Page 122 of Fool Me Twice

“I’m not sure I follow,” Hart said, feeling as faint as his voice had suddenly become.

Cane let go of his knee to tug at the gauge in his ear.

“The murder was revenge,” he said. “For being put in jail.”

“You’re gonna have to give me more than that, Cane,” Hart said, feeling himself tremble in reaction to what he was hearing.

Shady was one thing.

Dabbling illegally was another.

Both of those things Hart could live with. Had lived with to give himself time with Cane. Murder was…

“You know some of it already,” Cane said. “You know I was on the street as a teenager. And that I found a partner I built my business with when I was really young.”

“How young?” Hart asked.

“I met her when I was fourteen,” Cane said. “She was just a couple of years older, but to a fucked-up kid without a home, family, or any sort of stability she was a savior. She picked me out of the mud and made me her right-hand man. We started out small—petty crimes, enough to pay for a place to stay and have food each day.”

Hart wanted to ask questions. He wanted to interrupt and dig deeper and find whatever he could to make this not be the truth. But he had no choice but to let Cane say what he needed to say.

“She was ambitious, though,” Cane continued. “She knew how to get into places uninvited, knew how to swindle people into doing her bidding. She kept finding these jobs for us, each one bigger than the next. She made friends with some pretty fucked-up people. But powerful. She saw them as tickets to a better life. And I followed because I trusted her. I didn’t see myself as her errand boy, even though I did all of the dirty work. I thought we were equal. It was just me and her against the world.”

“Were you ever…” Hart trailed off, jealousy sticking to the backs of his teeth like caramel.

“We got together a year or two after we first met,” Cane said, making Hart’s insides turn. “The whole thing was just as volatile and toxic as everything else about our lives was, but I thought that was how it had to be. It wasn’t until I met you that my perception flipped. It wasn’t even the sex either. What me and Sarah had was certified vanilla in comparison, but the ways we interacted were… Well, let’s just say that what eventually happened shouldn’t have shocked me as much as it did.”

“What happened?” Hart asked to take his mind off the images in his head. Of Cane loving someone else. Wanting someone else. Seeing someone else as his whole world.

“She found a big deal dude she thought she could swindle,” Cane said with a snort. “Planned a long con on him, intending to take over his entire empire. She had a plan that sounded great. She had the brains to pull it off, and she had me at the ready to do whatever she told me to.”

Cane shook his head for a second before continuing.

“I just didn’t know that my part in her little plan was that of the fall guy. She’d fucked up along the way, but she’d convinced the guy it was all my fault, and to prove her loyalty to him, she offered to end me herself. She lured me to his place, then let him watch as she shot me like a fucking dog.”

He lifted his shirt and framed the scar on his stomach hiding under a tattoo of a skull with his hand. Hart had noticed it before in passing, but had never paid too much attention when Cane had moved him away from that spot when they were intimate.

Now it made sense.

Hart sucked in a sharp breath, the image of Cane bloody and beaten against the wall in his apartment coming to mind. Hart had been cursed then, but his horror and hatred had been real. He felt it now too.

“They packed me up in the trunk of a car and dumped me in Mechaven, under a tree right at the border,” Cane said, dropping his shirt. “She just had to be poetic, all the way to the end.”

“What’s poetic about being left to die?” Hart asked, his throat constricting.

“We used to bury the money we picked off people under that tree. Marked it with an X so we knew where it was. It was our spot.”

He sounded both wistful and venomous, the combination a confusing contrast. He spat the word “our” like it was poison on his lips, and Hart wanted to take it all away. But he couldn’t rewrite Cane’s history for him.

He couldn’t give him a loving mother who hadn’t run and left him. He couldn’t give him a father who hadn’t lost himself in drinking. He couldn’t prevent Cane from running away from home as a kid, trying to find something for himself and then stumbling across the wrong person who took advantage of how much he wanted. To have things of his own. To finally belong to someone.

It was written clearly now. Hart could see it like it was a book. The pages that made Cane who he was. A heartbreaking tale that was far too common.

“I pulled through because some homeless asshole found me and called an ambulance,” Cane continued, looking everywhere but at Hart. “By the time I recovered enough, she and her new friend had found out I was alive, but they couldn’t do anything to end me while I was in the hospital, so they reported me to the police and set me up for all the shit they were suspected of. I went down like the fucking scapegoat I was always supposed to be.”

“So you…”

“I did my time,” Cane said. “And she apparently did hers, because she climbed up the ranks in the underworld in the years I was away. She’d visit me. To gloat. To point out people she’d paid off to try to off me inside. She’d hand them cash in line of sight so I’d know she meant it. She laughed the entire time. Treated it as a game. She never seemed disappointed when the attempts failed. She’d just come for another visit, with a new idea, a new threat.”

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