Lucas ignored me, of course. With a sudden burst of movement, he lunged for his phone.
I didn’t hesitate. The phone was closer to me, and with a gasp, I pushed away from the sink and swiped at it. I reached it first, but Lucas nearly tackled me in his effort to grab the phone out of my hands.
“Give it to me!” he growled. “It’s my phone.”
“No!” I shouted, twisting this way and that to keep the phone from him. “You’ll call the Dumfries people and call the whole thing off.”
“Damn right, I will,” Lucas said, scratching my arm with his nails in his effort to take the phone. “They need to know they’re walking into a trap.”
“They’re criminals who need to be brought to justice.”
I managed to wriggle away from my brother enough to make a dash for the door. I thought fast enough to grab the van keys on my way, even though Lucas wouldn’t be able to drive the van anywhere after Saint and I had slashed the front tires. I bolted out of the kitchen and down the hall to the den, intending torun out onto the back porch, and maybe all the way down to the beach so I could throw Lucas’s phone in the ocean.
“You bastard!” Lucas screamed after me.
The shock of having my twin brother call me such a nasty name stopped me halfway across the den. I turned to gape at him, but that ended up being a bad idea. Lucas threw himself at me with full force. I wasn’t fast enough to move out of his way, and he tackled me, throwing me to the floor.
We hit the side of the coffee table and a sharp pain shot through my left arm, but I managed to keep a tight grip on both the phone and the keys by hugging them protectively to my chest.
“Give them back!” Lucas shouted. “Give them back!”
“No!” I shouted right back. “You have to stop this! The police are on their way. You’re a criminal that needs to be brought to justice along with the smugglers.”
“Bullshit!” Lucas wrestled with me, fighting to get the phone and keys. “I’m just a messenger. I haven’t done anything wrong.”
He tried to yank my wrist away from my body to grab the phone, but his grip slipped and his hand smacked hard against the coffee table. That must have hurt, because Lucas momentarily lost his focus.
I used the split-second to scramble away from him and to muscle myself to my feet. “You’ve done everything wrong!” I shouted at him. “You’ve always been a liar and a cheat. You made my life miserable growing up, playing your pranks on me and throwing me into embarrassing and dangerous situations. If Dad and Papa knew half the things you’ve done to me?—”
“Oh, I see,” Lucas sneered, pushing himself to his feet, still rubbing his hand where he’d hit it. “Little perfect baby Linus is going to run crying to Daddy and Papa because he doesn’t get his way all the time.”
“What?” I blurted, my voice rising. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you and your perfect grades and your perfect manners and your perfect everything,” Lucas screamed. “Dad and Papa doted on you all the time and forgot about me entirely.”
I couldn’t believe the things I was hearing. Lucas and I were grown men, and here he was, bringing up things from our childhood that he was definitely remembering wrong.
“Dad and Papa didn’t love me more, if that’s what you’re insinuating,” I said. “I worked hard while you goofed off and got into trouble. That’s why you spent more time grounded than not.”
“You made me look bad,” Lucas said, lunging at me again and swiping for his phone. “Nothing I did or said ever made them look at me the way they looked at you.”
“You can’t be serious,” I said, making a break for the porch door. “You’re an adult. Stop blaming everything on Dad and Papa. You keep putting me in danger because you think it’s funny.”
“Now who’s the one bringing up our childhood and using it as an excuse?” Lucas raced after me.
I reached the door, opened it, threw the phone and keys as far as I could into the yard, then pulled the door shut and faced Lucas again. “The omega auction was less than two days ago,” I told him firmly, not quite shouting. “And all those pizzas you had sent to my house was last month.”
“I thought you might be hungry,” Lucas growled with ridiculous seriousness that would have made me laugh under any other circumstances.
“This has to stop, Lucas,” I told him as firmly as I could, standing taller and blocking him from getting to the door so he could go after the phone and keys. “I refuse to let you pushme around anymore. I’m done with it. You’ve tormented me for years, and I’ve just sat back and let you because I wanted to believe that maybe you’d changed.”
“That’s your fault, not mine,” Lucas said, panting as he ran out of energy and trying to reach around me to get to the door handle. “You’re the schlub who fell for it every time I pulled something. It was hilarious,” he growled, glaring at me.
I shook my head, feeling sad more than anything else. “I’m not okay with it,” I said, feeling a new sort of strength deep in my core. It had to be because of Saint. “I was never okay with it. I let you keep walking all over me because you’re my twin brother and I thought cutting you all that slack was loving you. But it wasn’t and it never will be.”
“Get out of my way,” Lucas roared, trying to pry me bodily away from the door now, completely ignoring everything I was saying.
It hurt my heart. Not because Lucas was being his usual, combative, selfish self, but because for the first time, I realized he was never going to change. Nothing I did to love him or care for him or try to show him support or encouragement was ever going to make a dent unless he wanted to change. I didn’t know if that would ever happen, but whether it did or not, I was powerless to make my brother a better person.
