Chapter 34: In The Line of Fire

My throat went dry, and the words tumbled out before I could stop them. “W—what?” I could barely recognize my own voice. “What do you mean by that?”

Kevin’s expression faltered for a moment—like the truth had slipped out of him by accident, like he was suddenly standing in the aftermath of a confession he wasn’t supposed to make. I could see it in the way his shoulders tensed, in the way his eyes darted away from mine. He looked like a man who wished he could rewind the last thirty seconds of his life.

My pulse raced, my mind spinning through every possible interpretation, every lie I’d ever heard. I wanted to believe I’d misheard him. That maybe he’d meant something else entirely. But I knew better. The weight in his eyes told me everything.

“Then it’s not totally impossible for us to be together,” I said quickly, my words stumbling over themselves, desperate to make sense of what I’d just heard. “Since she’s not your mother.” My voice trembled, and I could hear how fragile it sounded—how small. “But why did you keep it a secret? What are you doing working for her? What is all this, Kevin?”

I hated how I sounded—pleading, confused, almost begging for him to give me something that made sense.

Kevin clenched his jaw, looking torn between anger and guilt. His eyes darkened as he exhaled sharply, the sound jagged and bitter. “Fuck,” he muttered under his breath, his voice cracking slightly.

He looked up at me then, and for a moment, I almost didn’t recognize him. His usual calm, the walls he always kept up, were gone. He looked… human. Broken.

“She’s my aunt,” he finally said, his tone low, pained. “My mother’s identical twin sister.”

The words barely registered. They felt too big, too strange, too heavy to fit into the room. I blinked, trying to process what he was saying, but the rest came rushing out of him before I could catch up.

“Ever since my mother died and my dad fell ill—he’s been bedridden in the hospital for years—Nina assumed the role of my mother. She did it so she could run the family’s business.”

His voice shook on the word mother. I could tell it wasn’t just grief he was swallowing—it was years of silence, years of pretending.

He dragged a hand through his hair, frustration spilling out in every movement. “Then one day, I found out she had a hand in my mother’s death. Nina killed her—just to take over the company.”

I didn’t realize I’d moved until I felt my hand press against my lips. My knees felt weak, the air too thin. “Oh my God…” I whispered, though it came out so faintly I wasn’t sure if he heard me.

“I had no concrete evidence to prove it to the world,” Kevin went on, his words rough, exhausted. “So I buried the truth. I had to pretend I didn’t know.”

My tears burned hot at the corners of my eyes, and I couldn’t stop them anymore. The image of Nina’s practiced smiles, her calm composure, her false sweetness—it all suddenly made sense. It was all a mask. Every single part of it.

“Nina managed to erase everything about my mother,” Kevin said, his voice trembling as he spoke. “So to the entire world, she’s my biological mother. But to me…” He looked away, his jaw tightening, his voice cracking softly. “To me, she’s just an ambitious aunt I made a pact with. I had to get on her good side, keep her trust. And when the time is right… I’ll get my revenge.”

His words hung in the air like smoke, thick and impossible to breathe through. My chest ached with something sharp, something between sorrow and disbelief.

My lips trembled as I whispered, “What kind of pact did you make with her?”

Even as I asked it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. But I needed to hear it—from him. I needed to understand what kind of hell he’d been living in, and how much of it was going to drag me down with him.

Kevin’s eyes darkened with pain as he placed the gun on a nearby counter and leaned against it.

The gun clattered against the counter and for a second the sound was louder than my pulse. It felt obscene in that small, dim room—so ordinary, so domestic, and yet everything in it had just turned poisonous. Kevin leaned back against the counter like the weight of the world might crush him through the laminate. His shoulders trembled slightly; I could tell he was holding himself together by a thread.

“That I would take care of her illegal businesses,” he said, voice low and tired, “which I shouldn’t mention because it’s better you don’t know about it—trust me…” He let the sentence die, eyes flicking away like there was something in the air that might burn us both if we looked at it too long.

I moved closer without thinking. There was a pull—irrational, fierce—that wanted to be near him, to press my palm to that taut muscle of his back and try to smooth whatever jagged thing lived there. “And in turn?” I asked, because I needed the rest. I needed the whole grotesque truth laid out so I could try to make sense of it.

He clenched his jaw and for a moment I watched some private war cross his face. Then he looked at me—really looked—and I saw how tired he was. “In turn,” he said, and his words scraped raw, “she’d continue to pay my father’s hospital bills. If not, she’d let him die without me ever having a chance to see him again. Just like my mother.”

My stomach dropped. The phrase let him die was a physical blow—colder than anything Nina had said on the phone. I felt dizzy, like the room had slipped on a tilt. Kevin’s hand found the edge of the counter and squeezed as though it could squeeze the truth out of the world. “She’s practically holding him hostage so that I’d carry out my end of the deal,” he said, voice breaking at the edges. “Whenever I fail or there’s a hitch in her business, she punishes my father for it.”

He shook his head, trying to put away the tremor in his words. “She might not look like it, but she’s extremely dangerous.” He sounded like a man naming a storm he’s already been inside of, as if anyone had ever asked him to map the lightning.

My throat closed around a single, ridiculous thing I wanted to say—I didn’t know. It wasn’t ridiculous; it was the only honest thing. I ran my hand through my hair like it might steady me and then, because I didn’t know anything else to do, I stepped forward and wrapped my arms around him.

The hug was impulsive and clumsy and everything I’d been denying myself for weeks. I pressed my face into his shoulder and inhaled the scent of him—smoke, cologne, something uniquely Kevin—and it steadied me in a way nothing else had that day. He was warm and real and, somehow, undeniably dangerous, and I wanted to stay there until the world made sense again.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered into his chest, the words tripping over themselves. The tears came again, hot and sudden, because understanding the reason for his absence didn’t make it hurt less. “I didn’t know you were trying to push past her games. I suspected and blamed you for leaving. I’m so sorry… and I’ve really missed you.” My voice broke halfway through and the honesty of it felt like a confession and a plea both.

Kevin’s body stiffened under me, then softened. He pulled away enough to look at me, his face raw with the things he’d been carrying. His hand cupped my cheek for a breath—gentle, tentative—like he feared my skin might shatter under his touch. “Abby…” he said, each syllable weighted. He tried to form the rest into words, then shook his head as if the words themselves were dangerous.

“I ghosted you because you shouldn’t be dragged into this chaotic world,” he said finally, with the kind of quiet urgency that made my scalp prickle. “Nina and I—Nina shouldn’t know about us. If she finds out, things will be messed up and I’ll never have a chance to get my revenge, and she will hurt your father. So we have to be careful.”

He sounded like he meant every single thing—like he had rehearsed the terrible calculus he’d been living with and had woken up every morning to choose the lesser cruelty. The idea that he’d lied, not to protect himself but to protect me, twisted something sharp inside my chest. It didn’t remove the betrayal. It only complicated it, braided hurt and relief into the same raw knot.

My fingers found the tender place at the back of his neck and I gripped it like an anchor, as if holding him physically might make the rest of the horror less likely to wash away. “Careful how?” I whispered. “What does careful look like when the other side’s wearing a crown of knives?”

He closed his eyes for a second, the light catching a bruise of weariness under them. “Careful looks like staying out of trouble, not digging into what you don't understand. Not giving her any reason to suspect that you know something about all of this… and lastly, letting me be the one in the line of fire.” He opened his eyes and looked at me with a fierceness I’d never seen before. “I thought keeping you ignorant would keep you safe,” he admitted. “I was wrong in a lot of ways, Abby. But everything I did—every lie I told—was to keep the people I love alive.”

I wanted to argue. I wanted to scream that secrecy had nearly killed us in other ways—by eroding trust, by making me doubt, by twisting love into weaponry. But instead I felt myself fold around him again, not because his confession absolved him, but because the rawness of his admission made us both human in a way I hadn’t allowed us to be.

Outside, muffled bass thumped through the walls and people laughed like nothing had broken. Inside, there was only the small brutal room and the two of us, trying to stitch together the pieces of a life that now had different edges. I pressed my forehead to his, feeling the fast stutter of his breath. The room smelled faintly of gunpowder and cheap whiskey; it smelled like the life he’d been forced to live and the things he’d been forced to do.

“We’ll find a way,” I said, though I didn’t know whether I believed it. The words were half-hope, half-command—an attempt to pull both of us toward something steadier. “We’ll bring her down.”

Kevin’s laugh was short and humorless. “It’s not as easy as you think, Abby.” He looked at me with tired eyes. “One wrong move and she’ll burn us both to ashes.”

The truth of that cut through me and sat on my tongue, bitter.