I quickly blocked Tian and the young boy’s view and ushered them out of the room, telling Tian to find somewhere to hide for the next hour and then come back with her guest. Tian’s face was tight and nervous as she looked at the boy, whom she awkwardly introduced as Liam, and his face was grim, eyes full of anger and hatred directed at all of us. I couldn’t blame him. We’d attacked someone who must have been tantamount to a family member while he was helpless. We were monsters to him.

Then again, Tian had kidnapped him, so we hadn’t really started off on the right foot to begin with.

Which really sucked. Because while getting Baldy to talk was clearly not happening, persuading the boy to join our side might’ve been a golden opportunity in disguise, and completely possible—had we not been smashing the face of someone he knew. Earning any form of trust now was going to be difficult, and I wouldn’t blame him if he never gave it to us.

Once they were gone, I turned back to Alex and Baldy, and noticed that Quess was already kneeling next to Baldy’s chair, administering first aid. Alex was watching, his eyes dark and brooding, occasionally waggling his curled fingers in a move I recognized all too well; they were hurting from all the punches he’d delivered.

I considered him, wondering what I was supposed to do. On the one hand, Baldy had hit a very sore spot for both of us, and a part of me felt like he deserved what he got. On the other…

I looked down at the blood splatters on the floor around the chair, and my stomach clenched. Baldy had tried to kill me multiple times. First in the Medica when we went to rescue Maddox from Devon Alexander, the former Champion, and then on the catwalk when Leo had been pouring his heart out to me. And then finally in the Attic, when he had cut my throat.

But even with all of that stacked against him, what I had been allowing to go on was unconscionable—not for him, but for me. For my soul or spirit or heart, whatever you wanted to call it. I had felt it even before Tian showed up, but the look on the young man’s face sealed the deal for me. I didn’t want to be the sort of person who could condone torture, no matter who the prisoner was or what they had done. I couldn’t let this happen again, no matter what Baldy had done to me.

I approached my brother slowly, coming up beside him. He made no move to acknowledge me, but I waited for him to, wondering what he was feeling. In a way, I was guilty for his response to this; I’d cut him out, left him with unanswered questions and an anger burning in his heart.

But that didn’t excuse the fact that he had lost control and might’ve beaten Baldy to death in a mindless, uncontrolled rage.

Yet given that was his reaction to Baldy’s claim that he was a failure… Was that the root of Alex’s anger? Our mother had just died, and neither of us had a particularly good relationship with her. In my case, however, things had been shifting toward the end of her life. So when I lost her, it had hit me harder than I thought it would, because I’d been starting to see a possibility for reconciliation, only to have it stolen away from me.

In his case, though, it had been over a year since he’d seen her. Not since our birthday dinner, when they had fought over Alex’s decision to join IT instead of the Knights. She didn’t understand why he didn’t want to be a Knight, and now I wondered if my brother wasn’t questioning that decision himself, thinking that maybe if he had followed a different path, he would’ve been able to keep us safe.

I imagined that stung a lot. And when he’d reached out to me, trying to make sense of everything, I’d blown him off, or forgotten to net him. I’d left him alone to deal with his pain. And though I’d wanted to be alone to process my pain, that didn’t mean he had. He had needed his best friend, his sister, his twin, and I hadn’t been there for him. I’d failed him.

“Alex,” I said hesitantly. “Are you—”

“I’m not sorry,” Alex interrupted abruptly, and I blinked and looked up at him, alarm spreading through me at his words. “This guy deserves much more—and worse—for what he did to you.”

For several seconds, I was stunned by the vehemence of his response. I had expected guilt out of him, for losing control, but not this deep rage that seemed to be consuming him. Once again, I felt like I was being confronted by a total stranger, but that couldn’t be possible. This was Alex, my twin.

I considered what he said for several moments, trying to rationalize this new behavior, as I watched Quess straighten Baldy’s broken nose by pinching the bridge between two fingers. I could comprehend his anger to a certain extent; it was an understandable reaction to the injustices we had suffered at the hands of our enemies. But in my brother’s case, his rage was borderline unhealthy, a way of easing the pain inside through some form of immediate and violent action. But that wasn’t justice. It was vengeance. And if my brother continued down this path, I feared what would happen to him.

“You lost control, Alex,” I said softly. “I told you he wasn’t going to talk.”

“You were right,” he said before I could form any sort of conclusion, and a curious warmth curled through me. I was? “He wasn’t going to talk. And he’s still a threat. We should kill him.”

I pressed my lips together, disappointed that he wasn’t admitting to the fact that he’d lost control. Was he really blind to it, or did he believe that what he had been doing was right? I wasn’t sure, but either way, it was starting to scare me.

Especially because it was so shortsighted. “If we kill him, then we definitely lose any chance of getting the boy Tian brought back to help us, if we haven’t lost it already, after… what happened.”

“Yeah, about that,” Quess cut in, and I could tell from the discomfort in his voice that he was angling to change the subject. “Did you get an explanation from her as to how and where she found him? Were there others? Was she seen?”

I exhaled, trying to tamp down my irritation. The answer was that I hadn’t gotten an explanation, and the reason was that I couldn’t bear to see Tian’s or the boy’s faces looking at us like that anymore. I’d get the story from her later, once I got this taken care of.

“No,” I told him simply. “Let’s get through problems A through D first.”

Quess snorted as he pressed the bone-mending patch over Baldy’s broken nose. “We’d be lucky to have only four problems,” he muttered, and a startled laugh escaped me. There was truth in his words, and, Scipio help me, it made me tired more than anything.

The momentary levity slowly melted away as I heard my brother make an aggravated noise and shift his weight. “We’d have one less problem if you’d just stop patching him up and kill him already,” he snarled. “He’s a threat, he’s no good to us, and keeping him alive is dangerous. If he breaks free from this room and lets his people know what we know, they’ll hunt us down and kill us all. Why are we still talking about this?”

My lips formed a thin line, and I fought the rising urge to shake him at his continued shortsightedness and bloodthirsty attitude. It was really starting to scare me, but even more than that, it lacked any rationality. Even if we couldn’t get answers out of Baldy, that didn’t mean we couldn’t use him for something. Not to mention, the boy Tian brought in knew Baldy. There had to be a way to exploit that connection. But not if we just beat on Baldy for no good reason.

“Alex, he’s still valuable, alive or dead. You need to take a breath and slow down. We have a ton of information to go through from Sadie’s computer, and once Leo gets Jasper and Rose separated and back online, they might be able to help us learn what’s actually going on. We’re going to figure this out. Together.”

On impulse, I reached out to touch his forearm, to comfort him, but as soon as my fingers stroked over his uniform, he jerked away from me, whirling around to present me with his back.

“Alex?” I asked, concerned and hurt by his reaction.

He stood there for several seconds, his back and shoulders rising and falling as he tried to calm himself, catch his breath… something. I couldn’t tell what was going on. All I knew was that it was dark, turbulent, and seemed to be consuming him. My twin. The only other human being in the world I felt fully connected to.

“Alex,” I said pleadingly, my heart overflowing with worry and concern. “Talk to me. I know I’ve been a crappy sister, but—”

He whirled around, his eyes blazing behind his glasses. “I don’t want to talk. I want to do something. I want to find the guys who hurt you and killed Mom and make them pay. Why is that so hard for you to understand? Why are you hesitating now, after everything that has happened? Do you not care that they’re killing Scipio? Do you not care that thousands of people are going to die if they get what they want?”

My brows drew tightly together, and I took a step back, the sting of his words and insinuations almost enough to make me want to walk away. I tried to remind myself that this wasn’t Alex—that he was in pain and upset because things were moving too slowly.

But I was rapidly running out of excuses for him, and I wasn’t sure what to do with this person wearing my brother’s face, because it certainly wasn’t him.

“Don’t talk to your sister like that,” I heard Leo say angrily from behind me, and a second later I felt his hands sliding over my shoulders, holding me upright just as I was about to falter. I shot him a grateful look, but he ignored it as he speared Alex with a glare. “She cares more about the Tower and the people in it than I’d wager most do, and I won’t let you say anything to the contrary! Of course she cares, and she’s working on it. We all are. But it isn’t something we can rush, no matter how much you want to, so stop attacking your sister. She is doing the best she can, and you should acknowledge and respect that.”

His words helped take away some of the pain from Alex’s words. But only some.

My brother glared at him, and then made an irritated noise. “You’re right,” he finally said, but there was still an angry undercurrent to his voice. “She is doing the best she can. I’m just… frustrated. I’ll go for a walk and try to clear my head.”

“You do that,” Leo said, and there was a firmness in his voice that said Alex was going to leave whether he liked it or not. I didn’t like it, but I realized that maybe he needed it.

My brother was already turning to walk away but grunted an acknowledgment over his shoulder, followed by an, “I’ll be back soon.”

The words filled me with an ominous dread, but I kept my mouth shut and let him go, hoping that Leo was right.