Page 48 of Protect Your Queen

But I missed my Papa. So I asked Jareth to teach me because of all my siblings, he looked the most like him. He was the one that was his image, and his talent. If I could capture just a bit of that, maybe our father would come back. Of course, he never did.

The moment I was proficient at piano, Jareth told me he’d never play again. As far as I knew, that had been true. He never sang or played around me. He said he would have quit sooner, if it wasn’t for me.

“Don’t trust the pretty boy.” My brother looked straight ahead; his eyes unfocused.

“Do you treat other women, the way men like Ambrose would treat me?” I was poking the bear.

There were certain things that you weren’t supposed to talk about, and this was one of them.

“Other women aren’t my concern, and neither is Ambrose.” My brother lifted his head. “You are.”

His eyes turned to the door, where Chris had just left, as if he was expecting him to reappear at any moment.

“I’m ambivalent about that fucker, right now.”

Chapter sixteen

Don’t Be So Suburban

Chris

One dark wall was covered in trophies of music achievements. Names of people signed under the Dryden label peppered the wall. Many I even recognized: Sophie Tudor, a classically trained singer who managed to break into the mainstream with her simple, moving ballads; Jomari Silang, whose legal name was Jomari Barkada, had gone platinum with his original orchestrations that fused rock with classical music and eastern rhythms. He’d won an Oscar for one of his movie scores. Hell, you couldn’t play a video game or go to the theater without hearing something he created.

I was admiring them all, one by one, waiting for the sound of Lea’s footsteps to come my way.

They never came. She just materialized and surprised the fuck out of me. Thank God I was able to keep from decking her.

“Sounds like you’ve had a very eventful night.” Lea’s calm face was off-putting and strange in how devoid of expression it was. “Less than forty-eight hours alone, and you nearly run over the client, then save her, get yourself shot, while also getting big brother money bags to hate you.”

“The money bags is a friend of your husband,” I stated.

“Don't remind her.”Who the fuck was that?

A man who I presumed was her twin brother appeared beside her. He smacked me on my injured arm. I flinched at the slight tenderness, and he grinned. “She likes to pretend she’s one of the people, but we both know she’s sold out.”

I had never met Leo Bonifacio until that moment, but he didn’t need an introduction. The two of them were two sides of the same coin, different only in gender. The brother was a bit taller, she was a bit more rounded, and her hair was an inch longer. But otherwise, they could have been identical.

Lea rolled her eyes after giving her brother a kick in the boot.

“Did you guys miss the whole possible murder we’re planning?” I asked, genuinely curious as to how normal this kind of turn of events was within our employment.

“Oh, come on, don’t be so suburban,” Lea said with a small laugh.

“Or do you think that lawfulness is the same as righteousness?” Leo chimed.

Were they the kind of siblings that finished each other’s sentences? Christ, that’d be annoying as fuck.

The two stood shoulder-to-shoulder, their heads tilted in the same angle as they regarded me.

“I… don’t know…” I shrugged. I liked to stay on the right side of the law. I had a sister going to college. I needed to make money for her, and it was difficult to do that from jail.

“Using the law as your moral compass is such a middle-class thought process,” Leo said with a fake Scottish accent that obviously made fun of his brother-in-law.

“I’m gonna say we have a difference of opinion on that,” I tried not to chuckle. He was definitely the funny twin.

“My husband and I met over a difference of opinion,” Lea said as she flipped her knife open so the blade was out. Then she took the tip and scratched her chin the way a normal person might do with their finger while they were thinking.

“Oh, is that right?” It was just another phrase to make it seem like I cared, even though I didn’t.

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