"The act of amnesia and pretending to forget everything was all nothing but a big fat lie from your filthy mouth! I can't believe I didn't act sooner." Forcing out the words through my teeth, I snarl like a vicious dog, struggling to break loose so that I can strangle this incompetent imbecile.

          "You knew he was alive?" Addy decides to pick this very moment to berate me while I'm hanging upside down like a pig skinned alive. The rush of blood to my head makes me painfully woozy and her voice doesn't help to soothe it at all. "Were you ever going to fucking tell me?"

"What do you think?" I snap.

She laughs frustratedly like a villain from a child's movie. "You bitch."

          "You can't see this, but I'm flipping your bratty ass off," I fire back agitatedly.

"Easy, girls!" Maddox chimes in to be the peacemaker among us when he's the biggest nuisance of our lives.

"Shut up!" Addy and I bark at the Scottish man in unison like nasty bitches, forcing him to shut his shithole almost immediately.

The man takes a minute and clears his hoarse throat before throwing orders at the two men standing in the corner of the room that is devoid of any decorations. Just plain white walls capsule us in this space with a few long tables and chairs, two of which are occupied by my mother and sister. This definitely isn't the same building as the one we raided in attempts to find my folks.

          There's nothing here for me to utilize and get the upper-hand on these idiots. No windows to break, no knives to slice them up with, but it does have my jacket that's sitting on the table in the far corner. If I can get that somehow, these fools will beg for mercy, but my murderous plots come to a harsh halt when one man starts coming toward me with a knife clenched within his fist as I notice a gun tucked between his pants.

"Touch me and I'll cut off each one of your slimy fingers and shove them up your ass," I threaten the green-eyed and silver-haired man with the tall stature who seems to be limping a bit.

"I'm used to having fingers up my ass," the man retorts proudly as he gets behind me and clutches my ankles with one hand. "Even fists."

A deep groan rumbles from my chest as I hear my sister laughing like an idiot. "It won't be so fun if she actually cuts off your fingers, buddy," Addy reminds him with a chirp in her voice while I devise a quick plan in my head. Although, it's a dirty strategy, it'll do for now.

Straining my arms a bit, I somehow allow my hands to cup the man's groin behind my back which doesn't faze him a tad bit as he starts cutting the rope I'm hung by. "Touch me all you want, but it won't change the fact that only men can arouse the beast in my pants."

"Oh, sweetheart, you have no idea of my skills," I chuckle, giving Addy a subtle nod, and thankfully, she understands my unspoken indication and wraps up the man into a rather raunchy conversation as I sense Maddox's scrutinizing gaze narrowing down on me.

          "Damn! I want to know your name since I'm gonna be here for a while," Addy proposes the idea and the man complies like a champ as the other one drags a stool in my direction.

          "Jordan," he introduces himself.

"So, you're into fisting, Jordan?" Addy questions him shamelessly.

"It's not bad," he answers her with utmost honesty, continuing the sawing motion on the rope, the vibrations of which went down my entire body. "It's better than some of the other things that have been up there."

          "I bet your asshole is the size of a grapefruit then," Addy cackles at her own pathetic joke as I tighten my fingers around Jordan's crotch which doesn't distract him from the task at hand. As the tall man casually talks about his gay escapades, I blindly move my zip-tied hands upward against the gravity, feeling my fingertips brush over the handle of the gun. Without letting another second pass away in vain, I nab the weapon from his waistband and pull the trigger at a random position. How dumb he was to not realize where I was going to go with my fondling! What a shame!

The man's high-pitched scream ripples through the room as I hear his body hit the ground before I jiggle myself, breaking the frail string of rope I was hanging by and falling right on my head. My eyes go blank for a long second due to the blow, a shrill ringing in my eardrums that makes me whimper in pain.

          "Nice dick shot, Athena!" Addy praises me amusedly, but my head has a hard time focusing on her as my throat clogs up with the bile that I try to force down.

          Holding back the piercing pain poking my head from all angles, I look at the gun that slipped from my hands. Before I could crawl for it, the other man in the room kicks it away from my reach as his eyes stare at my curled up body on the cold tiled floor.

          "Tie her up," Maddox commands him, unable to look at the shrieking man who holds his bleeding crotch as some other men rush into the room upon hearing the gunshot I fired.

          "I will kill you all for touching my sister once I escape, motherfuckers!" Addy snarls but no one bothers responding to her threat.

          A few of those men pick me up and carry me to a pole in a corner by Addy, their hold so tight that I can feel their nails creating bruises on my skin underneath my bodysuit. The energy in my body is at a moderately low level, and with my hands tied behind me, I can't fight them all off, but there's something else I can do just for the fun of it.

As they place the stool and force me to sit on it, I unleash the disgusting monster rumbling in my stomach and vomit on the two men in front of me. "Oops!" I shrug, giving them a mocking pout. "My bad." I almost expected to be slapped for what I did, but they continue on with the task they were given.

          Considering the number of men holding me against the pole, I can tell they're very well aware of my skill to take down armies. The fear that exudes from their pores basically makes me smile to myself as they cut off the zip-tie, freeing my hands, but the others hold onto my wrist, wrapping them behind my back and around the pole. They zip-tie it once again so that I can't break free.

"All of you may leave now," Maddox orders them and they exit after a reluctant second, leaving my half-brother, me, Addy, and my unconscious mother in the confines of this daunting room. His dark brown eyes briefly fan over the pool of Jordan's blood before he looks away in disgust and wipes his sweaty head with the back of his hand. "Jesus!"

          "Wow!" I can't help but laugh at his reaction to the violence after all that he has done to us. "Can't believe that a little blood has you all pale and scared when you're the one who literally stabbed us in our backs."

          "This pussy ass bitch can't face the fact that he tried to kill his sisters," Addy hisses through her teeth as Maddox remains still with his back turned to us. "What did we ever do to you to deserve that?"

          Turning around slowly, he shakes his head, his eyes full of shame and guilt. "Nothing."

          "I should've stopped Addy from ever interacting with you and your father," I seethe in vexation, jerking my body forward, but the pole holds me back.

          "He's your father too," he says in a meek voice.

          I scoff, biting the insides of my cheeks. "I have no father. Fabian was the worst and Holland wasn't any good either."

          "I just wanted to know my brother and my real father. That's all," Addy voices her feelings in a loud, frustrated tone, however, I can still hear the pain assembled within it all. "I meant no harm. I accepted you as my brother from the very first moment. Made big plans to have our family together despite everything. Spent months getting to know you and our father. I even convinced Athena to meet you after the longest time, and the very same day, you decided to kill us. Why?"

          A disheartening frown pulls his eyebrows together as tears start to well up in his eyes. "I am-"

          "No man had ever broken my heart the way you did." Her voice grows brittle as if walking over the tiny shards of her broken heart. "You hurt me so much, Maddox."

Silenced with extreme guilt, his eyes can only stare at us before he wipes away his tears that only seem to be fake in my opinion. Dragging a chair, he sits down in front of me and pulls out a handkerchief with which he gently wipes away the hint of barf from my mouth before I whip my head away from his pathetic touch and fake concern.

          "I'm going to kill you, Maddox!" I growl, discreetly trying to squeeze my hands out of the zip-tie, but the little suckers are too tight already.

"Maddox is already dead," he declares with a tinge of seriousness in his somber tone. "Time to officially introduce myself." His accent changes from Scottish to American like a quick snap of a finger which pinches my brows together. "I'm Maxen."

My eyes stare at him in confusion. "That doesn't make sense."

          "Twins," he informs me, scooting a little toward Addy to wipe the sweat from her face.

          I laugh in utter annoyance to his bullshit. "I researched the Laird family line very closely and there is no bloody twin in it."

Flickering his eyes to mine, he purses his lips into a thin line and sighs. "That's because our father took Maddox away to Scotland and left me here."

"I can't be the only one confused here," Addy blurts out as she stares at him dumbfoundedly.

"I'll explain. Thirsty?" He gets off the chair and saunters over to the table to nab the bottle of water sitting on it. "Our biological father, Holland, as we know, was a business tycoon. A very influential man who had a lot of business going on in Florida." As he sits back down on the chair, he twists the cap open and holds it to my mouth that I immediately turn away. "It's not poisoned, I promise."

"I don't believe a word that comes out of your mouth," I snap.

          After an eye-roll from him, he sips on the bottled water and shakes it in my face. "See! Not poisoned. I'm on your side." He puts the bottle forth hesitantly with encouraging spirit and slowly gets it closer to my lips so that I can drink out of it before he lets Addy have some too.

          "Thanks," Addy mumbles under her breath which slams a smile on his face.

          "As I was saying, he used to come down to Florida a lot from Scotland. Due to some reason, his wife, Lucy, couldn't get pregnant." He takes a casual deep breath and exhales. "My mother was working in the Laird marketing branch in Florida and was also Lucy's friend. The couple approached my mother with the idea of getting pregnant by Holland for a child. They promised her millions and she was down. Little did they know that they'd get one free. Lucy and Holland only wanted one of us to run the company in the future as their sole heir. I appeared to be small compared to Maddox, so they took him and left me back in Florida with my mother."

          Disheartened, he slumps his shoulders and slouches in the chair. "They bribed people and somehow got Lucy's name written on Maddox's birth certificate as the mother with Holland as the father. But for mine, they only had my biological mother and no one as the father because they couldn't risk anyone finding out about what they had actually done."

          "That'd explain why I never got anything on the Maxen concept because they left nothing for me to trace back to you," I think out loud to myself, shaking my head in disbelief and at my stupidity.

"Yup!" He huffs out air after popping the 'p'. "My mother never told me about it until I saw Maddox in a magazine when I was twenty. I found out that Maddox already knew about me, but he never came to visit me and neither did Holland."

          "Well, our dearest father does have a reputation of knocking women up and never coming back," Addy snorts which makes our half-brother chuckle who also nods in agreement.

          "He did send a lot of money to my mother to raise me, so it wasn't that bad of a childhood without a father," he shrugs.

A sarcastic smile tugs on the corners of my lips rather painfully as Addy speaks for the both of us. "You don't even want to know about our childhood, so stop rubbing yours in our faces."

          Raising his hands in surrender, he scrunches his nose a bit. "Guilty."

          "How do I know you're not lying about it all?" I question his intentions that don't sit well with me. For all I know, it's all a plot to get us to trust him, which certainly won't happen in a million years.

"Because I have no reason to and I'm on your side."

"Then why the hell do you have us tied up?" I struggle against the pole, itching to break away immediately.

"Because I thought that you'd try to kill me the first chance you got," he answers instantly. "You wouldn't have heard me out otherwise. I needed to tell you both this." He scoots forward on the edge of his seat, placing his elbows on his knees and looking between me and Addy. "Look, I've never had sisters before, and I want to know you both. I promise I'm nothing like Maddox. I swear."

          "Why did you pretend to be him and present yourself before me?"

          His tongue swiftly swipes over his dry lips as he shoots out air from his mouth. "After you killed Maddox, I was sent to Scotland a few months after his death. They set everything up. Bribed the doctors to falsify medical reports that said Maddox was in a coma for two months after a brutal accident and the plastic surgery too. I was forced to stay in that country and get in the accent perfectly. Close to four years later, here I am as Maddox Laird."

          "So this was all planned as soon as he died?"

          "They wanted me to play along and lure you into a trap to avenge his death. They made me believe that you both were the bad guys in the situation, but you were nice to me when you saw me and didn't kill me right away."

          "Really nice of me, wasn't it?" Jerking my body against the pole, I grit my teeth together. "I should've killed you then."

          His head drops in exasperation as his eyes look up at me through his lashes. "The plan would've been put into action sooner if you had killed me, but thankfully, you didn't."

          "You still took more than two months to come for me."

          "Yeah, because that stunt at the gay wedding you invited me to freaked me out. The guns, people dying. It was all too much for me, which is why I stayed in my hotel room for the longest time. They couldn't progress the plan without me which bought you a lot of time." He shakes his head at a slow place, staring at the wall behind me. "Everyone assumed that Adena was dead after the incident with Maddox because she never surfaced, but then you brought her back into the picture and that threw the game off a little bit. Then you brought your mother home too, and they knew that it was time to attack."

Through all of his talk, I only think about Jackson who knew Addy and my mother were very much alive. If he works for them, why the hell didn't he tell them? What game is he playing?

          "I had Jay on your ass, watching you, and she nev-" I stop abruptly as he twists his head a bit, implicating the obvious. "She's working for you people, isn't she?" He nods and offers me a sympathetic smile as I laugh at my idiocy. I've always been miles ahead of my enemy. I knew when they'd attack, what they planned, and what they even thought, but this time, I've fallen so weak and blinded by the people around me. "Past three years have been nothing but a bloody lie told by the people closest to me. You all got me good this time."

          "I'm so sorry," he apologizes, keeping a warm hand on my knee before removing it after I shove a glare down his throat.

          "How did you get that bitch to turn against us?" Addy asks.

"Janet's real name is Kenya, and she was Maddox's girlfriend," he revealed. "She kept an eye on me though so that I didn't go telling you the truth."

          "Maddox didn't have a girlfriend," Addy counteracts his statement.

          "You sure about that?" He challenges her with an arched brow. "Just because he didn't tell you, doesn't mean he didn't have one."

Addy caves in against his argument. "True."

"And Jackson?" I query. "I trusted him with my damn life. How did you manage to turn him against me?"

"Well." He swallows, holding off the answer for a long second. "He's my brother."

"Brother?" I snort.

"Same mother or father?" Addy asks.

"My mother took him in six years ago after his family died in a hurricane. He was my best friend and he considered himself indebted to my mother. He'd do anything for her."

          "Yeah, I was gonna say that a cute ass light-skinned boy and you could never be brothers," Addy points out the obvious as I think hard to myself. "No offense."

          "I met Jackson five years ago, way before the Maddox drama," I voice myself, straining my brain as it gets worked up. "How long have you all been planning to kill us?"

          "Look, I don't call the shots. I don't want to hurt my sisters that I've finally met. I'm not ready to lose the two of you. I don't want to make the same mistake as Maddox. I want us to be a family like Adena said," he lays out the peaceful and nice thought in a desperate tone that almost seems genuine, but nothing in my damn life is peaceful or nice. "I'm trying to prolong whatever is going to happen here so that I can think of a way of getting the both of you out of here without any bloodshed."

          "Don't tell me that Janet or Kenya, whatever the hell her name is, is the mastermind behind this!" I exclaim as my insides begin to heat up.

          "Nope, I am." Someone I would've never expected to stab me in the back saunters into the room in confident strides which jerks Maxen out of his chair and rips my heart out of my chest. Those brown eyes stare at my weakened state rather contentedly, basking in the scene before them as my breaths come out fast paced and angry to the point I can break the damn pole itself to strange this person. "My sweet little dove."

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A bit boring, I know. I wanted more in this, but I'll save Eros' POV for the next chapter. So this chapter was just about some juicy background information. Yay or nay?

Plot twist! Do you think Maddox/Maxen is telling the truth about everything?

Do you really think he wants to protect his sisters or what?

What game is Jackson playing?

What must be going on with Eros?

Who showed up at the end there, the person Athena would've never suspected?

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Much love ❤️
~Reet