Page 37 of Broken Pact

“Half-sisters,” I correct.

“As in plural? You’ve been holding out on me. Not cool, Jagger, not cool.”

I barely spare him a glare as I stride out of the garage, urgency quickening my legs. My mind races with the possibilities of why she would show up out of the blue like this, especially after I didn’t respond to her request to have dinner.

I tip my chin as I approach the front gate. Rocks stands like some kind of marble sentinel, boots planted on the blacktop and arms crossed over his barrel chest. I see the moment he spots me, his shoulders dropping a little bit.

“You’re fuckin’ popular today, Jagger.” It comes out as more of a grunt.

I clap him on the shoulder twice—he doesn’t budge an inch. “You’re a good man, Rocks. Lunch is on me today, yeah?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Rocks says, turning around and heading back to the security guard house.

“Hi, over here,” the woman standing next to Rocks calls out, waving her hand. “It’s Naomi.”

I shift my attention to her. Recognition hovers over me like a raincloud, thick droplets of understanding and disbelief pooling on my shoulders.

Naomi Bennet.

My half-sister.

Thanks to one little checkbox on an ancestry DNA kit, I discovered I had three half-sisters six months ago. Naturally, I did a little digging. Once I found one of them, it was easy to find the other two.

I spent almost an entire day lost in the rabbit hole of social media. Looking at all the photos they posted, seeing about their lives, and reading about them.

She looks just like her photos. Dark-brown tousled hair and wide brown eyes. Dressed in jean shorts and a plain black tee, she comes up to my shoulder blades. I guess we get our height from our shared parent.

But that’s about the only thing we seem to share.

I didn’t realize that I had some admittedly naive preconceptions about the first time I met my half-sisters. I expected some kind of cosmic identification, like our bodies would just understand that we were siblings.

Instead, it’s the kind of moment you have when you see someone mildly familiar at the grocery store. Their name is just out of bounds, like an itch in the middle of your back. You reach for it, but it always remains elusive. And it’s not until you’re about to fall asleep that you remember their name or how you know them.

“You know, your sister,” she says, widening her eyes and emphasizing the last word.

“I know who you are. What are you doing here?” I expel a breath and paste my trademark smile on.

She leans forward, putting her weight on her toes in a little bounce. “You didn’t answer my texts about lunch, so I decided to surprise you.”

My tongue presses against the back of my front teeth. “Well, consider me surprised.”

She steps into me without an invitation and wraps her arms around my torso, trapping my arms against my sides. My scalp prickles with discomfort as she holds onto me for a few beats longer than necessary.

I clear my throat and take a step back, forcing her to break her hold on me. “Why are you here?”

She looks up at me with a wide smile, her hand clasping my bicep. “I told you already, silly, you didn’t answer my text.”

I look from her hand to her eyes and back again, a frown creasing my brow. I pull my arm out of her grip and stroll toward the open gate. Something feels weird, but I can’t tell if it’s because I’m meeting a sibling I didn’t know existed or something else. “Right. How did you know where I work?”

She laughs like I just told the punchline of a joke. Her steps quicken until she’s next to me. She bumps her shoulder into mine. “On your social media, of course. So, want to spend some time together? I think I saw a diner when I drove through downtown. Are you hungry?”

I glance at her, trying to decipher the layers of her intentions beneath that bright smile. Her easy demeanor feels like a facade, a carefully constructed mask hiding something darker underneath.

But then again, maybe I’m just being paranoid. Maybe she really is just a long-lost sister excited to reconnect.

Except . . . my social media consists of one thing and one thing only: Pudding. My cat is the star of the show, and I’ve never mentioned anything about the Reapers or RGRC.

So at the very least, she did some deeper digging on me. I’m not offended. I did the same shit to her and her sisters after I got the results. But the difference is, I didn’t randomly show up at the Boat House where Naomi waitresses five nights a week.

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