Basilisk

Chapter 1

“Hey, kid. I’ll take a black coffee, large. I need something to keep me awake in this boring-ass town.”

I didn’t bother to look up from my book resting on the counter. “I’m not a kid.” I repeated that every day to my brother, not that he listened. I turned a page. My name was actually Michael, but I couldn’t tell the customer that; I couldn’t tell anyone. “And it’s already waiting for you at the end of the counter. That will be three fifty.” I’d seen him come in, a flash in the corner of my eye, and heard his loud voice from the sidewalk long before he’d entered. If he had been a regular, I’d have given him my immediate attention and the service-friendly smile that exactly echoed that of the former employee of the month, whose picture was framed on the wall. It was the right kind of smile . . . friendly but not stalker-friendly. It said, “I make minimum wage, but it’s a nice day, and you seem like a nice person. How can I help you?” It was natural, nonnoteworthy, and appropriate for the job. It took me two tries in the bathroom mirror to copy it, and I’d used it for every patron since the day the coffee shop had hired me. It was the expected smile—the normal smile.

It was important to be normal.

At least, it was important that people think that you were normal.

I wasn’t normal.

This tourist was my first exception to pierce my mask of prosaic, run-of-the-mill normalcy. He’d come in every day for a week, ordering the same thing, tipping the same amount—nothing—and saying the same insult: boring-ass town. Cascade Falls was not a boring-ass town. It was a nice town. It was small and inconspicuous and no one had tried to kill me or my brother here, not yet. That made it the perfect town really, and I wished that this guy’s new wife—it had to be a new wife; he wasn’t the camping type—had planned their honeymoon elsewhere, because I was tired of hearing him carp every morning. I was tired of him, period.

Also, only my brother could get away with calling me kid.

The man was five foot ten, about forty to forty-three, mildly thinning blond hair greasy with the sheen of Rogaine, hazel eyes that blinked with astigmatism or too much alcohol the night before, twenty-two to twenty-five pounds overweight, and with a small crease in his earlobe that indicated possible heart problems due to his body’s inability to cope with his diet. He glared at me over the top of sunglasses he hardly needed on a typical Oregon day in the Falls and tossed down three dollar bills and two carefully fished-for quarters. He snorted and flicked the tip jar with a finger. “Like you caffeine pushers do anything worth a tip.”

He made his way down to a cardboard cup of coffee, still steaming, that was waiting for him, grabbed it, and headed for the door. I could do something worth a tip, quite a few somethings, if that was his complaint, but I doubted he wanted to experience any of them. Although, making him impotent on his honeymoon would be a poetic punishment. . . .

I shook my head, clearing it. Simply because I could do certain things didn’t mean it was right. I knew right from wrong. My brother, Stefan, had commented on it once—that I knew right from wrong better than anyone raised in a family of Peace Corps pacifists descended from the bloodlines of Gandhi and Mother Teresa. Considering how I’d actually been raised, what I had been molded for and meant to be, he said that made him proud as hell of me. Proud. I ducked my head down to study my book again, but I didn’t see the words, only smears of black ink. Stefan was proud of me and not for what I could do, but for what I refused to do. It was a good feeling, and while it might have been almost three years since he’d first said it, I remembered how it felt then—and all the other times he’d said it since. It was a feeling worth holding on to. I concentrated on that rather than on what I wanted to do to the rude tourist.

Stefan also said that despite his former career, he knew right from wrong too, but before he found me, he was beginning to lose his tolerance for it. It was a lie—or maybe a wish that he could do away with his conscience, because what he’d once done had to weigh on it. He’d worked for the Russian Mafiya. He’d done bad things to . . . well, probably equally bad or corrupt people, but the weak too. The weak always got in over their heads in dark waters. What Stefan had done, he didn’t want to tell me and I didn’t push, but I did my research. You didn’t work as a bodyguard in the Russian mob as Stefan had without doing some serious damage to people who may or may not have deserved it.

Regardless of that and regardless of the things Stefan had done for me, under that ruthlessness to protect, and the willingness to kill if that was what it took to keep me safe, there was a part of him that wanted to believe in a world that was fair. He wanted to believe that concepts like right and wrong could be viable. Despite all he’d done and had been forced to do, he wanted to believe, though he knew better. Stefan had a heart and he didn’t realize it. Why else would he search for a kidnapped brother for ten years when his—our—own father had given up?

Older brothers, especially ex-mobsters, weren’t supposed to be more naïve than their younger ones, but Stefan . . . sometimes I thought he was. We had both been trained to be killers, but I thought I’d learned far more than Stefan. He would deny it, but he was wrong.

If he hadn’t spent almost half of his life looking for me and doing what was necessary to finance that search, I wasn’t sure what my brother would’ve been. Not what he was, I did know that. When I had been taken—such a simple word—it had ruined lives, and when it came to Stefan, when I had been abducted, it had done more than ruin. It had done things I wasn’t sure there were words for. And when it had happened, it had changed my brother as much as it had me—which wasn’t either right or fair. But true as that was, we were both alive and free now, and that was a thousand times more than I’d ever expected or dreamed. Where I had spent most of my life, freedom wasn’t a concept, only a meaningless word to be looked up in a dictionary.

My brother had made it mean something. Cascade Falls was part of that, which only made me wish again I had made that tourist pay for his contempt. And that was a slippery slope. I focused on my book and the words swam into focus. I was close, very close to what I was trying to accomplish—it was only a matter of weeks or maybe days, I hoped. I’d had seven years of a normal life before I’d been kidnapped, Stefan said, although I couldn’t remember a single second of them; ten years of captivity, which I remembered with stark, vivid clarity; and nearly three years of freedom, freedom to do research; and now the time was almost right. I was almost there. All the more reason to learn more and do it faster.

A finger poked at my book on neurosurgery. “Parker, you’re always studying. If you’re not going to college, why bother?”

Parker wasn’t my real name, but Sarafynna didn’t know that. Then again, Sarafynna didn’t know how to spell her own name and that made me doubt she cared that my name was actually Michael. Or Mykyl. When it came to Sarafynna, I wasn’t too sure that wasn’t how the letters popped up in her brain. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure Sarafynna had a brain at all without an MRI to back that up. All that Sara—the nickname was much simpler and it didn’t make my mind twitch—knew was how to put whipped cream on top of the lattes and how to flirt. To “mack” or “hit on” guys. Since I didn’t know who Mack was, I went with the other one—“hit on.” That was more modern than “flirt” . . . to “hit on” guys. Whatever. I had more significant things to concentrate on.

Saving brain cells for important information outweighed saving them for teenage slang—which was mostly uninteresting anyway. Besides, in another month I wouldn’t be a teenager anymore.

In almost three years I’d learned about flirting and sex, but now, at nineteen closing in on twenty, I liked intelligence in girls or women. Sara was entertaining and she let me know my hormones were working at top capacity—she was gorgeous. . . . Hot, I mean—“hot” was what someone my age should say. But she didn’t have it all. I’d come to find out that I needed resourceful and smart too; Sara had everything except that. She had sunshine-bright blond hair—fake; big, turquoise eyes—fake; and she bounced wherever she went. That meant certain things on her, those things also fake, bounced with her as she went and rarely stopped bouncing. The first time Stefan had met her, he waited until I got off work that night and took me to the drugstore for a box of condoms.

I told him I didn’t need them, and he told me I was an idiot if I didn’t want to play in that sandbox. I was nineteen, he said with a grin, and that was what nineteen was all about. Nineteen and friction—knock yourself out.

But I didn’t. I saw her fake-colored contacts and thought about the one I wore that turned my one blue eye mossy green to match the other one—two fakes don’t make a reality; I thought about her lack upstairs of anything but whipped cream, and it seemed like a waste. Stefan and I had lived in Bolivia for two years before we came to Cascade Falls. I’d played in sandboxes there, whatever Stefan had said. It wasn’t as if I were a virgin. I’d had the experience . . . experiences. I’d been seventeen before I’d gotten to make my own choices, even a single one. Now that I had almost three years of making decisions for myself, I wanted to be sure that each one I made now was the best I could make.

Sara did bounce in a very intriguing way, though. It might be worth thinking about. Hmm.

“I might go to college someday,” I said, turning another page. What I didn’t tell her was that I was going to the equivalent of college and then some. I had the knowledge base for a medical degree with a specialty in biogenetics with an emphasis on polymorphism and pseudogenes, and a PhD in biochemistry and neurology.

Theoretically.

Nineteen and a doctor three times over, but it was amazing what you could learn when you could hack into the computer system of any university in the world. Computer hacking had actually been the easiest thing to learn compared to many other things. In fact, it was pretty boring.

Yes, I’m smart. I know.

The question was whether I was born that way or made that way.

“College sounds like a lot of work.” Sara’s voice brightened. “Except for the parties. I’ll bet frat parties are fun. Maybe I should go. My parents keep bitching at me to since I graduated.” She pushed up to sit on the counter—against the rules—but I was reading. Technically I shouldn’t notice.

And technically my eyes didn’t wander to technically not watch her bouncing—lying to yourself can be entertaining—when I saw past her to the television in the break room. What I saw on it made Sara’s whipped cream skills and bouncing vanish. The sound was turned low, but I could still hear it. I could still see him on the small screen. I saw a man I’d never expected to see again. His face had that enigmatic smile that could save your life or far more likely put you in your grave; he was Stefan’s father.

Or our father, Stefan would say. . . . Anatoly Korsak.

And they were saying he was dead.

I told Sara I felt sick, and then I went to the bathroom and threw up, nice and loud—no finger needed. Genetic skills, I had them in spades. And you don’t tell stories you can’t back up. You always do what needs to be done to provide evidence to support your deception. I hadn’t learned that from Stefan. I’d learned it at the Institute—the place Stefan had rescued me from. The Institute had thousands of lessons and some hung around, lingered—when I was awake, when I was asleep. They most likely would my whole life. When it came to making people think what you wanted, a small number of those lessons were harmless, the rest considerably less so, but all were efficient.

I was nothing if not extremely efficient.

My trip to the bathroom got me a “Shit, Parker, sweetie. Are you okay?” from Sara and a call to someone else to replace me. Ben Jansen. Ben liked the bouncing as much as I did—or as much as Stefan said I should.

Stefan . . . he should know better. He shouldn’t have done this. There was protective and overprotective; then there was something so far beyond that—a word hadn’t been invented for it yet—and that was what Stefan practiced. Anatoly was dead; it was all over the news, and Stefan hadn’t told me. He hadn’t called me to let me know. How could he think I wouldn’t find out? I didn’t know, but I did know it had to stop. Nearly three years free and twice I’d saved his life; it was a two-way street now. He had to trust me with the bad as well as the good. I wasn’t a kid anymore, no matter what he called me. I could more than carry my own weight.

The coffee shop door shut behind me and I started down the sidewalk with my hands in my pockets, heading to my car. It was seven years old, gray, and a Toyota. They were virtually invisible. That was mob and Institute knowledge, oddly coinciding. Low tech meets high tech, with the same purpose: clean getaways. Of course, the Institute expected no getaway would be necessary if you did your job adequately. I guessed we’d fooled them, because Cascade Falls was a clean getaway so far.

In the distance I could see through the trees the silver glint of the Bridge of the Heavens crossing the Columbia River. When we’d picked this place to live, Stefan had quirked his lips. “Bridge of the Heavens,” he’d said. “How about that, Misha? That must mean this is Paradise.” Sometimes he could be a little thick, my brother. He didn’t always get that everywhere I went outside of the Institute was Paradise. If there was actually a Hell, the Institute would make it seem like Paradise too. Hell would be a walk in the park. Hell would be nothing.

“Hey, smart-ass. You get tired of ripping people off with your high-priced shit?” The words, tainted with bile, came from out of nowhere, or nowhere if your attention was not in the here and now, and mine wasn’t.

Stupid. How could I be so careless and stupid? Anatoly was no excuse. You were always ready. Always.

It was the tourist. He was sitting on the wrought-iron bench, always freshly painted bright blue, outside Printz’s Bakery. I noticed that every day. The swirls of iron reflected the exact same color of the sky overhead. It was one more detail about Cascade Falls that made me . . . happy, I guess, and made it my home. The tourist wasn’t one of those warm, small-town features. There wasn’t anything warm about him at all, except his sweat. He had a cheese Danish the size of a four-year-old’s head in one hand and a smear of buttery cheese on his chin as he glared at me. As I’d thought earlier—his body had its work cut out in taking care of him.

But it wasn’t my job to take care of him, unlike his unlucky heart, and I ignored him and kept walking. That was normal too and being normal was the best move I could make now. Do as a normal teenager would do. Only I was barely still a teenager and I was nothing close to normal. But I played the game as I’d been taught. Normal teenagers usually aren’t polite to annoying people—or assholes—and that meant I walked on as if I hadn’t heard him.

Stefan would definitely say this guy was an asshole. He wouldn’t be wrong.

“Shithead, I’m talking to you.” I’d only just passed him when there was a hand grabbing my arm to give me a shake. From the smell, he’d put something in the coffee after he’d left the shop. Cheese, alcohol, coffee, and natural halitosis—I’d smelled better things and I’d smelled worse. People almost always smelled worse on the inside than the outside.

The Institute had had anatomy classes and enough cadavers to make Harvard Medical School jealous. The Institute taught its students to hurt people, taught them to use what had been stamped on their genes. But I hadn’t wanted to hurt anyone. I hadn’t wanted to kill anyone. The thought of it, in self-defense or not, had made me sick. That didn’t mean I wasn’t forced to learn and it didn’t mean I hadn’t killed.

Once.

I didn’t plan on ever doing it again.

In addition, the Institute had biology classes. One thing they taught us there was that as adolescent males grow, the production of testosterone increases, and so do levels of aggression—the natural kind that gives you the instinct to protect yourself if attacked. Three years ago I wouldn’t have hurt this on-my-last-nerve irritating tourist. I wouldn’t hurt him now, although the jolting surprise of his voice and his shaking me made it a very close thing. But I caught myself. He wasn’t a threat, despite being bigger than I was. No, I wouldn’t hurt him, but it didn’t mean I wasn’t more tempted now than I would’ve been when I was younger. My temper ran hotter now than it had then. Nature—it can’t be stopped—usually.

Slippery slope, I was repeating to myself, same as I had in the coffee shop, when he shook my arm again, harder this time. Slippery, slippery slope.

But then again, what was one ski run, really? Just the one?

This once, I gave in to nature. I looked at the tourist and tried not to smile. I didn’t think I was successful and I doubted it was a friendly smile. Not that employee-of-the-month one. “Alcohol is harmful to your liver and not all that great for your stomach either,” I said, pulling my arm free. His eyes widened, he dropped the Danish he was holding in his other hand, and I backed away quickly. I made it in time as he bent over and threw up on the sidewalk. I’d done the same to myself earlier in the coffee house bathroom, but not quite so . . . explosively. I should’ve been sorry, but I wasn’t. He deserved it. Out of range and unsplattered, I turned my back on him and kept walking toward my car. I heard him vomit one more time, curse, groan, and then vomit again. He would keep it up for approximately the next fifteen minutes until he was empty of everything, including yesterday’s breakfast. He would chalk it up to strong coffee, whatever alcohol he’d put in it, and the Danish. After all, what other explanation could there be?

Well. . . .

Other than me?

He was fortunate I wasn’t more like my former classmates. If I had been, that one touch of his hand to my arm, that hard shake he’d given me—I could’ve ripped holes in his brain, torn his heart into pieces, liquefied his intestines. After all, that was what I was: a genetically created, lab-altered, medically modified child of Frankenstein, trained to do one thing and one thing only.

Kill.

All with a single touch.

Isn’t science fun?

Besides, vomiting didn’t hurt. It was only annoying, like the man who was doing it.

Mr. Fat-ass Danish would never know. I climbed into the car, pleased for a split second. Mr. Fat-ass Danish . . . the phrase had come out naturally, no work at all. Cursing was one thing that had proved difficult to learn. I was getting better at it. Then I remembered Anatoly, and the pleasure popped and disappeared like a soap bubble. Stefan and I needed to talk. I started the car. His babysitting days were over. That took me to the most simple of physics lessons: immovable object, unstoppable force. I sighed and pulled the car away from the curb.

All right, his babysitting days were mostly over.

Fifteen minutes later I was telling my brother the same thing that I’d told the tourist when he’d asked for his coffee.

“I am not a kid.”

And I wasn’t. My brother called me that daily at least, but since he had lost me when I was seven years old and only gotten me back when I was seventeen, I understood. Calling me a kid was his way of trying to ignore or reclaim those ten lost years. It was an emotional and appraisal-based mixed coping skill.

Again, still smart.

As I denied my inclusion in the kid category, Stefan wiped the back of his hand along his forehead, not that there was any sweat. Moisture, but no sweat. I’d spent most of my life in Florida and so had he. But when you were living in Oregon, when there was water dripping down your forehead, it wasn’t often sweat. It was the air. You drank your air in the Falls; it was that heavy on every molecule. It was July now and around fifty-five degrees today. I didn’t mind the drop in temperature compared to Florida and Bolivia. It was green here in Cascade Falls, everywhere green, and it was cool on the river. I was surprised to find I liked that. I was usually surprised when I liked anything. “Prepare for the worst and get the worst.” That had been an unspoken Institute motto among the students. I’d been raised there with suspicion as my very best friend since my first memories. That meant everything I saw, touched, tasted, heard—it was all evaluated through a filter of wariness. But in the time since the Institute I’d had more pleasant surprises than unpleasant ones.

That, ironically, surprised me too.

I liked Oregon and I was lucky to be able to have an opinion one way or the other, which made me like it more. I didn’t mind the lack of ocean. I’d seen it in South Carolina for a short time, and I’d have liked to have seen more, but if I needed water, there was also the river. But more than that, there was Stefan.

He was overprotective and he called me kid, but he was my brother—mine—and I sort of loved him. Not that I’d say that. You couldn’t just go and say things like that aloud. TV said so. Movies said so. General guy culture said so—I’d learned that from close observation. Everything said so.

Almost three years with him and the possibility of losing him said so.

Funny the things you don’t want to say and tempt fate, the things you don’t want to admit to yourself, no matter how often you think them. We were free and alive now, but that might not always be true.

“I’m not a kid and that ladder is too high. You could break a leg,” I said. Yet there I was, thinking it again. People were fragile. They were like ancient glass found in Roman ruins waiting to shatter into pieces at one simple touch, thousands of pieces that could never be glued back together. Easily . . . extraordinarily easily broken, those normal people.

I wasn’t normal. I tried to be, but I wasn’t. The Institute had made certain of that.

Stefan was painting Mrs. Adelaide Sloot’s house today. Every morning before he left, I made him leave a schedule pinned to the refrigerator with my Albert Einstein magnet. Fine. I was forced to admit it: the babysitting thing went both ways. Now with my showing up, he let the brush fall back in the can of mint green paint and looked the ladder’s entire ten feet plus half of his own size down at me and my scowl from where he perched on top. “Okay, that’s out of nowhere.” He meant the kid part, not the ladder complaint. He’d made it clear I was profoundly overprotective lots of times before. Profound was an exaggeration, as was pathological. I thought he’d been carrying around a dictionary that particular day—stuck on the letter P. I was cautious, that was all. Besides, considering what he’d done to protect me in the past, I wasn’t sure I came anywhere close to falling in the same category.

Anatoly’s death and Stefan’s not telling me about it proved that, didn’t they?

He ran a hand through his short, wavy black hair, leaving flecks of green. “I promise to be extremely careful with this Tower of Babel–tall ladder.” He said it solemnly enough, but I had my doubts. “Why aren’t you at work? You fought kicking and screaming to work in a public place, and now you’re skipping?”

“I did not kick or scream. Are you mocking me?” And I had to be out in public eventually. I couldn’t live my entire life sitting in the house, afraid I’d be spotted by employees of the Institute. I wasn’t letting them take more years away from me. They weren’t taking any more of my life. This wasn’t about me, though. This was about Anatoly, what Stefan had done, and how to approach the subject without making him dig in his heels harder. He was stubborn. I was too.

As I thought about it, I swung a bag in my hand that I could easily throw up to him or at him, depending on his mentioning kicking or screaming again. I added, “And, I repeat, yet again, I’m not a kid.”

“I would never mock you. Make fun of you or tease you, maybe, but never mock.” That was twice as solemn and earnest and a flat-out lie. Maybe his head. I could hit him in the head with the bag. No. Then his chances of falling that treacherous ten feet only increased. Revenge was tricky that way. “And what’s up with the kid thing? Am I wearing a T-shirt that says you’re a kid?” he went on with a grin. “Did you hear me talking in my sleep last night and going down the hall to the bathroom, calling you cute names? Things like ‘puppy’ or ‘skipper’? Something that made you resent me enough to chase me down while I paint gingerbread?”

Cascade Falls was a long way from Miami, or Bolivia, where we’d spent two years before coming to this tiny Oregon town of “homey” but expensive restaurants; small artsy stores; happy, pleasant people—or unhappy, unpleasant people with excellent acting skills. I was still debating the last part. Caution and suspicion—they kept you alive. There were also tourists, the newlywed or nature type—and the puking type, thanks to me—but definitely not the mob types Stefan was doing his best to avoid. The town also had several bed-and-breakfasts, as did the surrounding small cities.

Bed-and-breakfasts, like Mrs. Sloot’s, seemed odd to me. It didn’t matter that all the Web sites and brochures talked about your “home away from home.” Why would I want to stay in the home of someone I didn’t know, didn’t trust, and didn’t have a thorough background check on? At least, theoretically didn’t have a background check on. White lies didn’t hurt when your brother thought you spent too much time on the computer.

Despite all that, there was one positive to bed-and-breakfasts—they always had gingerbread trim in need of painting. Stefan now had more than enough money in offshore accounts his father—our father, he kept telling me—had given him before we’d left for Bolivia. Anatoly Korsak had made a massive amount of it in his time running the majority of the Miami mob for twenty or so years. Now, part of that money let Stefan work as a handyman and still afford to feed us.

Plus, he’d told me, he had a bachelor’s degree in general studies from the University of Miami, which translated to “Do you want fries with that?” Then he’d explained why that was both funny and sad. I got the funny. Sad? I didn’t tell him it was one of the furthest things from sad there was. Stefan was living with a guilt he’d never be rid of thanks to my kidnapping. I wasn’t going to go prodding at it, especially as he didn’t deserve it, not any of it. It turned out that Stefan liked the work, which was good and he deserved good. He said it gave him a helluva lot more sense of satisfaction than beating up people for the Mafiya.

“Helluva.” That was one of the curse words I kept meaning to add to my vocabulary. I could add it to “fat-ass.” To fit in. Stefan liked his job and Stefan painted a helluva lot of gingerbread. Good. That sounded correct. It sounded like something a real person would say. A real boy . . . just like that old children’s cartoon, Pinocchio .

Except I wasn’t a boy. I was a man and I wasn’t real, thanks to the Institute. Not real, not quite yet, but Stefan was and always had been—more real than he should’ve been forced to be. Choosing real-life decisions in a life he wouldn’t have chosen at all if it hadn’t been for me. Being in the Mafiya had been Anatoly’s calling, not Stefan’s. When he ended up wearing cotton candy pink, sunshine yellow, or mint green paint on his jeans these days, I knew he didn’t mind. His masculinity would survive pastels, I’d pointed out helpfully, or it wasn’t much masculinity to begin with. He’d balled up his jeans and thrown them at me, and he’d laughed. I’d made him laugh. Stefan didn’t laugh much. I was proud of every laugh I’d been a part of.

And it was good work, what he did—the handyman job. Good, and except for tall ladders, mostly safe, and, better, he didn’t need a gun to paint the trim on a house. But he carried one anyway—there and everywhere else.

It made sense when we were on the run from the Russian Mafiya and another organization so secretive and grim that James Bond producers would’ve pissed themselves just reading the script—I knew that for a fact because I’d seen men piss themselves in fear in real life, and I liked James Bond movies. In any case, when you had all that chasing you, you wanted reassurance—as much as you could hope for. Oregon weather was good too for layering your shirts, and that in turn was good for covering up a discreet gun tucked into the back of a person’s jeans. As for me. . . .

I didn’t need a gun.

“You forgot your lunch,” I said, before repeating for the third time, “and I’m not a kid.” I’d had the bag in the car and had planned on driving it over to him at noon. Now it was an excuse for a few more minutes to stall and think how to go about this. He was only protecting me, or thought he was. I had to get him to see that he wasn’t. Not anymore, not by holding back vital information. It was time to treat me as an equal, not as a little brother.

He caught the bag I tossed up to him. I made him lunch every day. I’d considered writing his name on the side in marker, but my newfound sense of humor might get my hair ruffled with that one. And raised in the Institute or not, trained for an obedience and passivity that, in my case, never really took, I was not putting up with that at all.

Lunches were only part of it. I tried to take care of Stefan for all he’d done for me. He said I was an idiot and that it wasn’t necessary and something else after that, but I’d tuned him out by then. He was as overprotective of me, physically and emotionally, as he accused me of being of him. When it came to arguments over who didn’t owe anyone anything, I ignored him and did what I wanted—I gave him what he did deserve . . . or the best I could.

He could talk forever, but he wasn’t going to change my mind about that. Besides, it made me happy, and he liked his brother happy, so he huffed and let it go. I’d discovered peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches were the very best things in the world and that was what I made him every day—two of them in a brown paper bag. I didn’t think people carried their lunches in brown bags anymore, but I’d seen it once in an old movie at the Institute and the image had branded itself onto my brain as the ideal family moment—the handing over of the brown-paper-bag lunch before sending Junior on his way. That was the way it was done and that was the way I was going to do it.

Movies were how I learned a good deal about life in the Institute—where there was no peanut butter or marshmallow. Three years in the real world hadn’t changed movies or me as much as I’d thought it would. Stefan said there was nothing wrong with that. I liked movies and real life . . . though it wasn’t always one hundred percent likable. I didn’t blame myself for preferring the fake version once in a while. Stefan wasn’t actually thick. He was smarter than I was in a lot of ways.

He opened up the bag I’d tossed and caught the whiff of peanut butter and Fluff. I know, because I did too. The smell made me hungry. His lips twitched with a particular amusement I hadn’t quite figured out yet before he rolled the top back shut to wait for lunchtime. “Thanks, kiddo.”

“For the fourth time, I’m not a kid. I’m an adult.” I folded my arms and gave him a grim frown. “Nineteen. Almost twenty. A goddamn adult.”

“ ‘Goddamn,’ huh? We’re having a serious moment here. And legally maybe you are an adult, but you’re kind of scrawny.” He grinned. He always grinned or smiled or bumped my shoulder. He kidded about calling me a puppy, but you’d have thought he was the most harmless, puppylike grown man with matching puppy brown eyes if that was all you saw—him with me. When you saw him with other people, he was different—harder, cynical, not to be messed with. When you saw him with people who wanted to hurt us, he was lethal. Period. And his smiles then were nothing near puppyish. They were the smile of a wolf before its jaws closed on its prey, and those brown eyes went pure rapacious amber.

Stefan could go from puppy to predator in a heartbeat and then end yours.

Right now he looked like a happy Labrador. The scar that ran along his jaw from his chin almost to his eyebrow only made his grin look wider. He yawned, up and out to work before dawn, and looked me up and down with a dubious snort. “If adult were measured in pounds, I don’t know . . . it’d be close.”

I let my frown deepen. I’d grown since I’d been with my brother. I’d gone from five foot nine to five foot eleven, the same height as Stefan, but I was . . . not skinny, but light, built like a runner. Considering our lives, that was a good thing. I was just your average teenager with average brown hair and slightly less average green eyes. One of my eyes was blue and the other green. Far too distinctive, which was why I wore a colored contact lens to give me matching green eyes. To the people in town, I was nothing out of the ordinary—as we’d planned and as being in hiding required.

I was stalling, but I had to stop. It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but it was time for the truth. “This is serious. I am an adult and you have to accept that. I mean it. Stop being so overprotective.”

“I swear,” he said, a puzzled furrow appearing between his brows. The Institute had a class on reading facial expressions. I was seventy percent effective at it—not that great among my peers, but passable. I could tell if someone was uncomfortable by a crease, whether it was physical or emotional distress by a line, and the cause of it by a flicker of their eyes toward the source. I could diagnose an STD faster than any doctor and without having to see one single crotch scratch.

“I don’t have a clue why your panties are in a wad,” Stefan went on.

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” I tilted my head, trying to figure it all out. “Unlike you, who just reads the comics”—a lie; that was only every other day—“I watch the news every day.” As well as reading it online . . . every day, several times a day, alert for any pertinent fact that someone was on to us.

“And?” he asked, looking more confused than before.

Oh, shit.

That cursing came naturally for the third time today. I didn’t have to check my mental folder for it. I’d made a mistake, a big one. I stopped frowning and ran a hand in unconscious imitation of him over my brown hair. I could’ve kept my face from tensing—in the acting class at the Institute we learned that perfect assassins are perfect actors—but I didn’t. Because that would have been a lie and I wouldn’t lie to Stefan. Not unless it was for his own good. “You don’t know. About Anatoly. You don’t know.”

Because he was painting. Because he wasn’t by a TV. Because he didn’t listen to the radio that often while working.

Maybe I wasn’t smart. Maybe I was as idiotic as they come.

I took a step backward, the longtime natural instinct of a former prisoner, then reversed to take one forward, a new instinct, hard won. “He’s . . . gone. I’m sorry, Stefan. They found his body. He’s been dead for about four weeks. Anatoly’s gone.”

The lunch bag didn’t drop from his hand, but I saw his fingers loosen. He was stunned and why wouldn’t he be? Anatoly was dead. His father was dead.

Then his fingers tightened and the paper bag crumpled under his hand. I could guess, sort of, what he might be thinking, his first thought. We’d talked about Anatoly since my rescue and I’d gotten a fair picture of Stefan and his relationship. Anatoly and mine, not as much, but I knew Stefan and his father—our father—as much as I could. What do you think when your father dies, when he never was a father at all but an imitation at best? How can you love and respect a man who ordered people killed as easily as he ordered dinner in a restaurant? You pretend, I guess. Pretend, and when that man dies, you mourn what should’ve been . . . what you wish could’ve been, not what actually was.

Stefan had said he’d never killed anyone in the mob and I believed him, but if it had come down to it . . . if it had been kill them to have the money to save me, I knew what his decision would’ve been. He would’ve killed his own soul for me. He thought that made him and Anatoly not so different. He was wrong. Anatoly had done it for the money and the power. Stefan would’ve done it to save me, because Anatoly wouldn’t give him the money then to chase ghosts. To Anatoly, that was what I’d been. He’d given up on me when Stefan never had. No matter what Stefan thought, he was nothing like our father. And I only called Anatoly our father aloud and in my mind for Stefan.

Stefan had told me once that he didn’t know that Anatoly didn’t love his sons, because he didn’t know for sure that he didn’t. Murderers could love their own—couldn’t they? I didn’t know, and I didn’t think Stefan knew for sure, but I agreed they could. It was what he had wanted to hear. That was something I’d learned on my own, not at the Institute.

“Stefan?”

He blinked at the sound of his name, his real name, and corrected me automatically—“Harry.” Here we were Harry and Parker Alonzo, not Stefan and Michael Korsak. Stefan and Michael Korsak were on at least two kill lists. Fake names kept it that way, because you came off those kill lists only when you were dead. I’d picked the names . . . from another old movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It was my favorite, though it was older than I was.

Stefan had snorted when I’d suggested it and promptly said that if I wanted to call myself Sundance, he supported my bold and very personal decision.

I’d called him an ass, another curse word I’d learned to use, and gave him Harry. It was Sundance’s real name and I used Parker, Butch’s last name. He was the smart one after all, I’d told my brother smugly, although I wasn’t being too bright right now. Harry was also the name of Stefan’s horse that was shot and killed on the beach the day I was taken by the Institute. I thought that might bother him, but he’d said no . . . that we leave memorials scattered through our lives in different ways. Gravestones were frozen in time, but memories you could take with you anywhere. Names too—you could keep them with you always. He hadn’t thought Harry would mind.

“Harry,” I corrected myself with my frown returning, this one directed at my own forgetfulness. I was better than that and had been trained to be exceptional in all areas of deception. I wasn’t being exceptional now. “We should go home. I’ll tell Mrs. Sloot that a pipe burst. It’s flooding the bathroom. You have to go home and fix it.” I turned to go inside the house, but then I hesitated long enough to say over my shoulder, “I’m . . . as I said—I didn’t think . . . I’m sorry.” It was the most awkward handful of words to come out of my mouth probably ever. It was self-conscious and tongue-tied five times over, but it seemed to mean something to Stefan. The darkness in his eyes lightened a little.

He cleared his throat and replied, “Thanks, but he was your father too, even if you don’t remember.”

I nodded silently and went on into the big house with trim the color of half-fresh mint green and half-faded lavender. As I did, I heard the lid being hammered back onto the paint can. Anatoly was gone and there was Stefan covered with paint, doing a job his father would’ve had hired someone to in turn hire someone else to actually do. If it didn’t involve a gun or a knife, manual labor was far beneath him, I imagined. But he was the man who’d bought Stefan his first bike or at least had been the one to give it to him after having his own handyman put it together. Stefan had mentioned the bike. Anatoly probably wasn’t there for school things . . . whatever school things there were—plays or football. But he’d been there for Christmases, Thanksgivings, birthdays, at least half the nights of the week. I’d seen the pictures when recuperating in South Carolina. I doubt he’d hugged Stefan much, though, except when he was younger than three. A web strung together from what Stefan had told me and what logic trumped. That was what I thought and with years of being near the top of my class in psychological training, and, with a failing grade being a failure at survival, I thought I guessed right.

Stefan had once said Anatoly thought I’d hung the sun and the moon—that I was special. I honestly didn’t care what Anatoly had thought about long-ago Lukas. Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t the thought that counts. What did count was a rescue ten years later by a brother who had refused to give up.

I knocked on the door to the house and as the sign, painted in loops and whirls with tulips and roses, told me to, I went on inside. There, Mrs. Sloot—“Adelaide, sweetie. Call me Adelaide”—tried to stuff me with sugar cookies. “Such a skinny boy.” I might be almost six feet, but I didn’t look nineteen. Seventeen was the best I could hope for, but I could’ve looked fifty and still had grandmotherly women trying to shove food down me. It happened all the time.

I learned to live with it, take the cookies, and be grateful I was too old for them to pinch my cheek—although the lady in one of the tourist shops in town had, only a different cheek. I hadn’t told Stefan. He would either laugh or break her arm, and arm breaking wasn’t part of the whole lying low thing. “Yes, Miss Adelaide, water’s everywhere. Harry’s going home to fix it.”

Her poodle jumped at my feet, then nipped me on the ankle as she tsked about our bad luck and gave me another cookie. “Oh, Parker, sweetie, look at my new tchotchke. I know you like animals. Sookie-Sue loves you. You’ll think it’s cute as can be.” I did like animals and Sookie-Sue was the first one to not like me back, but. . . .

It was too late. She’d shoved a small statue into my hand. It was an armadillo, I guessed dubiously, dressed like a clown, with a happy pointy smile, soulless red eyes, and balloons held in a gloved hand. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen. “It’s nice,” I lied effortlessly. I hadn’t been an enthusiastic student at the Institute, but I had been a good one. Sookie-Sue nipped me again. I sighed patiently, but I did like all animals, including the ones that made it a challenge, and I didn’t nudge her away. “What is it?”

Adelaide pursed her lips, coated with bright orangered lipstick to match her hair, and her drawn-on eye-brows arched. “I told you, dear: it’s a tchotchke.”

My own eyebrows, and I actually had some, went up at the answer.

She scooped up Sookie-Sue. “Teenagers these days. Don’t know a thing. A gewgaw, knickknack, bit of froufrou.”

Stefan’s hand landed on my shoulder and he said with the friendly handyman’s persona he’d perfected, “Useless dust collector, Park. Don’t you start collecting’em.”

“Ah.” I handed it back to her with as much care as I would for something not nearly as hideous and worthless and corrected my mental file of Adelaide Thomasina Sloot from mostly harmless with three unpaid parking tickets to bizarre, dusty, possible automotive maniac, with the ‘harmless’ designation to definitely be reevaluated at a later date.

Background checks were useless if you didn’t update them frequently.

“Let’s go home and get that mess cleaned up.” Stefan steered me toward the door.

My mess. It wasn’t all over the bathroom floor, but it was all over just the same. All that training . . . I wonder if the Institute knew how unreliable it was. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, and you never were quite sure which would be which. The Institute’s students didn’t fit in, no matter how many classes they gave us. We couldn’t always act like normal people. We could manipulate them, but not act like them . . . not be normal people. Of all the training they’d given us, in the end we were good for only one thing; we could excel at only one thing over those normal people.

Killing them.