Page 93 of The Twins

I can’t hold it back. I roll my eyes, and I break eye contact. Fuck this. “What do you want?”

“I want you to transfer fifteen million dollars to this account,” Arthur reveals. Who does this man think he is? From underneath the folder of my accomplishments, his fingers produce a piece of paper with numbers scribbled on it. “By tomorrow.”

“Why?” My throat is dry.

“You want this raise, don’t you? What’s a couple million dollars to you when you have billions?” Arthur grins, his eyes drifting over the folder in front of him. After everything I’ve done for him, our commanding officer, and our mission, I’m confronted with blackmail.

“You either pay, or I tell everyone about your preferences.”

* * *

I didn’t pay up,so I ended up paying for my mistake.

I resumed my work with a distrust I couldn’t shake. Before, nobody knew the real me. Now that Arthur had found out and possibly told everyone on my team what I enjoyed in bed, I felt seen.

It wasn’t a pleasant feeling.

Trust was an integral part of what we did in our unit. We trusted one another not to fuck up. If one thing went wrong, our whole operation was doomed. Lives were at stake when you had a weapon of mass murder at the palm of your hands.

Our skinny bitch drone was meant to attack terrorist cells. Bad guys. Scumbags. People who didn’t care who they hurt with their ideologies.

And for a while, that’s what we did.

With my skinny bitch drone, my unit held a record—the least innocent civilian deaths recorded. I crafted my drone to be intelligent, to analyze data in a record time. There was no need to shoot and ask questions later. My programs made sure we knew exactly who we were shooting.

My second-in-command didn’t care for that, though. Not a lot of people did. My unit was an anomaly amid power-hungry cunts that sucked the government back home dry of its money and gave zero fucks about the locals who suffered under threats of terror and occupation.

It started like any other day. We rolled out of the base in vans to get to a secure location for the first part of our day—try-outs in the open where there is no chance for a civilian to get hurt. After try-outs, we returned to the base, protocoling our test results. At the base, we updated the system of my skinny bitch drone.

Every day, there was a new update to add to our project to make it more sophisticated.

I was never the only one who worked on the skinny bitch drone, but I had invested most of my adult life on this project, and I claimed ownership over it, although in legal terms, it was my government’s object.

Not mine.

That day, we were meant to target a terrorist cell that hid in a residential area in the city center. Our superiors tasked us with these targets because the skinny bitch drone moved in and out of sensitive areas without causing more trouble than it needed to.

Not that day.

It was the first time my skinny bitch drone had acted out. I couldn’t logically think of what had went wrong because when I had examined the drone before sending it out, its condition had been splendid and ready to go.

I’ve spent years trying to figure out who betrayed me that day, who flipped a switch and went off the rails.

Blaming it on Arthur, my second-in-command seems like a way out of owning up to my mistake. Why would he risk it?

I allowed my skinny bitch drone to wreak havoc.

That day, the drone reached the terrorist cell surrounded by civilians. Instead of doing its job and returning to the base, it blew up the cell and its neighboring buildings.

A school and an orphanage.

Buildings that were bursting with children, students, and teachers at the time.

What followed was a day of earth-shattering crisis.

My fuck-up was publicized internationally. My name was kept secret, so was the unit. Everyone on our base was blamed for what my unit did.

What used to be a safe haven because we had the guns, the money, the resources became a property of fear and loathing for one day.

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