29

My eyes squeeze shut as I try to recall that awkward second day of living with my sister and Aidan. I’d humiliated myself, stumbling half-asleep into an occupied bathroom where Aidan, coming off a night shift for the Secret Service, had just stepped out of the shower. He’d been so quiet, kept the lights off, using only the early dawn light, probably not wanting to wake Harper, and I walked right in. Got a full-frontal view of my future brother-in-law.

I scoot back, placing a couple of feet of empty space between Miles and me. “That’s their mark, isn’t it?”

Aidan had handled my intrusion with polite professionalism, but my sister thought it was hilarious. Once the ice was broken, I’d asked her about his tattoo. He wouldn’t tell her what it meant, so she’d tried to figure it out on her own.

“One of the symbols might mean light,” she had called to me from behind her laptop. I’d been trying to forget the whole ordeal, so I’d avoided aiding her in research. “Or fire. The other I think is pet. Fire pet? That doesn’t make sense.”

“Ellie…” Miles starts but trails off, silently confirming that I’m right.

“Light or fire?” I say aloud to myself, wanting to untangle every last bit. “Life?”

Miles’s eyes widen a smidgen, giving the answer away.

“Life,” I repeat. “Life and pet…what am I missing—” Miles’s explanation of St. Felicity’s comes back to me.

Invitations happen practically from birth, but you don’t accept until you’re old enough to make a pledge of loyalty for life.

“Pets are loyal,” I say, ignoring his efforts to interrupt. We just stare at each other for several long heartbeats until I finally whisper the answer my sister had almost landed on nearly a year ago. “Loyalty for life.”

I knew about Simon. I knew he had been a junior member of the league of assassins. But I didn’t know about Aidan— God, I can’t even think about… Harper doesn’t know. I’m sure she doesn’t.

And Miles.

I lift my eyes to meet his. “Why? After they tried to kill us? How could you join—”

“They didn’t try to kill us; Jack’s rogue group did,” he says firmly.

The story he told Dominic about how he ended up here, it was missing a piece. A third group to account for Miles. “Did St. Felicity’s send you here to kill someone? The Zanettis? Are they that dangerous?”

“Nobody sent me here,” Miles states. “I volunteered. I was following a lead.”

My whole body turns to ice. “Were you ever going to tell me?” I wait a beat and then find the answer on my own. “That’s what you meant when you said you hadn’t expected us to be so—”

The look he gives me—intense, rich with pain, dripping with so much—causes my voice to catch. I stop before too much pours out of me. I’ve already given away enough. And now I feel naked—figuratively and literally. I spring to my feet and scoop up my leggings and sweater.

“Aidan,” I mutter under my breath while shoving a leg into my pants. “I never thought— I have to tell Harper.”

Miles is on his feet again, too. His hands land on my arms, holding me firmly in place. “You can’t tell Harper anything.”

I shake out of his grip and pull my sweater on hastily. “What do you mean I can’t tell her? Of course I have to tell her.”

“Ellie, look at me.” Miles forces my chin up so our eyes meet. “You can’t tell her anything. Not ever. And I’ve never meant that more than I do right now.”

Fear bubbles up in my chest. “But you do realize that Aidan was arrested by the FBI barely two months ago for being paid to murder Simon Gilbert. As a hit man, assassin—whichever word you want to use. And it turns out they were right; he is a freakin’ assassin!”

“Shhh,” Miles says, looking panicked. “Just because he pledged doesn’t mean he’s been called to duty. He may never be.”

“Called to duty?” I shake my head. It’s too much. A new thought ignites. “I know you volunteered, but what do they want you to do here? Do you have to—” I’m not sure I can say it but I take another stab at it. “Kill someone?”

The color drains from Miles’s face, and his body turns to stone right in front of me. The memory of Miles pointing that gun at Jack after he came so close to ending us, I can still see his finger tremble over the trigger, can still hear Clyde’s voice urging him to put the gun down, saying he wasn’t ready to take someone’s life.

“What did they do to you, Miles?” I ask, even though I’m afraid of the answer. “I thought your family wasn’t part of St. Felicity’s. Jack said your dad turned it down.”

“I thought that, too.” His eyes close briefly and he exhales, seeming to refocus. “I have been given a job already, but I haven’t had to… I mean I haven’t…”

Killed someone. That’s what he can’t say.

“How did this happen? You’re seventeen. How could anyone ask you to do this?”

“Only one person could ask me to do this,” Miles says, fierceness in his voice now. “Or better yet, only one person could convince me to do this.”

“Your father?” I guess, completely clueless. “The president?”

“Simon.” The name falls from his lips with such genuine respect and value.

“Simon’s dead,” I remind him. “When exactly did you get that tattoo?”

“A month ago.” He studies my face as if waiting for me to say something, but I can see it’s him who’s deliberating, him who is reminding me of the boy who offered me so little information about himself when we first met, made me work and dig for every tiny thread. He must have made his choice, because seconds later, he shoves the bed aside, revealing a small, barely visible door. “Come on, I have some stuff to show you.”

“I take back my comment about window escapes being your go-to,” I mutter. “Clearly secret rooms are now top of the list.”

He seems too flustered by the sharp turn of events to offer any retort. I’m too flustered not to joke about this, any of this. Just to keep myself sane and calm. Before opening the door, he grabs a battery-operated camp lantern from under the bed. I follow him through the door, both of us needing to duck our way in. The door clicks shut, leaving us in complete darkness. Then the light from the lantern fills the small space the size of a large walk-in closet. I glance around, not surprised to see the black felt covering the walls. When Miles was my neighbor, he’d had a secret room just like this one. Complete with photos of my classmates and me pinned to the walls. This room has no photos and instead holds only words scribbled on torn pieces of paper and pinned to the walls. Like with the photos in the other secret room, many of the words are connected by pieces of string.

On the wall adjacent to the small door, six words catch my eye. They’re pinned and lined up in a perfect row.

SQUIRREL (102)

KING (875)

RAMONA (45)

RIVER (429)

WICK (20)

“Code names.” Miles notices me reading a paper on the far right, out of line with the others, the word tooth written on it. “Except this one is just a nickname that I haven’t deciphered yet.”

“And the numbers?” I prompt.

“Correlate with employment or associated organizations,” he says. “CIA, FBI, United Nations…”

I give him a look that I hope is scathing. “These are your brothers, right? Brothers for life.”

“St. Felicity’s isn’t an all-male organization.”

“Great,” I say. “Equal-opportunity assassins.”

He sighs. “These names represent remaining members of Jack’s rogue for-profit group. Alleged members, anyway.”

That puts the ax on my sarcastic remarks. “Seriously? How did you figure out—”

“Simon,” he says simply. “Remember that envelope I showed you before Jack hauled us away?”

“I remember,” I answer, cutting him short.

The day Miles showed me an envelope Simon had sent him days before he was murdered was the same day a SWAT team showed up at our apartment to take Aidan in on murder charges. I was so confused and took one look at the photos in the envelope—several were of my sister in her former job as a stripper—and the judgment on Miles’s face as I confessed everything about my family. Then I knocked him out using a self-defense move he’d taught me and ran off with the envelope.

“There were numbers written on the back of one of the photos,” he explains. “Took me forever to decipher them. One I’m still working on.”

“And?” I prompt.

“The numbers correlated with a bank in Turkey.” He eyes me warily, waiting for my reaction. Clearly he went to Turkey with more purpose than a simple holiday getaway or even for his parents’ jobs. He went to investigate something Simon left him.

I divert my eyes from his and focus on the wall. “You should have told me.”

“There was nothing to tell,” he argues. “It was a whim. A ridiculous tangent that only someone like me, a student with freedom to explore every ounce of curiosity and a month’s vacation between semesters, could pursue.”

I lift a hand, gesturing around the room at all the puzzle pieces spread over the walls. “Clearly not a whim.”

“Got lucky.” He shrugs. “A real agent wouldn’t have been able to jet across the world to look into a number left on the back of a picture.”

“So you said,” I respond drily, because I’m beginning to wonder what exactly is left to separate Miles from a so-called real agent. “And what did this Turkish bank reveal?”

“A safe deposit box. In my name.” Miles’s voice catches, and I can only assume the idea of Simon taking these great lengths, showing how much he trusts his old boarding school roommate, isn’t easy to swallow now that he’s gone. “He left me a list of names. Which I burned immediately after memorizing them.”

“That’s it?” I say, not hiding my frustration. Do these military schoolboys ever take a direct approach? Everything is always ten steps when it could be one. Always circling a perimeter but rarely striding through it. “He couldn’t have written the names on the back of the photos? You had to go all the way to Turkey just to get a list of names?”

“Names of very dangerous individuals who happen to have a great deal of power and resources,” he says, as if I need a reminder how dangerous Jack and his band of brothers were. “And he also left this note.”

His index finger points at the wall behind me. I turn slowly and walk toward a small slip of paper with handwriting I recognize from all the biology lab reports we did together and from that envelope of pictures.

The only way to catch them
is from the inside. I’m sorry. —S

Even though I’d already discovered and deciphered the tattoo, this note is what actually makes me believe the truth.

And my heart is already breaking.