Chapter Two

“When’s the 20/20 interview?” Keira asked, frowning as she stared at her phone, swiping through online comments offering obnoxious opinions of every lock of her hair and every blink of her eyes. “Are we still doing CNN?”

“20/20 is Friday and CNN is Monday, though they’re pissed about that. We also have a three-part series with some celebrity psychiatrist that airs during daytime,” said Charlotte Conner, our cyber-hacking best friend, who now also managed my sister’s ever-expanding media schedule.

Keira nervously bit her bottom lip, absently peeling chapped skin with her tooth until a hint of blood appeared in a crack. She didn’t seem to notice.

This was a huge mistake.

When I made my video deposition with Julian Stone—our benefactor and billionaire media buddy—I was still seeing swirling spots of panic and fighting hyperventilation. My boyfriend, Marcus, had just been poisoned in Rio de Janeiro, where I watched him foam at the mouth. Then I learned that Allen Cross, our only adult ally with ties to espionage, was behind the poisoning. That alone would have been enough to cause the funk to circle over my head like a Category 5 hurricane about to touch land, but that was before I confronted my parents, before I watched them murder Cross right in front of me. That was before I learned that every Dresden Kid I’d spoken to over a span of many months was lying, and that Marcus’s brother, Antonio, had orchestrated the entire plot, turning each Dresden Kid against us before we arrived on their doorsteps. Then Antonio slept with my sister.

So when I got off the plane from Brazil, after all of that, I might as well have crawled on gnarled hands and knees waving a tattered white flag tied to a broken stick. I was beaten. We all were. And I sided with Julian. I listened to the plan he’d been pushing since the day I’d met him, his idea to keep us safe by raising our profile so high no one could touch us. I told him everything. On video. Then Keira did the same.

We decided—by a group vote—to release Keira’s confession to the wild, tossing a dripping piece of steak to a pack of starving hyenas. The reporters swallowed it whole. Within days, Bravo contacted us about a reality series chronicling Keira’s “return to life following a death certificate and a tombstone.” Four New York City publishers were fighting for her book rights. Celebrity News Online offered $100,000 for a picture of Keira in a bathtub. And several high-profile publicists begged Keira to date their has-been clients.

Keira had finally achieved her dream—her picture was on the cover of tabloids, news outlets screamed her name, and trolls crawled from under bridges with sharpened fingernails poised over keyboards. “Who would kidnap her?” “How disgusting to use her parents’ crimes to get famous.” “Her mom killed my cousin’s neighbor. I hope they all rot in hell.” “You know Keira’s in on it. I bet she ordered that hit on Tyson.” “She’s not even pretty. Have you seen her from behind? Huge!” “I’d bang her.” “Please, she’s already banged half of Boston. Trust me, I used to work with her.” “I heard she dropped out of college.” “Dumb and sexy, just how I like them. Don’t worry, babe, I won’t be gentle…”

Keira was kidnapped, drugged, held at gunpoint, and betrayed by the last two men she cared about. (If she wasn’t in love with Antonio, then she was in serious like.) Now the cyber universe had her shoulders constantly slumped, and it was getting harder to ignore the wine bottles collecting in the recycling bins.

What was I thinking? I should have never listened to them…

“All of the interviews will be conducted here, right?” Keira asked, licking blood from her lip as she lifted her dead eyes from her phone.

“Yes, the reporters are coming here. No travel for you,” Julian reassured her as he approached, shooting me a worried look. He could read her expression, too, or maybe he saw the words “slutty bitch” in all caps glaring from the comments on her screen.

His interview, “Keira Phoenix: Rising from the Ashes,” was a global sensation. He delivered on his promise—with so much media coverage, no one could harm us without raising suspicion. In return, his reputation had gone from laughingstock who racially profiled a bunch of innocent Islamic women to serious journalist who broke the year’s biggest story. The downside? He turned my sister into Edward Snowden mixed with Monica Lewinsky—Keira was a victim, a whistleblower, and a sex scandal all in one. The news constantly talked about how she slept with her kidnapper (Craig Bernard had yet to be seen, let alone captured), how she was taken from a bathtub in the nude (there was no way that was true, but the rumor persisted), and how she was too dumb to realize her parents were Dr. Evils. They even scoured social media for every picture of Keira holding a cocktail or wearing a bikini and used that as the photo on TV when they talked about her being “back from the dead.” And this was coming from the journalists.

“Your security is paramount,” Julian continued, his tone unnaturally calm as a wrinkle formed between his perfectly shaped brows. “They’re displeased that my father owns the estate. And they’re worried that their news outlets will be unduly monitored, but I assured them that will not be the case. Our first priority is your safety. After what you’ve been through, no one can argue with that.”

Keira briefly looked up from her online tormenters to flick a glance at the armed guard wearing a tailored black suit and an earpiece by the doorway to the library. There was another somewhere else inside the compound, and two more outside—our new normal. “Good. Here is good.” Keira nodded, then turned back to her phone.

“Put. That. Down,” I insisted. Her face reminded me of the day I found her in Venice, scared and helpless, chained to a sink. This wasn’t the stoic sister who raised me, who refused to shed a tear in my presence. “It’s getting late. Don’t you want to watch The Bachelor? I hear one of the girls has an old boyfriend show up on the group date.”

I hated The Bachelor, but I smiled with such enthusiasm, even I started to believe I cared about Britta and Peter’s TV romance. Keira loved that stuff. Or she used to, back when we were normal. Only this Keira didn’t even blink to suggest she heard me. She was too busy reading death threats. At least once a day someone online threatened to rape her. They also asked her to marry them. They sent her pictures of their kids and asked for money for experimental surgeries. They claimed to have gone to school with us in Morocco, or Milan, or New Orleans. One person took the photo of Keira in the trunk of a car in Rome and added blood dripping from her mouth and eyes. Every dawn was a new surprise.

Charlotte plucked the phone from my sister’s hand. “I need to update your schedule,” she said, as if that were the reason she wanted the device.

I nodded in appreciation when Charlotte met my eyes. We had become my sister’s round-the-clock counselors, and I feared we were very inept at the task. Exhibit A) Keira hardly washed her hair, saying she “didn’t see the point” of showering if she wasn’t in front of a camera. B) She rarely left the compound. C) She claimed her nursing career was “dead forever” and the only thing she was good at was “being a victim.” And D) her eyes were so raw with emotion that looking at her often felt like watching an abused animal ad on TV. This from the girl who greeted guests at our parents’ funeral with the detached etiquette of Martha Stewart. She never said she regretted giving her deposition, becoming our poster child, because she couldn’t—that would mean saying she wished I were going through all of this online harassment instead. She couldn’t wish that out loud. But she had to regret that viral newscast every day she read a fresh death threat in a comment section. I knew I did.

“I don’t see the point of another interview. I’ve said everything I need to say,” she muttered.

“Every outlet has its own angle on events,” Julian explained like the newsman he was. “With each interview you keep the light shining on your story. You keep people looking for your parents, and you get closer to ending all of this.”

“Yeah, because some guy with a bag of Fritos and Wi-Fi is going to find our mom and dad,” she snapped. “The freakin’ CIA can’t find our parents.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I scoffed, and Charlotte shot me a look.

What? Ending this nightmare was our full-time jobs, we looked for our parents all day, using every connection we had, and so far we’d only partially succeeded.

The FBI raided Dresden Chemical’s offices the day after Julian released Keira’s statement. We all watched, with buttered popcorn and bubbling flutes of champagne, as computers and cardboard boxes were hauled from the company’s downtown Boston skyscraper. There was helicopter footage and evening news teasers, front-page headlines and trending topics on social media. We thought we’d won. Dresden Chemical was dismantled, eliminating the front for Department D. Urban’s empire was confiscated and ruined in a single news cycle. It was what made Keira so famous—her video brought down one of the largest and most influential chemical companies in the world. This was epic news from the business community, to the espionage world, all the way to Us Weekly.

Then we found out that Randolph and Sophia Urban, along with Marcus’s parents, took off before the raid. They were probably hiding in matching caves alongside my parents. So our mission changed, or at least mine did. It was time for our parents to face justice in a court of law—no CIA black sites, no cemeteries, and no free rides on a fountain of margaritas. For us to be safe, for us to ever be normal, we had to make sure their enemies couldn’t use us as live bait, and they had a lot of enemies—from damaged families like the Dresden Kids, to governments who didn’t want their conspiracies outed, to spies bent on revenge.

We had to find them. So every day, Marcus and I scanned CCTV footage from Rio to Boston to London; Charlotte hacked into bank statements, airline records, anything she could find that might offer some hint as to where any of our parents went. So far, nothing.

“Your story’s getting all kinds of new coverage because of Regina’s latest video. The media’s turning it into a Bond Girl catfight.” Charlotte shook her curly hair in disgust as she tucked Keira’s phone in her back pocket, not returning it. Thank God. “Last week, #JusticeForTyson was trending, and there’s even a donation page now.”

“What’s Regina buying with the money? Eyeliner?” Marcus quipped, and I swatted his arm.

Though I barely recognized my old friend—first she chopped her hair for Tyson’s funeral, now she was sporting a dramatic pixie cut and coating her eyes with so much liner it winged halfway to her ears. Even the sound of her voice on that video made me cringe. I’d never been hated like that before, not by anyone who actually knew me, not by anyone who was really justified.

Regina was right. Tyson would be alive if it weren’t for me. And I wished I could tell her how much I hated myself for that, maybe that would make her feel better, knowing that I dreamed of him being swallowed by a shadow while I watched frozen, only to awake dripping with sweat. Maybe she’d be happy that I cried so easily now, and that my throat felt so tight all the time I stopped eating bread products because I couldn’t swallow them without choking. I wanted to tell her these things, and I tried. Charlotte sent several messages via online channels, but Regina’s response was to make another video slamming us for attempting to “silence her movement.” We stopped after that. I didn’t want to antagonize her into making more clips, into dragging herself into this horror any further. Regina might despise me, but I didn’t despise her. I didn’t want her in this life. Especially when all I was trying to do was free myself from it. Regina was my last connection to the old me, the normal me, and she had to stay there. I owed her that. I owed that to Tyson.

“Regina’s grieving. We can’t blame her for that.” I squeezed my hands, my nails forming little half moons on my palms as I pictured Regina’s face firing words at the camera, at me. We used to share baby carrots at lunch.

“At least people love her. Regina’s the vigilante girlfriend.” Keira made a face like this was a compliment, like Regina was in an enviable position. Her boyfriend was dead. “I’m the girl who got what was coming to her. Because our parents did this, because my boyfriend screwed me. Literally.”

“You have to stop.” I rose to my feet, marching to my sister. “You’re listening to a bunch of internet trolls. They’re idiots! You know this. No one who knows anything blames you.”

“I blame me! What do you think I was doing all those months locked in hotel rooms? I thought you were going to get killed because of me. I thought I was going to get killed. Because I ran a DNA test on Mom and Dad, because I went out with Craig Bernard to begin with. And now the whole world knows how stupid I am—”

“Stop saying that!” I yelled, and Charlotte grabbed my arm. I wasn’t helping.

But I couldn’t listen to this anymore. I let them talk us into going public. I was so angry at myself for forcing Marcus to go to Brazil. I was so mortified that I listened to Allen Cross and let him manipulate me into that ridiculous Dresden Kid plan. I doubted my judgment now. I let the group vote to put our story on the evening news, and to make Keira our poster child. It seemed like a logical idea while my head was full of poison attempts, undead parents, and jewel-encrusted daggers. I listened when they insisted that Keira was the better choice, because she didn’t have to lie. Everything she said on that video was true. She was abducted from our bathroom. She was held against her will, bound and gagged, and declared dead by the Boston PD. She was taken by enemies of our parents. Our parents were criminals, and if they were alive, she hadn’t seen them.

That was the big difference between Keira and me—I not only saw our parents back from the dead, but I watched them commit murder. If the world knew our parents were alive and had killed a man as recently as a few weeks ago, the investigation would stop there. That sensational headline alone would be enough to convince any jury, any human, that my parents were the villains of this story. And they were, but they weren’t the only villains. Randolph Urban kidnapped my sister, and the Reys sabotaged every Dresden Kid we met in an attempt to pin decades worth of crimes solely on my parents. And someone killed Tyson. I was not going to let any of them act like innocent employees of an engineering firm who had no idea criminal activity was being committed. This time, they were all going to burn, without any beasts rising from any ashes.

So I gave an honest deposition to Julian, detailing every tiny element of my twisted story, and locked it in a safe-deposit box with “in case of emergency, break glass” instructions. Only now, while my glass was still intact, I was starting to feel like Keira’s was irreparably shattered.

“If you don’t want to do this interview, any interviews, you don’t have to.” I sat on the puffy arm of my sister’s wingback chair, the elegant damask pattern clashing with her oatmeal-stained gray yoga pants. “You’ve done enough.”

“If I stop now, it will be for nothing. All of it. They’re still out there. People still want to kill us to get to them. The only difference is the whole world thinks we suck, too. I can’t let it end like this.” Keira clenched her eyes shut, shaking her head, like everything hurt.

“It’s not up to you to fix it. You’ve been through enough. If you want to be done, then we’re done.” I watched the wrinkles deepen on her forehead.

“I can cancel,” Julian insisted, not an ounce of judgment in his voice. “But if you want to continue, you know you’re safe here.”

“Yeah, here.” Keira’s eyes flung open. “Problem is, I’m acting crazy and I know it. I’m afraid to go to New York City for an interview, because I think a flight attendant might poison my ginger ale or a lunatic might break into my hotel room. I know how pathetic that is.”

“You are not pathetic or crazy, those are valid concerns,” Charlotte offered.

“Sí. I was nearly poisoned to death,” said Marcus.

“That’s not helping.” I shot my boyfriend a look, not wanting to add to my sister’s paranoia.

“Mom and Dad must have seen my video, my interviews,” said Keira, peering at me with a gaze so lifeless I wanted to reach for a crash cart and shock her chest. She needed to be zapped back into herself. “They haven’t tried to contact me once. After everything they did, don’t they think I deserve an apology? An explanation? Something?”

Yes, she did. But if that was the reason she was on camera, I needed to cancel every interview she had scheduled. An apology wasn’t coming. I tried to explain that to her before, tell her that the people I met in Rio were not the people who raised us, but she couldn’t accept it. She had to see them for herself, and she deserved that. But the parents I confronted spent their entire time with me justifying every unforgivable thing they did, including the murder of Allen Cross’s sick wife and then his murder right in front of me. They didn’t see the damage they caused. Though it shouldn’t take a mommy-and-me class to learn that first-degree murder was not something you wanted to share with your kids. It shouldn’t take a parenting manual to realize that faking your death was a pretty traumatic thing to do to your children.

“We’ll find Mom and Dad,” I assured her, keeping my opinions to myself. She needed hope, and I was not about to take that away.

“I just wish they would find me. I wish someone cared about me,” she mumbled.

“We care about you!” everyone shouted in unison.

Her head shot up. “That’s not what I mean, and you know it. Julian, you and Charlotte have each other. And you and Marcus are together.” She looked at me like her words were an accusation. “We may be isolated here, surrounded by guards and nutjobs, but at least all of you have a life, a real one, and I don’t. It’s freakin’ Valentine’s Day tomorrow!”

Damn. I gulped.

I had hoped she hadn’t noticed the date. Not that we ever celebrated Valentine’s Day before. Not sincerely anyway. Keira and I never had a boyfriend to take us to dinner or buy us perfume. We were always each other’s Valentines. We’d buy cheesy stuffed animals and cheap assorted chocolates from the drugstore and make fun of everyone who took the commercialism seriously. But while I truly disliked the millions of people buying cards full of vapid romantic sentiments written by a corporate conglomerate, I sensed my sister always wished she had a guy who’d take the time to pick up a wilting bundle of roses. Romantically, she couldn’t be any more damaged and alone right now than if she were in solitary confinement.

“Valentine’s Day sucks,” I said.

“You can say that. You have a guy who threw himself in front of a loaded gun for you!” She furrowed her brow at Marcus.

“Sí.” Marcus shrugged with a look of I am awesome. And he was. He rescued me from Luis Basso in Cortona, stealing a motorbike and everything, but his brother also betrayed us, and my sister in particular. I didn’t need him making her feel worse. I narrowed my eyes.

“We all care about you,” he quickly added.

“And being single is a good thing,” I said. “You’re strong, you’re independent…”

“I’m a freak show.”

“You are not!” Charlotte yelped.

“Yes, I am. My last two boyfriends were fake. My parents are fake. My entire reality-star wannabe persona is fake.”

“We’re real,” said Charlotte.

“Yeah, and are you and Julian gonna invite me to watch The Notebook with you tomorrow?” Keira snapped.

“Actually, and this probably isn’t the best time to say this”—Julian gazed at Charlotte—“but I thought we might go out tomorrow, somewhere nice.” His shoulders rose apologetically at my sister, who slumped farther in her seat. Meanwhile, Charlotte’s face lit up like he’d just offered her the keys to the NSA. Like Keira and I, I couldn’t remember Charlotte ever having a real date on Valentine’s Day.

“We’re going out?” Charlotte asked, her pale skin glowing. She deserved to be happy. Not that I wanted to make my sister hurt worse, but I also didn’t want to strip any joy from Charlotte. She was sacrificing a lot for us, including her career and her life back in Boston, so she got to have a moment once in a while.

Julian nodded, and Charlotte leaned toward him, eyes sappy, then she quickly looked away, like she would betray my sister if she dared to smile.

“Great.” Keira sighed. “I’m a fun sucker.”

“Hey.” I nudged her shoulder. “We’re not doing anything.” I squeezed Marcus’s forearm like “you’d better back me on this.” He swiftly nodded. “You know I hate Valentine’s Day. It’s stupid. Let’s show Marcus how we used to celebrate.”

I pumped my eyebrows, trying to remind her of holidays past, the ones with just her and me. We always made them work, in our own way, the two of us.

Now it would be the three of us.

That wasn’t awkward…

Marcus grabbed my hand, and I ignored the look on his face.