Page 131 of Claiming Pretty

“It was never a choice,” I said as if it could end the conversation.

As if that could bury the hatchet. Could alleviate the guilt he felt for letting me take the fall.

Apparently not.

“And now, neither is mine,” Ciaran said, his words heavy and full of a meaning I couldn’t quite grasp.

I would. Much later, I would understand what he meant to do if it came to it.

But not in that moment.

Ciaran winced as he rubbed his face, the muscles along his arms strained, his gaze distant.

Torturing himself, I realized.

So we were identical twins it seemed. Even after all that had come between us.

My heart ached in a way it hadn’t for longer than I could remember as I watched him.

Say something, a part of me whispered, a younger me from the days before a black car door opened on a gravel drive and a beautiful girl with raven hair and startling round eyes emerged.

Release him from his debt to you.He is your brother.

But the words we’d left unsaid piled high like a wall between us. I couldn’t find the right words to cast over the crumbling bricks.

In the end, it was Ciaran who broke our fragile silence.

“I’ll find a way to repay you.” My brother’s eyes held a storm of terror and determination as he lifted them tomine. “I must,” he said with emotion enough to make me look away in shame.

The answer was there on the tip of my tongue. What he could do to rectify the years of imprisonment I endured in his stead.

All I had to do was say it.

Let me have Ava.

But I knew in my heart that it wasn’t up to Ciaran just as it wasn’t up to me.

In the end, Ava would have to decide.

The tension was back between my brother and me as both of our gazes instinctively moved toward the object of our shared desire.

Ava was oblivious to our mutually beating hearts, the unspoken war neither of us could command. She lifted her slender fingers to tuck a strand of dark fallen hair back behind her ear, completely unaware of her intoxicating beauty as she worked, lips pursed in concentration.

She was drafting an article revealing all the sordid details we’d discovered about the Sochai.

Once she was finished, it would be sent to Lisa with instructions for what to do with it should things end badly and none of us made it through the night alive.

We were in the precarious position of not knowing what our enemy knew.

We thought we had the upper hand, that our ruse would be convincing, but we were dealing with a shadow group and all three of us understood that we might have only stumbled upon the tip of the iceberg.

I looked up to study Ciaran’s face as he continued to watch Ava type against her drawn-in knees, crumpled in theseat like the normal student he wished she could be, stressed about tests and papers instead of secret societies and missing girls.

He and I imagined vastly different things for the girl who changed our fates forever. But they were two sides of the same coin—wanting the best for Ava.

“Shesurvives this,” I said.

A demand.

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