I Fell In Love With Two Rogue Brothers On The Run

Amara

"The fire needs building up," my mother said from the doorway. "His feet are cold."

I put the pot down. I didn't say anything back. There was nothing to say that would matter so I just walked to the fireplace and crouched down and started building it up the way I had done a hundred times before in this house. My knees hurt from the cold floor. I didn't mention that either.

"And the hall floor needs sweeping when you're done," she said. "I noticed it this morning."

She went back to the other room. I heard her settle into the chair next to Gareth. I heard him say something low and she laughed and I kept building the fire because that was what I was here for.

I want to be clear about something. I am nineteen years old in this body. But I am not nineteen. I have been here before... not here, not this exact cold house with this exact cold floor but in lives that ended the same way this one is trying to. I remember all of it. Every single thing. My first life. My second. The way they both finished. I carry all of it in my chest like a stone I learned to breathe around because the alternative is not breathing at all.

The fire caught. I stood up and went to get the broom.

"Amara." Gareth's voice came from the sitting room.

I stopped in the hallway. "Yes."

"Don't use the good broom. Use the other one."

I looked at the two brooms in the corner. They were identical. I took the one on the left and went to sweep the hall and did not say a single word about it.

I made dinner after that. Set two places at the table because that was the number that was expected. Cleaned the pot before anyone asked. Ate standing in the kitchen because sitting at the table required someone to have thought of me when they set it. Nobody had.

I washed the dishes. I put the lamp low. I went to my room and lay on my back in the dark and ran the plan for the eleventh time.

It had four steps. Two of them had serious problems. The problems kept producing other problems and all of them circled back to the same thing, I was an Omega with no money and no connections and the specific knowledge of someone who had been here before and knew exactly how much a head start was worth. Not enough. That was always the answer. A head start is never enough when what is behind you does not stop.

I knew his name. I had known it since my first life. Corvus. I closed my eyes and I did not sleep.

The next morning I heard the voices before I reached the kitchen.

My stepfather's first... low and careful, the voice he used when he wanted something from someone who had more power than him. Then another voice I didn't recognize. Male. Older. Flat in the way voices get flat when the person speaking has stopped caring about the content of what they deliver.

I stopped in the hallway. I made myself very still. I have been making myself very still in difficult places since before I can explain why.

"The timeline has moved up," the stranger said. "He wants her this week."

"This week." Gareth repeated it like he was considering it. He wasn't considering anything. He had already decided. "And the arrangement still stands. Everything we discussed."

"Everything you were promised will be delivered when she is. Not before."

"She won't cause trouble," Gareth said. Then a pause. The kind of pause where someone is picking a word. "She's manageable."

Manageable.

I stood in the hallway and let that word sit in my chest and felt something move through me that was not surprise. Surprise needs the thing to be unexpected. This was not unexpected. This was just the confirmation of something I had been calculating for weeks and hoping... against every piece of evidence my previous lives had given me, was wrong.

It was not wrong.

"This week," the stranger said. "Have her ready."

I was back in my room before the kitchen door opened.

I sat on the edge of my bed and held what I had just heard. Corvus. Of course it was Corvus. It was always Corvus. In my first life he looked at me like a problem he needed to solve quickly. In my second he was even faster about it. And now in this one he wasn't even coming himself. He sent a man with a flat voice. My stepfather used the word manageable and whatever small favor Corvus was offering was apparently worth more than I was.

I looked at the wall. I ran the plan again. The problems were still there.

I was going to try anyway.

That evening my mother found me in the kitchen after dinner.

"You've been quiet today," she said.

"I'm tired."

"Mm." She looked at me the way she had been looking at me for years, not quite focused, like I was something in her peripheral vision she hadn't decided was worth turning toward. "Make sure the back door is latched before you sleep."

I looked at her. "I'll check it."

She left. And I stood in the kitchen and thought about everything.

I latched the back door. I checked it twice. I went to my room and lay in the dark and ran the plan one more time. Getting ready to move.

I was almost through the second step when I heard it.

The back door.

The one I had latched. The one I had checked twice. It opened.

I was against the wall before I finished processing it.

I did not run. Running is for people who have somewhere to go.

I stood in the dark and I waited and then a voice came from my kitchen... easy, almost amused, like this was all going exactly the way he expected.