He could talk forever, but he wasn’t going to change my mind about that. Besides, it made me happy, and he liked his brother happy, so he huffed and let it go. I’d discovered peanut butter and Marshmallow Fluff sandwiches were the very best things in the world and that was what I made him every day—two of them in a brown paper bag. I didn’t think people carried their lunches in brown bags anymore, but I’d seen it once in an old movie at the Institute and the image had branded itself onto my brain as the ideal family moment—the handing over of the brown-paper-bag lunch before sending Junior on his way. That was the way it was done and that was the way I was going to do it.
Movies were how I learned a good deal about life in the Institute—where there was no peanut butter or marshmallow. Three years in the real world hadn’t changed movies or me as much as I’d thought it would. Stefan said there was nothing wrong with that. I liked movies and real life . . . though it wasn’t always one hundred percent likable. I didn’t blame myself for preferring the fake version once in a while. Stefan wasn’t actually thick. He was smarter than I was in a lot of ways.
He opened up the bag I’d tossed and caught the whiff of peanut butter and Fluff. I know, because I did too. The smell made me hungry. His lips twitched with a particular amusement I hadn’t quite figured out yet before he rolled the top back shut to wait for lunchtime. “Thanks, kiddo.”
“For the fourth time, I’m not a kid. I’m an adult.” I folded my arms and gave him a grim frown. “Nineteen. Almost twenty. A goddamn adult.”
“ ‘Goddamn,’ huh? We’re having a serious moment here. And legally maybe you are an adult, but you’re kind of scrawny.” He grinned. He always grinned or smiled or bumped my shoulder. He kidded about calling me a puppy, but you’d have thought he was the most harmless, puppylike grown man with matching puppy brown eyes if that was all you saw—him with me. When you saw him with other people, he was different—harder, cynical, not to be messed with. When you saw him with people who wanted to hurt us, he was lethal. Period. And his smiles then were nothing near puppyish. They were the smile of a wolf before its jaws closed on its prey, and those brown eyes went pure rapacious amber.
Stefan could go from puppy to predator in a heartbeat and then end yours.
Right now he looked like a happy Labrador. The scar that ran along his jaw from his chin almost to his eyebrow only made his grin look wider. He yawned, up and out to work before dawn, and looked me up and down with a dubious snort. “If adult were measured in pounds, I don’t know . . . it’d be close.”
I let my frown deepen. I’d grown since I’d been with my brother. I’d gone from five foot nine to five foot eleven, the same height as Stefan, but I was . . . not skinny, but light, built like a runner. Considering our lives, that was a good thing. I was just your average teenager with average brown hair and slightly less average green eyes. One of my eyes was blue and the other green. Far too distinctive, which was why I wore a colored contact lens to give me matching green eyes. To the people in town, I was nothing out of the ordinary—as we’d planned and as being in hiding required.
I was stalling, but I had to stop. It wasn’t going to be pleasant, but it was time for the truth. “This is serious. I am an adult and you have to accept that. I mean it. Stop being so overprotective.”
“I swear,” he said, a puzzled furrow appearing between his brows. The Institute had a class on reading facial expressions. I was seventy percent effective at it—not that great among my peers, but passable. I could tell if someone was uncomfortable by a crease, whether it was physical or emotional distress by a line, and the cause of it by a flicker of their eyes toward the source. I could diagnose an STD faster than any doctor and without having to see one single crotch scratch.
“I don’t have a clue why your panties are in a wad,” Stefan went on.
“Did you think I wouldn’t find out?” I tilted my head, trying to figure it all out. “Unlike you, who just reads the comics”—a lie; that was only every other day—“I watch the news every day.” As well as reading it online . . . every day, several times a day, alert for any pertinent fact that someone was on to us.
“And?” he asked, looking more confused than before.
Oh, shit.
That cursing came naturally for the third time today. I didn’t have to check my mental folder for it. I’d made a mistake, a big one. I stopped frowning and ran a hand in unconscious imitation of him over my brown hair. I could’ve kept my face from tensing—in the acting class at the Institute we learned that perfect assassins are perfect actors—but I didn’t. Because that would have been a lie and I wouldn’t lie to Stefan. Not unless it was for his own good. “You don’t know. About Anatoly. You don’t know.”
Because he was painting. Because he wasn’t by a TV. Because he didn’t listen to the radio that often while working.
Maybe I wasn’t smart. Maybe I was as idiotic as they come.
I took a step backward, the longtime natural instinct of a former prisoner, then reversed to take one forward, a new instinct, hard won. “He’s . . . gone. I’m sorry, Stefan. They found his body. He’s been dead for about four weeks. Anatoly’s gone.”