How About Seven? ✔

50. Will We Ever Meet Again

PRESENT

"I don't - " I stopped. Part of me wanted to scream. Part of me wanted to sink to my knees. Part of me refused to believe, and part of me was more than willing to - because if it was true, if Kaylan is Thomas, then it meant that Thomas really was alive, and had always been with me, since the first day I entered Pambrooke until now. I simply had not known it.

"How did you call me at the party?" I asked. "Where Jasper proposed to me."

"Bribed a member of the domestic staff to help."

"But that's - you sounded like Thomas at the party. You don't sound like him now."

His voice dropped a little, and lost the huskiness. And suddenly I was hearing Thomas Blackcroft all over again. "You mean like this?"

He has the nerve to smile at me! Godddamnit.

Thomas cleared his throat. "I don't sound like myself anymore. My vocal cords were damaged during the explosion, and this has been my, well, normal voice for sometime now."

"Cognac had his suspicions on your identity, when we hacked Damian's phone," Roxy admitted. "But he couldn't prove it, and he passed the job to me. You cover your tracks pretty well, but in the end I managed to track Thomas' cellphone as having been bought under the name of Kaylan Hood. That's when everything became clear as day."

Emrys hadn't stopped staring at Thomas. "So that's why you got so close with Hayley so fast. How you took out Jasper's men so easily."

"And why Re found you familiar," I finished.

"Thanks for letting us know the truth, Roxy." Emrys smiled widely, a little too widely, I felt. "It definitely gave us the answers we were looking for. It also gave me enough time to do this."

Emrys dangled his pair of handcuffs in the air; they were locked, but his wrists were not in them. 

"How did you - " And then deciding wisely that acting first was better than asking questions, Roxy narrowed her eyes and moved her finger onto the detonator.

But Thomas was faster. With a whip of his legs, he sent Roxy face-planting onto the floor. The detonator fell from her grasp and Thomas kicked it out from her reach. When Roxy tried to lift her gun, Thomas stomped on her wrist, and she screamed. He didn't take off his foot. 

Doing the only thing I could do with my hands behind my back, I let out a most inelegant pterodactyl shriek as I ran forward and dive-bombed into Roxy's back, shoulder first. I struggled to keep my weight on top of her as she snarled and tried to roll over. My brother, seeing my distress, did the only thing he could do with his hands behind his back - which is to repeat the same move I did, except without the screaming. But he was malnourished and severely underweight and therefore could not contribute much, which led to Thomas, after kicking Roxy's gun away from her, adding himself to the pile as the official final layer in our altogether crude, but efficient, human pyramid.

Emrys took his time walking over and shook his head, making tsk-tsk sounds as he came.

"You guys are a pretty picture now, aren't you?" He took out his phone and snapped away.