You know who he is.

I ignored the crazy trying to break through the wall of pain. Fuck.

“I’ve already answered that question several times, little sister.” It took me an entire two seconds to realize he was speaking in Russian and not English. “Perhaps that concussion caused some brain damage.”

“Maybe it did,” I agreed in English. “And maybe I’m hallucinating all of this.”

Shifting, I glanced around the private plane’s cabin. I doubted my ability to stand without falling on my face, given how badly my head pounded and the continued in-and-out blurriness of my vision. With the light shining through all the windows, my eyes began to water, my head pulsing in time to my erratic heartbeat, but I still tried to take stock of every detail. I needed an exit strategy for when the pilot landed.

“Where are we going?” I asked when the silence became too much. Not even the jet engines could drown out the crazy once it got started, and I didn’t want it to start. Not when I was in a confined space, thirty thousand feet in the air, with a stranger I had zero intel on.

“Don’t worry about it.” He picked up a tablet and began typing.

I licked my dry lips. Despite the IV that was keeping me hydrated, I was desperate for a drink of water. “What’s your name?”

My captor didn’t look up from his device. “I have several.”

“I don’t doubt that.” Annoyed, I glared at him. My head hurt too badly for games. I just wanted to get off the plane and find Elias.

Pain radiated through my entire body. I needed to be back with him. I didn’t know how long it had been since the last time I saw him, but from the noise in my head, I realized it was far too long.

Calm your crazy. Stay sane. Figure this shit out so you can get back to him.

“What’s the name you prefer?”

“Vaughn.”

I twisted my fingers around the blanket that covered the bottom half of my body. Even the crazy was suddenly eerily quiet. “Professor Vaughn?”

He lifted his head long enough to meet my gaze for a brief moment. “We both know I’m not a professor, Samara. I took on the role after I saw Abi.”

Fuck.

Abi.

I jerked against my restraint. “Stay away from her!”

For the first time, emotions flickered in his brown eyes. “Never.”

“If you touch her, I will kill you,” I vowed. “If you hurt her, I’ll make you beg me to end you.”

“Did our mother teach you how to torture people as well as being an assassin, little sister?”

“Mom taught me everything,” I hissed, but confusion rushed in. “Ourmother?”

He was a lunatic, even crazier than me.

His smile was humorless as he studied me for a long moment. “Yours and mine. As in, she gave birth to me, and then over a decade later, you were pushed from her body. Unlike Ryan, we share the same mother. Biologically.”

I scoffed. “What drugs are you on? My mother doesn’t have any other children. She had a miscarriage like thirty-four years ago, and then she struggled to get pregnant with me. Whoever you are, you should make sure to get your facts straight before spinning the kind of fairy tale you’re weaving.”

Vaughn carelessly lifted a shoulder. “Are you sure, little sister?”

“Of course I am.” But a sliver of doubt nagged at the back of my mind. He looked too much like Ryan and Papa, with just a hint of Mom. My nose wrinkled up at my own idiocy, and I pushed the thought away. “Whoever your plastic surgeon was, you should have found someone better to work on your nose.”

“Ouch. Burn,” he taunted. “That’s a rather sore spot for me. I broke my nose when I was fourteen. Got into a fight with a bunch of street thugs in a back alley. Just a few blocks from the Parliament Building in Budapest.”

A ghost twinge pulsed in my thigh at the mention of Budapest. “It’s a dangerous city,” I ground out.