Lies That Break Us (Syndicate of Fate #2)

Prologue

Deniz

U sually, I’d do this from afar, through a screen. I’d find cameras—mine, or ones I could access—and follow her past traffic lights and ATMs, doorbell cameras and security systems, until I saw her silhouette through the wall of windows in her apartment.

But she’s been out of the city for quite a while now. First in Trani with her family, then in Prague. I lost her for a few days in Munich before she popped back up on a hotel security camera in the city center. From trains in Paris to flights in Taipei, it’s been weeks of seeing her features distorted through grainy video feeds. So, as soon as she stepped off that plane in Los Angeles, I had to be close to her.

She slides out of the back of her town car, smiling through the open window at her driver. She laughs at something they say, throwing her head back and bracing her hands against the car door. I’m close enough that the sound carries to me on the wind, full-bodied and laden with unrestrained joy. She wraps her chestnut hair into a high bun, curls spilling from the top and sides. I get a glimpse of golden skin when her sweater rides up, revealing a sliver of her abdomen. Both she and the driver disappear into her building, the car’s hazard lights blinking against the soft sunset.

I realize I haven’t moved, haven’t blinked, since she stepped out of the car. Pressing my fingers to the nape of my neck, I try to relieve the pressure building at the base of my skull. I still haven’t decided if I should kill her.

It should be an easy yes . Her family and their skewed view of justice are the reason Kerem is gone. They’re the reason I had to clean the dust and soot from my brother's face before I could cover his eyes and let him rest. The memory eats at me like poison as it has for months, degrading my sense of morality and humanity until I’m nothing but a husk of pain and rage.

It was almost a year and a half ago now, but the memory won’t fade. Kerem wrapped in a simple cloth, half his clothes burned off, skin blistered and covered in a thin layer of grime. I remember turning his face so I could pass the wet cloth over his temple and scrub away the evidence of the fire. I let the memory of blindfolding and shrouding him to the hymn of my mother’s wails wash over me, fill me, until I’m resolute once again.

Eymen, the family friend who Kerem had been staying with, had called me, frantic, saying Kerem had gone to Taksim Square to explore on his own, but he never came home. There was a fire, he said. At a restaurant. Kerem had never come home, had left his passport at Eymen’s house, and there was a fire.

It took me less than five minutes to find footage of the blaze. I had searched before truly thinking about the consequences, and soon I was watching smoke pour from the windows, people screaming and crying as they ran from the flames. And just for a second, I saw Kerem. He had the arm of an older man slung around his shoulder as they hobbled out of the restaurant, and in that moment I had hope. Maybe he made it, and he was stuck at some hospital with no identification.

But then he sat the man on the street and turned right back to the blazing building. There must have been people still left inside—the recording had no audio to hear their screams—because Kerem ran back into the haze.

He never returned.

I spent seventeen sleepless hours scouring through records, searching for where they had taken him. He couldn’t still be at the bottom of that rubble. It was too painful to imagine him unable to rest, smothered by stone and ash. Eventually, I was able to access the morgue’s files. Three fatalities. An elderly Turkish man. A European woman on vacation. And an unidentified teenage male.

The only words to describe the most important person in my life. Unidentified teenage male.

The authorities said it was an accident, faulty wiring in the kitchen that set the restaurant ablaze. But something whispered in my ear that there was more. Maybe it was the first sign that I was losing my mind, but I called Eymen and told him to tell anyone who had seen Kerem in Türkiye that he had returned home for an unexpected family emergency. I got in contact with Chase, one of my best friends and the only person I truly trusted in the area, and called in the favor of a lifetime. And less than forty-eight hours later, my brother’s body was in a funeral home in Burbank, all evidence of the last four months of his life, including any record of his presence in that Turkish morgue, erased from history. A manufactured story, false records of a car accident, hundreds of fake documents, all planted because of the ghost of a suspicion.

In the time since I’d buried my brother, the paranoia I felt panned out. Hundreds of hours of research into the victims led to a woman who appeared and disappeared from the records of that day. Paramedic logs show she was taken to the Acibadem Taksim Hospital emergency department with significant burns, but no one matching her description was admitted to the burn unit. All it took were a few well-placed questions to family friends in the area to find out as much as I could about her. She was Italian, she was transferred, she was rich . She was connected . She was discharged as soon as she was even remotely stable, her unconscious body escorted by men with concealed guns to a private medical transport helicopter.

The Costa family may not have started the kitchen fire that took Kerem’s life, but they caused it all the same. In their vain belief that they could impose their rules of morality on the world, they created enemies. Enemies who didn’t care if innocent bystanders were obliterated in the attack on their reign.

So, my brother’s life was taken instead of Lucia Costa’s. She survived, the best doctors in the world supporting her as she clung to life, while my brother died in her place. In return, I will use Lucia’s own family to find and kill the person who ordered her assassination. Then I can destroy the Costas as well, finally balancing death’s ledger.

A bell chimes nearby, and I press myself farther into the shadowed corner of this storefront so the light from inside doesn’t illuminate my face. The cigarette I’m holding slips easily between my fingers as I spin it distractedly. It’s an excuse, a front. No one asks why a man is loitering outside a restaurant if he’s holding a cigarette.

The driver—Lee, if I remember correctly—returns to the car, and I watch as they pull away from the curb and down into the underground parking. The lights of Clara’s apartment, which takes up the entire second floor of the building, are still off. She does this sometimes—waits a little while to turn on a lamp. I often wonder what she does in that darkness. Does she feel relaxed and safe, in her home that I’ve invaded? Or is her guard always up?

But tonight is different than most. It takes much longer than usual for any light to appear, and when it does, it seems to come from a candle. She’s hunched over her table, her body casting odd shadows against the wall in the flickering light, and I think she’s writing something.

After minutes of undeterred focus, she sits up straight, rolling her shoulders and cracking her neck. I can finally see what she was doing, because one by one, she tears pages out of a pocket-sized notebook. She lays them in front of her beside a little blue bowl. And once she’s done, she lifts a page and holds it to the candle’s flame.

Like a reflex, my heart pumps too fast, a tightness building in my throat as the hues of orange and yellow consume the paper. I fist my hands in the pockets of my jacket, the cigarette abandoned on the sidewalk at my feet, trying to swallow down the urge to—to what? Call the fire department? Run upstairs? Save her? Fan the flames so they will consume her too, ensuring she meets the same fate as my brother?

I can barely see her face, but it doesn’t matter. I can feel her focus, her pain, her resolve as the flame eats toward her fingertips. Right before the blaze meets flesh, she drops the remaining corner of paper into the bowl, the spark immediately going out. Barely a heartbeat passes before she picks up the next page and starts again. Again and again she does this, burning dozens of pages in the darkness. I stand on the street and watch Clara Costa burn her own memories, until the last page is nothing but ash.