The Brother's Vow

“Hey, brother.”

I watched as the blood drained from my face. Well, technically, I watched the blood drain from my brother’s face but since we were identical twins it was the same face. I glanced at his girlfriend and was satisfied to see she was just as shocked. I know I tended towards the dramatic but it was just so much fun to see peoples’ reactions. Objectively, the woman behind Aidan was beautiful, but it was the woman now standing beside me that had all my attention.

Lucy. I repeated the name in my mind as I watched Aidan try to come to terms with a brother he didn’t know he had.

“I’ll get the scotch.” Lucy’s dry voice felt like a caress and I watched her slim, fit body as she went over to a sideboard and poured about three fingers of scotch in glasses for the four of us. My gaze roamed over her, watching her long blonde hair shift with her movements down to the play of her ass underneath a flowery pencil skirt that had dirty thoughts blazing through my mind all over again.

Again, because a slew of them had pounded through my head from the first moment I’d seen her, and every time since. There was something about the shape of her, the fire in those brown eyes, and her attitude that made dirty thoughts involving everything I wanted to do to her parade constantly in my mind.

I’d waited until just before the office’s closing hours tonight to come in so that the first meeting between my long-lost brother and I would be fairly private. I’d hoped that Lucy wouldn’t leave before I decided to go in, but after watching her for several months I doubted it. She came early and left late, often working hours that I was sure Aidan didn’t know about. I knew that the flight he was on would land soon so I took the chance to finally talk to Lucy. She had no idea I knew her, that I’d been lusting after her hot-as-sin body from my first glance.

“How… Fuck, I don’t even know what question to start with.” Aidan’s words brought me out of my musings and I focused on him. I watched as he drained his scotch in two gulps and sat in a chair. His girlfriend, who I knew was named Calliope but called Callie by friends and family, stood next to him until he roughly pulled her onto his lap. He buried his face in her hair, squeezing her before she could argue with the set up. She looked at Lucy, smiled and shrugged before relaxing into Aidan.

I glanced over at Lucy to see her looking at them with a happy smile on her face. When she felt my gaze her eyes shifted to me. I must’ve projected my dirty thoughts through my eyes because her smile straightened out and she glared at me with a look that said “don’t even think about it”. I hid my smile and sat in another chair, waiting until Lucy was also sitting to begin my story.

“My name is Calder. Obviously, we’re twins.” The three of them gave me “duh” looks and I grinned as I continued. “I’m older, by the way. I know that you’ve been looking for our parents, and I’m assuming you had no idea I even existed. Not a surprise, since when our parents gave us up at three weeks old we were unfortunately separated pretty quickly. The system tries to keep siblings together, but it doesn’t always work out like that.”

Aidan grimaced and nodded, understanding the faults of the foster system.

“I know you went through a few bad homes before getting adopted. Same for me, minus the whole adoption part. I ended up running away from a particularly disgusting home at 14, so I found myself on the streets trying to defend myself. I was homeless, but I was happier. Freer. Lighter. I didn’t have to answer to anyone, and I cherished it. I was clever and wily, not to mention I looked older than I was so I was able to get away with a lot. By the time I was 20, I was well versed in grifting.”

“Grifting?” Callie asked the question and even though I’d seen her and knew who she was, I’d never heard her speak. My gaze zeroed in on her.

“What was that, sweets?” Aidan growled at the nickname I threw out, and Callie placed a palm on his chest to hush him.

“First of all, call me sweets again and I’ll beat your ass. Second of all, what is grifting?”

Damn, that girl’s voice could make lesser men fall to their knees. No wonder Aidan was head over heels- it was honey and sunshine wrapped into one, and if I didn’t vastly prefer Lucy’s smoke and lace voice I’d probably be hard right now.

“Noted. Grifting is another term for swindling.”

“You’re a con artist,” Lucy said and yep- I started to get hard. Battling down my body’s reaction to her voice I shook my head.

“I was a con artist. But I gave that up.”

“Why? You didn’t like tricking innocent people into giving you money anymore?” Lucy’s words were razor sharp and I tamped down my anger at her assumptions. She’d learn who I really was soon enough, so I begrudgingly let the comment pass without a lot of argument.

“Not quite.” I forced myself to look away from Lucy and face Aidan. “I refuse to be like our parents.”

Aidan looked confused for a moment before realization dawned. “You mean to tell me our parents are con artists?”

“Yeah. You know how you’ve been looking for them for years and have found nothing? It’s because they change their identities constantly. By the time anyone would start to figure things out they’d change everything- their appearances, their information, their cars. I’m talking full reidentification. They’re fucking good man, I’ll give them that.”

“How did you find them?”

“Pure accident. I was on a job and something about the situation was weird so I dug deeper and realized that someone in the same circle as the people I was working were also being conned. So I confronted the other grifters, telling them to stop fucking up my job. They laughed. The man had looked at me appraisingly. ‘Maybe it’s time you join your parents’, he said. I told him I didn’t have any. The woman chuckled, and said the words that changed everything. ‘We must be pretty good at this if you can’t even recognize your own mother and father, Calder’.”