I had no idea how long I’d been running, but judging by how my body was starting to feel, it was longer than was probably healthy in the kind of heat that was burning up Jersey on that particular day.
The long drive home from Carmen’s neck of the woods had done nothing to clear my head. So instead of driving home, I’d driven right to the beach, taking time to grab basketball shorts and sneakers out of the saddlebags, changing, then taking off down the pathway along the beach.
I slowed, squinting against the sun to see who was hollering. Only to find my brother standing there.
“What the fuck are you running from?” he asked, making his way toward me. When he was close enough, a bottle flew through the air, making me reach up to snatch it before it whacked me in the face.
Electrolytes.
“Thanks,” I said, untwisting the cap and chugging the contents.
I wasn’t sure how long I’d been running, but I did know that it was too long without a drink.
“You’re gonna get a damn heat stroke running in this,” Croft, not usually a worrier, scolded.
“How’d you know where I was?”
“Aviela told me she saw you running when she drove down the shore… then still running over an hour later when she drove back.”
“Why didn’t she stop?”
Unlike Croft, our sister absolutely was the worrying sort. Squarely stuck in the middle, and the only girl, she worried both about the recklessness of her older brothers and our little brother.
“I think Aviela knows when a situation is a sister thing and when it’s a me thing.”
“This isn’t a you thing either. It’s not a thing at all. I needed to blow off some steam.”
“Blowing off steam is one thing. Risking heat exhaustion is another. What’s going on? You’ve been weird as fuck for days.”
“Weird as fuck because I didn’t want to party twice?”
“It’s more than that, and you know it. What’s going on up by the city?”
Fuck.
Fuck.
My brother and I had a deal. We had our location on for each other. I’d turned it off the first time I went to confront Carmen. But I’d forgotten when I’d left that morning.
Of course, he checked if he was already suspicious about me.
“Went for a ride.”
“A ride. To some random duplex. Then some fancy-ass house?”
He’d not only looked me up, he’d researched where I’d been. That was so unlike Croft that it hadn’t even crossed my mind to worry about that.
“The tracking was probably off.”
Croft’s head tilted, scenting the lie like a hound.
It was hard to lie to your twin.
I’d maybe only pulled it off once or twice in our lives. And only because it was a life-or-death situation.
“Rune, who is Carmen Torres?”
How’d he even guess it was Carmen and not Sofia?