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She is holding a matte gun, and she is smiling.

It’s Anton, my brain screams, desperately across the wreckage of my thoughts, searching for any scrap of logic that won’t rip my ribs open from the inside out. Anton threatened her. Anton is hiding behind the trees with a rifle trained on her spine. She’s terrified. She’s being coerced.

“Alya…” I drag a trembling hand up to my temple, feeling the tacky mess matting my hair. “Alya, put… put the gun down. Where is he? Where’s Anton? If he’s here, if he told you to do this—”

“Anton is dead, Ilya.” Her voice doesn’t waver, not even a fraction of a decibel. “I put a steel chisel through his ear canal two hours before I cracked your head open. You’re looking at the only person running this show.”

The air turns into pure nitrogen in my lungs.

“You’re awake,” she adds. “I was worried I hit you too hard with that hammer. It’s no fun if you sleep through the whole thing.”

I force my legs to work as I push myself off the ground, staggering upright. I have to plant my feet wide just to keep gravity from dragging me back down into the mud.

“Alya, what is this?” I ask, my hands coming up. “What the fuck are you doing?”

I turn my head, forcing my blurry peripheral vision to sweep the area. We are standing on the jagged limestone bluff of the old quarry at the northern edge of the city. There is a jagged drop of eighty feet straight down into a quarry lake.

Twenty feet to my left, near the edge of the limestone drop, stands Adrian.

Alya’s polite boyfriend is holding a gun jammed hard into the temple of the man beside him.

Kento.

My heart detonates against my ribs.

He has his hands cuffed like a prisoner awaiting execution. He looks mad. I follow his gaze, and I realize he has his eyes locked on Alya’s gun on my head.

“Get your goddamn hands off him, or I’ll rip your fucking spine out and use it to beat you to death,” I roar, already halfway toward Adrian. My fists clench so hard they tremble, and I can barely see past the rage flooding my skull. I want to break him. I want to drag him away from Kento and make him understand, in the most painful fucking way possible, that he has just made the biggest mistake of his miserable life, because someone threatening Kento activates a whole new level of fucking insanity in me.

Do I threaten him regularly? Absolutely. Do I occasionally want to strangle him myself? Also yes. But those are my privileges, thank you very fucking much. Everyone else can back the fuck off.

Click.

Alya thumbs the hammer of the gun. “Take another step, brother,” she says, her voice dropping into a singsong hum, “and I’ll paint that pine tree behind you with whatever’s left of your brain.”

I freeze. My boot hovers an inch above the gravel before I slam it down.

“What the fuck are you playing at, Alya?” I hiss. “Look at me! Look at me. What the fuck is this?!”

Alya tilts her head, her green eyes scanning me from my bloody hair down to my shaking hands.

“How interesting,” she murmurs, a genuine chuckle bubbling in her throat. “For years you walked around that house like a ghost. Letting Anton push you into corners, letting Papa treat you like a defective toy. You were so quiet. So resigned to being nothing. And now… you see him in chains for five seconds, and you turn into a rabid dog.”

“If you call him a dog again,” Kento’s voice cuts through the wind. It is flat, but deadly. “I will dig your tongue out of your throat even if it is the last thing I do on this earth.”

Alya flinches.

Even with a gun in her hand, even with him in handcuffs, the gravity of Kento Kazuma terrifies her.

Adrian feels it too. The boy’s hand is trembling against the gun.

Alya clears her throat, forcing her posture back into perfection, the smile snapping back onto her lips like a plastic mask.

“You won’t be digging anything out, Kazuma,” she says, though her voice lacks its earlier airy lightness. “You won’t have the hands for it in about ten minutes.”

I swallow, forcing my focus back onto my twin.

My other half. The girl who used to crawl into my bed when the thunder shook the estate windows. The girl who has held my hand under the dinner table while our father told me I was too weak to carry the family name.