“We’re here on behalf of your brother, Maxwell Patton.”
Max was more than just my brother. He was my twin. We were born just minutes apart, me being the “younger” one, and even though we looked exactly the same, our personalities were like night and day. Mom used to joke that someone messed up when they were giving us traits because instead of each having a balanced personality, both of us were extreme.
Max got all the responsible, successful, and determination traits. And me?
I got to be the charming, irresponsible one with a girl on each arm.
It’s clear I got the better deal.
It was because of the wide gully of difference between us that Max and I weren’t as close as most twins are. I hadn’t seen Max since I joined the Corps, but even still I found it very hard—if not impossible—to believe that Max was in trouble with the law.
“Max asked you to come here?” I questioned.
Charged silence filled the space between the agents and me. Tension coiled in the back of my neck, making it feel as if all the muscles and nerves were wound tighter than a double-knotted shoestring.
Agent Collier cleared his throat. “I’m sorry to inform you Maxwell is dead.”
The words hit me hard. Shock rippled through my body as disbelief filled my head. There had to be some mistake. Max wasn’t dead. He was too young to die. He wasn’t even thirty. I snapped my stare back up to the men watching me with solemn expressions.
“Come again?” I asked, thinking I heard wrong.
The man cleared his throat and shifted in his polished black loafers. “It happened last night. It was a car accident.”
So I had heard right. An aching hollow feeling opened up in the center of my chest. It settled just beneath my ribs where the pain lodged and continued to hurt. It was the kind of pain no one ever described to me before; I wasn’t sure this feeling could be put into words. If it could, they were words no one should ever have to hear.
Suddenly I felt lighter, as if part of whatever held me to the ground was no longer there. I looked down at my feet, at the boots still anchored on the floor. It was strange because it seemed I should be floating.
Part of me was gone.
Ripped away.
Empty.
The hollowness within me flared, and I had to make an effort not to hunch over. I had to work not to let these men in bad suits see how much the death of my twin hurt.
“I’m thinking the FBI usually doesn’t make house calls to inform people about their relatives’ death.”
“Maxwell’s death was not an accident.”
“You came here to tell me that my brother was murdered?” I asked, deadly calm. I might not have been close to Max, but he was my brother, my family, and I loved him.
“Maxwell was assisting the FBI in a corporate espionage case. He was the inside man. The fact that he was working with us was kept under wraps.”
“Obviously not if someone killed him because of it.”
The silence that followed my statement filled the room. If these men thought they could come here, tell me that my brother died helping them, and not be met with some sort of angry animosity, they seriously did not know who they were dealing with.
The fact that Max had been doing this at all surprised me. Part of me wanted to ask if they were sure they had the right guy, but respect kept the question in. Respect for my brother. Just because it was out of character for Max to get involved in something like this didn’t mean he hadn’t. He was a hard-working guy, always on the straight and narrow path. He never strayed from his goals; he never had time for fun or anything he considered time wasters.
But he did have a strong sense of right and wrong.
That was likely the only personality quality we shared.
So yeah, it might be unlikely that Max would become involved in some sort of criminal case, but it wasn’t impossible. Especially if whatever was going on had been blocking the path he was traveling.
Respect for him rose up inside me like a bottle of shaken soda. That hollow feeling threatened to pull me under and grief was a pungent taste in the back of my throat.
He can’t be gone.
He’s too young to die.
The man across from me cleared his throat. “No one knows of Maxwell’s passing. You’re the only one who’s been told.”
I swallowed thickly, pushing down the bubbly emotion inside me. I thought about my mother, my father, my sister. I was going to shatter their world today. I swallowed again. “I’ll take care of it,” I told them.
They said nothing, but I felt the change in the room. I looked up, directly into the eyes of one of the agents. There was a reason I was being told first. There was a reason that no one else had been notified about his death.