hold of my shoulders and pinned me in his grasp the second he saw my eyes.
“When did this happen?” Adam snarled.
“Last night.”
His tension surged, and he grated out, “Did Mom talk to him? Tell him when my flight out was supposed to be?”
Robert sucked in a sharp breath, and it was clear to me that Anna still refused to see her son for the evil dick he was.
I couldn’t believe she was still talking to him.
Maybe a murder one charge would change her goddamn tune.
“Where’s Freddie?” Adam rasped.
“With Cain.”
He tensed. “Sweet fuck. I’ll be getting the first flight out.”
“No!” Robert barked. “Get your ass to the cops, tell them what’s happened, and have them send the verification of your presence there to the Boston PD.”
“Surely they just have to check my records, my flights, to see I’m telling the truth.”
“Let’s make it even simpler,” Robert ground out, “then get your ass back here the second that’s done.”
“O-Okay,” Adam replied, for the first time sounding shaken.
Because I wasn’t used to seeing him like that, I replied for him, “We’ll be on the first flights back as soon as we get everything arranged.”
Robert cleared his throat. “I didn’t want to think it was you, Adam.”
“You should have known I’d never do anything like that—”
“I know. You’re right. We just keep letting you down.” Robert sucked in a breath. “I’m sorry, son. We’ll find him and your boy.”
Then he cut the call, and Adam was pretty much vibrating in my hold.
“We’ll find Freddie, Adam,” I told him softly.
“You’re coming back with me?”
The words throbbed with emotion, both a torrent of rage and confusion, and a welter of panic too.
I got it.
I did.
Freddie was his son, and his psychotic brother was somewhere out there with him.
But why? Why the hell had Cain done this? It didn’t make any sense.
“Yes,” I answered easily, because I couldn’t not be at his side as he went through something like this.
“You’re not going to spout that curse shit at me?” he rumbled.
Irritation had me squinting at him. “It isn’t shit.”
“You’re right, sweetheart, it isn’t shit.” His snarl had the hairs at the back of my neck pricking to attention. And I wasn’t surprised when he moved me backward, not stopping until I was pinned against the wall. “Not much of a fucking curse, is it, when the only reason I’m here, safe, and out of harm’s way from my bastard of a brother’s intentions is because I’m with you. I might be in a jail cell if it weren’t because of us—because of this.”
My eyes flared wide at that. “I-I didn’t think of it that way.”
“No, I can see you didn’t, but I have.” His hands grabbed mine, and he threaded our fingers together before he pinned them to the wall. “We are not your parents. We are Thea and Adam. We are not cursed.”
He stared at me with eyes that were stormy. Overwhelmed with fear for his boy and outright shocked at how this was going down, and I knew he was right.
Life hurled shit at everyone.
But our link had saved him.
We were here together because of the bond.
If I’d ignored it, turned him away, and he’d gone on the flight he was supposed to take, he’d be in Boston again. A warrant for his arrest out on him.
My bottom lip quivered as I came to terms with that, then I whispered, “We are not my parents. We are Thea and Adam. We are not cursed.”
He gulped, and his eyes closed, denying me the sight of his raw pain and the thread of relief that trailed through it like a vein of gold running through a rock.
I reached up on tiptoe and did the only thing I could. I kissed him.
Gently.
I slipped my arms around his waist and held him to me before I whispered against his chest, “Let’s go bring Freddie home.”
And that was what we did.
Together.
ADAM
When I saw my brother’s smirk, I wasn’t sure what the hell was the matter with him.
I’d always known he was a psycho, even if he’d hidden it from the rest of the world, but to see him smiling as he listened to the jury declare him guilty for his crimes, I truly wondered if he should be in prison for the rest of his life or some kind of psychiatric ward.
He was unhinged.
Something I’d always known too, but I was at a loss. I knew my father and mother were too, Mom more than Dad. She was devastated, to