog of music that civilized people reference in civilized conversation. Just notes. A meandering, tuneless sequence of pitches that I produce through pursed lips while my fingers drift across bolts of fabric arranged on the worktable like a textile cartography of options I haven’t committed to yet. The whistling is a habit I’ve never tried to break because breaking it would require acknowledging that I do it, and acknowledging that I do it would require examiningwhyI do it, and the why leads to places I’d rather visit on my own terms.
I whistle when I’m thinking.
I whistle when I’m planning.
I whistle when the world has just handed me something so absurdly dangerous that the only appropriate response is to pretend it’s not.
The fabric beneath my fingers is a deep charcoal silk—heavy, fluid, the kind of material that moves like water when it’s cut correctly and hangs like a confession when it isn’t. I lift the corner and let it drape from my hand, watching the way itcatches the afternoon light that enters through the high windows of the quarters Violet allocated to us when we first arrived at Savage Knot’s compound. Not luxurious, these quarters—not by the standards we grew up with, whenquartersmeant a wing of a house and a wing meant fourteen rooms and fourteen rooms meant nothing because what’s fourteen rooms when you own the building and the land and the company that built both? But adequate. Clean. Furnished with the utilitarian efficiency of a space designed for people who are expected to survive rather than thrive.
The room smells of cedar and linen starch and the faint, residual traces of whatever previous occupant inhabited these walls before we did—a scent profile that has been scrubbed by the Academy’s cleaning protocols but not entirely erased, leaving a ghost of someone else’s pheromone signature hovering at the edge of perception like a whisper you can’t quite decode. The walls are paneled in pale wood. The ceiling is high enough to feel generous without being dramatic. A bookshelf in the corner holds volumes that neither Cassian nor I placed there, their spines organized by height rather than content, which tells me they’re decorative rather than functional.
I move to the next bolt—a midnight blue that borders on black, heavy enough for structure but with a sheen that suggests it would photograph well under ballroom lighting.
Ballroom lighting.
Listen to me.
Planning wardrobes for a masquerade that might end in our execution.
If Mother could see me now, she’d either laugh or have me committed.
Probably both, in that order.
The door opens behind me.
I don’t need to turn to know who it is. Cassian enters rooms the way Cassian does everything—quietly, precisely, with a footfall so measured that it barely disturbs the acoustic profile of the space it’s entering. Where I announce, he arrives. Where I fill silence, he occupies it. The complementary architecture of identical twins who have spent thirty-four years learning to be the negative space of each other’s presence.
“Shouldn’t we go check on Dominic?”
His voice carries the particular cadence of concern that Cassian deploys when he’s genuinely worried but doesn’t want the worry to sound urgent. It’s a frequency I know intimately—the same one he used when we were twelve and our uncle’s men came for the estate, the same one he used when we were nineteen and homeless for the first time, the same one he used three years ago when Damien looked Dominic in the eye and told himthis is for the bestbefore walking away with his freedom and leaving us with the wreckage.
I laugh.
The sound is bright, unbothered—the particular brand of amusement that I’ve cultivated over three decades of being the twin who processes catastrophe through levity rather than gravity. Cassian carries the weight. I carry the joke. Between us, we carry everything.
“The fucker has either killed himself or been shot at.” I lift another fabric swatch—a burgundy velvet, impractical for combat but magnificent for entrances—and hold it against the light. “So we only have to play the waiting game to find out.”
Cassian sighs.
It’s a specific sigh—the one reserved exclusively for moments when my response to a legitimate concern is so aggressively casual that he has to physically expel the frustration rather than verbalize it. I’ve been producing this sigh in him since we shared a womb. It’s practically our call-and-response.
“I think you forget we owe him, my doppelgänger.”
I set down the burgundy velvet with deliberate care, turning to face him with the full, theatrical attention that our dynamic requires when he’s being serious and I’m being me.
“I continue to correct you,” I say, lifting an index finger with the pedagogical authority of someone delivering a lesson they’ve delivered a thousand times and will deliver a thousand more, “that I came out first. Soyoucopiedme.”
The pause that follows is brief and loaded—the silent interval where our twin dynamic recalibrates from tense to teasing, the atmospheric shift that occurs when he recognizes I’m pulling him out of the worry spiral and into the banter that constitutes our emotional regulation protocol.
“But I do enjoy this,” I add, my voice softening by a degree that I allow only in his presence. “Bantering with my twin brother. Keeps things lively.”
