The Twist

Chapter 12: The Twist

The grenade hissed and started spitting thick white smoke into the room.

Kael moved on instinct. He grabbed Julian by the collar and hauled him down behind the bed frame, putting the mattress between them and the door.

“Cover your mouth. Don’t breathe it in.”

Smoke rolled across the floor, filling the room fast, stinging Kael’s eyes. Through the haze, he heard footsteps — not retreating, coming closer.

He raised the gun toward the doorway and waited.

A shape moved through the smoke. Kael fired a warning shot into the wall beside the door frame, close enough to make the point. The shape froze.

“On the ground. Now.”

For a second, nothing. Then, a small, high laugh, almost delighted. “You really are good at your job.”

Boots pounded down the hallway — the Apex team alerted the moment the jammer signal dropped off their monitoring grid and triggered a fail-safe callout. Two operatives flooded through the smoke with flashlights and took Brenda down before she could move again. She didn’t fight it. She just kept looking past them, toward the bedroom, smiling like she’d gotten exactly what she came for.

It took twenty minutes to clear the smoke, secure her, and get back up running the floor. Julian sat wrapped in a blanket on the sofa, coughing, staring at nothing. Kael didn’t sit down. He went straight to his laptops.

“What are you doing?” Julian’s voice was hoarse.

“Making sure there’s nothing else.” Kael pulled up Brenda’s confiscated phone, running it through a data extraction tool. He wasn’t planning on sleeping tonight, or maybe ever again.

Messages started populating the screen. Weeks of them. Some numbers Kael didn’t recognize yet. Then, one thread stopped him cold.

A contact was saved as J.

He opened it.

Two months old.

Brenda: Got the internship. He doesn’t suspect anything. When do you want the letter delivered?

J: After the LA show. Make it look real. Nothing too much — just enough to get their attention.

Brenda: And the photo?

J: Take it from the garage. Not too close. I need it to look credible.

Kael read it twice. Then a third time, like the words might rearrange themselves into something else.

They didn’t.

He looked up. Julian was watching him from the sofa, blanket pulled around his shoulders, still coughing faintly.

“Julian.” Kael’s voice came out flat. “Who is J?”

Julian’s face changed before he said a single word. The colour left it. His mouth opened, then closed.

“Kael, I can explain—”

“Who is J.” It wasn’t a question this time.

Julian’s hands twisted in the blanket. His voice came out small. “It was supposed to be nothing. A fake letter. A photo. I paid her to make it look real enough that management would actually take it seriously and assign real security. I didn’t think—”

“You hired her.” Kael set the phone down on the table, very carefully, like he didn’t trust his own hands with it. “You hired a stranger to fake a death threat against yourself.”

“I wanted you.” Julian’s voice cracked wide open. “I’ve wanted you since I was seventeen. You don’t even remember it, do you? Some drunk guy tried to drag me into a car after a show. You pulled him off me, shoved me behind you, and told me to get inside. You didn’t even look at me twice. You just did your job and left. I will never forget it. When the tour started and they were talking about hiring security, I… I panicked. I thought if I could just get you back in my life somehow, I’d figure out the rest. One letter. One photo. That’s all it was supposed to be.”

“And then it stopped being one letter.” Kael’s voice was low and getting lower. “The garage. The gifts. The paparazzi ambush that nearly got us both caught. The mob rushed. That camera could have killed you. I threw myself in front of a forty-pound broadcast camera because I thought your life was actually in danger.”

“I didn’t plan any of that after the first letter! I swear to you, Kael, I told her to stop. I told her we were done. And she just—” Julian’s voice broke completely. “She kept going on her own. I didn’t know it had turned into something real until it was already happening. By the time I realized how far she’d taken it, I was terrified of what you’d do if you found out.”

“You knew.” Kael stood up so fast the chair scraped hard against the floor. “Twenty minutes ago, a woman rolled a live grenade into this room, and you’re telling me you knew she was unstable and you didn’t say a word to me.”

“I was scared!” Julian shot to his feet, the blanket falling to the floor. “I didn’t know how to tell you without you finding out I lied to you from the very first day we met. I was terrified you’d walk away.”

Kael grabbed his jacket off the back of the chair. His jaw was locked so tight it looked like it might crack. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet and devastatingly calm.

“Everything. Every threat I took seriously. Every time I put my body between you and something I thought was real. The mob rushed. The bathroom. The closet. The nights I stayed awake watching the door so you could sleep. All of it happened because of a lie you paid someone to tell.”

“Kael, please—”

“I quit.”

The words landed like a door slamming shut.

Julian’s face crumpled. “You can’t. Kael, you can’t just—”

“Apex will assign someone else in the morning.” Kael’s voice had gone completely flat — the same voice he’d used the first day, before any of this. Cold. Professional. Finished. “Someone who won’t be compromised. It’s better for you.”

“I don’t want someone else!” Julian’s voice cracked wide open, raw and desperate. “I want you. I have always wanted you. That’s the whole reason any of this happened—”

“That’s not love, Julian.” Kael stopped at the door and looked back at him. For the first time all night, his face wasn’t unreadable at all. It was furious, and underneath the fury was something that looked almost like grief. “That’s a carefully produced fantasy. And I spent weeks risking my life for it.”

He walked out.

The steel door shut behind him with a heavy, final click.

Julian stood alone in the smoke-stained room, the smell of the grenade still hanging in the air, and realized the man who’d promised nobody would ever get through that door had just walked through it himself.