Barely had time to scream?—
Before the trigger pulled.
That night, I lost my youngest brother.
That night, I lost myself.
My twin and I ran.
We ran away from the bullets.
And we left our younger brother to suffer a lonely death in warm sticky blood staring up at a ceiling that used to hold stars we told him to wish on.
“Watch them glow,” we’d urged. “One day your dreams will come true.”
Or.
One day.
We’d fail.
And he’d end up dead.
All because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
All because of the De Langes, all bad things in our world led to them, and that intel led everyone else to us.
A price on our heads.
A price on a child’s.
If war was what they wanted.
War.
Was what they would get.
2
LOUIS
Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go. — T.S. Eliot
They buried me a traitor.
My twin got the funeral, the flowers, the fucking praise.
I got a tux, a fake smile, and a bride who hadn’t smiled since she’d learned to lie.
My name was Louis De Lange. And today I’d marry the sister of the girl I loved.
Only one of us would be walking away from this marriage alive.
And I really hoped it was her.
I stared at myself in the mirror, all cufflinks and black silk, like dressing up a corpse makes it presentable. They say weddings are the start of something new. For me, it felt like the final nail in my coffin.
The whispers started the second the ink dried on the marriage contract. That I wasn’t really dead. That I switched places with my brother. That I was loyal to no one.