The text includes an image of some kind of building access or security badge bearing a picture that’s strikingly similar to the man in front of me, along with the quick info on Rhys.
Rhys O’Malley. 34. Formerly private security for Technique Group Inc. Unknown if terminated or quit. Ten years in the Marines. No criminal history. No known current employer. Immediate threat assessment is relatively low. Use code word if situation changes.
Translation—Cyril is not, in fact, a mile down the road, but is now right outside the window that I cracked open after I smacked Rhys in the stomach so that my head of security could hear me if I needed to say the code word.
Cyril doesn’t congratulate me on my security system working right.
Probably because if he’d had his way, this guy never would’ve made it through the front door, because Cyril would’ve been outside waiting instead of me relying on a homemade booby trap.
“How do you know Lucky?” Rhys’s voice bubbles a little through the water rushing over his face.
Guilt threads through my belly at the knowledge that I assaulted an innocent man—even if I didn’t know he was innocent at the time, because honestly, who arrives at a remote mountain cabin after midnight?—and the guilt isn’t assuaged by knowing that I’m about to drop lie number two.
It’s good to practice on real people instead of myself in the mirror. And the one thing I promised Lucky—that I wouldn’t tell a soul that we share DNA—is the most important piece of my job here.
It’s how I intend to earn my brothers’ trust before I confess my real name and ask them for a favor.
Plus, god knows I’ve seen families destroyed. Theirs seems functional and healthy.
The lies about the man who raised them being their biological father aside.
Which are actually admirable, if you ask me.
I’d do a lot of morally ambiguous things in the name of protecting my sister, and keeping a secret that she doesn’t need to know and that could hurt her would be the easiest of those things.
And finding out that they’re related to my father is definitely something that could hurt them.
“We met in nursing school and kept in touch after I dropped out,” I tell Rhys.
He briefly angles his face to look at me like he doesn’t believe me.
He shouldn’t. I come from a long line of liars, even if I prefer to operate with the truth until I can’t anymore.
Like right now.
I’ve known for years that my father has other children besides Daphne and me. I’ve known for years I’d only find out who they were if I managed to locate the legal paperwork detailing the payoffs and the nondisclosure agreements. My mother probably knows too, but she’s always looked the other way because she likes the billionaire lifestyle. It’s far more comfortable than the way she grew up.
But then I took a DNA test under a fake name on the off chance he’d missed any, and now here we are.
Not only did the Sullivan triplets of Snaggletooth Creek, Colorado, slip through the cracks of my father’s otherwise meticulous cleanup processes with his mistresses, but there arethreeof them.
Triplets.
My father missed that he fathered triplets about the same time I was born.
“You dropped out of nursing school?” Rhys says while my phone buzzes again.
This time it’s Lucky. Yeah, that’s him, and I’m gonna need the story about what’s up with his face.
I’ll text him back later. For now, I look back at Rhys, debating if that internal whisper ofyou need to apologize to your brothers’ friendis right or not. “Yes. I fainted dead away the first time I had to stick someone with a needle.”
Lies, lies, lies, more lies. At least this is one that Lucky and I agreed on beforehand.
I’ll help you find a better job and you can stay in my cabin while you get on your feet, but you can’t tell anyone who you really are because my dad doesn’t know we know that we’re not genetically his, is what Lucky said three weeks ago when I told him I wasn’t happy in Iowa, where Margie Johnson was raised by a single mom who passed away two years ago.
“And you didn’t know before nursing school that that would happen?” Rhys says.
The man is highly suspicious of me.
