“Amy.”
“Blair,” she tilts her head to the side and approaches me. She stands in front of me, head tilted to the side. She’s inspecting me with a critical eye, brows slightly narrowed. “Hm. I’m kind of disappointed.’’
“Excuse me?”
“Well, I expected more of my doppelganger.” She chuckles, then makes distance between us. “Can’t say I’m too surprised you’re uglier in person.”
My brow twitches, but I keep my cool, not wanting the bitch to see me pissed. “What do you want, Amy?”
She sighs, the dramatic kind of sigh that makes me want to rip my hair out. She flops on the couch, crossing her legs, then points to the opposite one. Reluctantly, I walk over and take a seat, my hand still tightly wrapped around the gun.
“You know,” she trails off for a moment before her eyes settle back on me. “You were never a part of the equation for me.”
I lift a brow, signaling for her to continue.
“I got in some shit back at home, well, in Long Grove. I came to New York, laid low, and made sure people thought I was dead, or at least missing. Then you came along. My perfect lookalike, and everything went straight to hell.”
“You mean the fact that I took over your identity?”
“Obviously,” she drawls out, as if speaking to an idiot. “To make matters even worse, you must’ve done something over there for those people to know you’re not me. Because they came straight to New York afterwards and haven’t laid a single hand on you, which is odd.”
“Does this little story have a point, Amy?”
“It does, yes.” She rolls her eyes, and it freaks me out even more. That small habit that makes it seem as if I’m looking into the mirror causes goosebumps to prickle my skin. “Somehow, through some strange twist of fate, you and I ended up connected, in more ways than one. The people I work for want you dead. And, well… I want you dead, too.”
“The people you work for… meaning Paul Simmons.”
“Ding-ding-ding,” she sings, a grin on her face. “We have a winner!”
My eyes roll to the back of my head, and I feel like they’ll pop right out of their sockets at this rate. “That just means he’s contacted you from prison.”
“Of course he has,” she nods. “I mean, he’ll probably never actually leave that prison. Not alive, at least. But that doesn’t mean he still doesn’t have high connections. After all, his clientele has always been the wealthiest of the wealthiest.”
I’m no genius, but it doesn’t take one to figure out why Paul would want me dead. I can only imagine him seething behind the bars as he awaits the trial, and it’s thanks to the connections of Hudson and Arlo that he’s Hudson’s cellmate. He wants me dead for many things, though I think sending him to prison was the final nail in the coffin.
“But why would he entrust you to kill me, though? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“Doesn’t it?” Amy smirks. “Come on, get there.”
One look into her wicked eyes reveals everything. It’s as ifthe fog’s lifted off my brain, and I can think clearly. The dots start connecting immediately, and the realization hits me harder than I’d like to admit.
That just means I walked into a situation I have no way of getting out of.
That’s why Amy’s been able to live under the radar for years. The reason she left Long Grove, and the reason Simmons has been keeping her around. It’s definitely not because we look freakishly alike.
Amy’s a fucking hitman, too.
I want to ask more questions to figure out who the fuck the mole is, but I don’t get the chance to. I blink, and when I open my eyes, Amy’s on me. She’s caging me between the couch and her body, a sharp blade tucked under my jaw.
“Checkmate, twin,” she mocks, drawing out her words. “Anything you’d like to say before I slit your pretty little throat?”
“Yeah,” I grit my teeth. “Go to hell, bitch.”
I don’t give her a single second to react. The hand that’s still wrapped around the handle of the gun is quick, and I pull the trigger without a second thought. The bullet pierces through the material of my coat and ends up hitting her in the stomach.
The shock — or perhaps the pain — on Amy’s face is all I need. I push her off me, and she stumbles backward, falling flat on her ass. However, I underestimated her need to kill me. She grabs my ankle at the last minute, yanking me backward.
She rolls us over, and she’s on top of me, seething. Her teeth are bared at me, a look of pure fucking fury flashing behind the eyes. In that moment, I see myself in her. Then, I shake it off. We’re physically almost the same, but that’s where all the resemblance starts and ends. We’re not the same person. She’s a brutal killer for the sake of it; I’m one because life forced me to be.
