Chance (Angels Halo MC Next Gen #16)

Prologue

Evie

It was the melodic rhythm of the rain against the window that called to my soul. With the door slightly ajar, I could hear the wind picking up, the rustle of the trees in the distance. But I wanted to be closer. Throwing back the curtain, I looked out at the midnight sky.

Shut doors tended to make me twitchy. Heart pounding, body bathed in sweat, sick to my stomach, air trapped in my lungs twitchy. Seeing them, being reminded of my life before Evy saved me, took me back to those dark places in my mind.

I felt trapped.

Smothered.

So the doors stayed unlocked and open. Just a little bit.

Not like it had been earlier, when some guy named Reid had dropped by.

I hadn’t met him, but Evy had while I was trying to wrangle the sheets onto our bed.

She’d come back to help me, looking…dazed.

Definitely a little smitten. There had been a new glow to my sister’s cheeks at the time, her eyes all dreamy.

She was totally crushing on the guy.

I liked the smile that’d stayed on her face since then. Above all else, I wanted my twin to be happy.

Lifting the window, I breathed in the cleansing smells and imagined the rain washing away the suffocatingly lonely past that constantly tried to steal my newfound peace. I didn’t want to think about what was behind me or what the future would bring.

There was only now.

“It’s really starting to come down out there,” Evy murmured, walking out of the bathroom. She was dressed in cute panda pajamas that matched my own.

It was still surreal that we were living together.

That for the first time since birth, we were under the same roof for more than a few hours.

Twenty-one years of only seeing my twin on our birthday had been torture for us both.

Planning our life together once we were adults had been the only thing that saved either of us during those lonely years of being separated.

It had taken three full years longer than expected, but we were finally where we’d always hoped to be one day.

Side by side.

Under the same roof.

Free.

Given that we’d grown up apart, it should have felt like I was living with a stranger, yet for the first time, I was in a place that finally felt like home.

Some identical twins probably did all they could to be more individual.

But not Evy and me. For too long, all we’d had was the image in the mirror to help us stay connected while being forced to live separate lives.

Seeing my face, knowing that it was the same one that my sister saw when she passed any reflective surface, had been the one thing that had helped me hold on when my isolation had been at its worst.

Isolation. I nearly snorted at that ridiculous understatement.

Imprisoned, that was a better description.

Locked away, behind a gate with guards that changed every eight hours.

Not allowed outside, even though there was a thirty-foot-high wall that surrounded the house.

Shut behind impenetrable doors and bulletproof, tinted windows that blocked most of the sun’s rays.

There was staff that cooked, cleaned, assisted my father in his day-to-day, but those people might as well have been ghosts.

I was never allowed to see them, let alone speak to them.

Only my father spoke to me. My single connection to the outside world was the online homeschool courses I took—all prerecorded—and my birthday, when I got to see Evy.

Talking to the mirror, pretending it was my sister, that was what had helped me stay sane. What had kept me from falling completely into the darkest parts of loneliness.

Until I couldn’t hold on anymore…

Evy dropped her head on my shoulder, jerking me back from the scary parts of my mind that wanted to pull me under.

Mentally shaking away the memories, I focused on the two of us enjoying the storm.

And our connection. I didn’t think she would ever understand exactly how much I needed the physical contact with her.

Her warm skin. Her heartbeat. Her laughter. I was so hungry for human contact.

Even when we didn’t speak, having her close was all I needed. It calmed the panic that was constantly fluttering right below the surface.

“I always wondered what it would be like to play in the rain,” I confessed, letting out a longing sigh.

Having lived in Seattle my entire life, I knew it rained at least forty-five percent of the year. Yet I’d never once felt it touch my skin. I always hoped it would rain on my birthday, so I might get the chance to touch a raindrop, but oddly, it never did.

My twin’s head popped up, her eyes darkening for only a moment before she grinned. “There’s no one here to tell us we can’t.”

I nibbled my bottom lip. That was true. I just had our dad’s…my dad’s voice echoing in my head, grumbling all the reasons why I shouldn’t. My dad, I reminded myself. Evy went silent when I called him “our” anything.

To Evy, he was merely William. He’d never considered himself Evy’s dad.

There were times I’d felt like he even hated her.

Outwardly, my twin didn’t appear to let that bother her, but I could almost feel the pain that lived inside her from his rejection.

Her anger was plentiful—and understandable.

I hated that bastard more than anyone, even more than my sister did.

His rejection of her had carved a scar on her soul that she couldn’t acknowledge, but she couldn’t hide it from me.

With his death came unbelievable relief. Finally, we were both free.

Now, I was able to do…

Well, anything.

There were no locked doors to keep me inside. No guard to restrict me from leaving. No stern father to guilt and gaslight me into thinking I was ungrateful, unworthy. Nothing. Or worse—broken—and the world would never accept me.

You’re nothing, Evelyn. Without me, you’ll always be nothing.

Fuck off, asshole.

I was still working on figuring out if I was actually broken or not. Twenty-one years of being locked away from society, except that blessed one day a year when I would get to see my twin, kinda destroyed a person’s…everything.

When our parents divorced, they split everything down the middle, including their children.

Each parent got one twin and went their separate ways.

We hadn’t lived some weird version of The Parent Trap, hadn’t even considered doing the whole switching places thing, despite the two of us being so identical there wasn’t a person alive who could tell us apart.

Least of all William. He’d been so paranoid about us possibly pulling a stunt like that, that he would mark me with a Sharpie before our annual visit.

If it hadn’t been for the judge making it a stipulation that we had to spend our birthday together, we might never have even known about each other, let alone bonded.

Maybe they had seen something in my father’s eyes.

His need to control. His madness. Or perhaps the judge was just trying to look out for the unborn babies that were still in our mother’s belly.

Whatever the reason, I was grateful.

Per the judge’s order, neither of our parents was allowed to attend those supervised “playdates.” It took me years to understand that it was because our parents got volatile when in the same room.

Evy, however, seemed to figure that out much sooner than I did.

How, she never explained to me, and I’d been a little afraid to ask.

We didn’t talk much about our parents during our visitation days.

That always seemed the least important subject to discuss when we were so desperate to soak in being with each other.

A few short hours together for a single day out of a year starved us both for the connection we craved.

Three hundred and sixty-four days was an eternity when you were missing the other half of yourself.

Diving into the drama that had ended our parents’ marriage before we were even born was unessential in the face of breathing each other’s air for our brief time together.

Which had been a mistake neither of us truly understood until we were in our teens. Me, because I didn’t know any better. Evy, because she didn’t know how much I was suffering.

To be fair, I didn’t know I was suffering either. Not then. It took a while before I came to that realization on my own.

Our mother’s death right before we were set to graduate from high school had blindsided us.

Every plan we’d made to be with each other when we turned eighteen had been waylaid.

We were only a few months shy of our birthday, the end of our separation so close we could almost touch it.

Adulthood meant going out on our own, college, seeing the world outside of what little I was allowed to watch on Netflix.

With our mother’s death, I thought that would automatically mean my sister would come to live with us.

I’d been wrong.

That day was forever burned into my mind.

Not so much because I’d lost my mother, a woman I had no memories of.

She’d never once been in my life and, as far as I was aware, hadn’t made any attempt to try to have a relationship with me.

Other than a few moments of considering the what-ifs of what it might have been like to have a mother to turn to in those scary times a girl needed an adult female mentor to hold on to, I hadn’t felt much regarding her when I was told of her passing.

And even those what-ifs were based on things I’d seen on television rather than witnessing mother-daughter relationships in real life. That was kind of hard to do when my dad kept me so sheltered I was homeschooled via an online curriculum for my entire education.

Evy was the one I hurt for. She was the one who needed me.

I could feel it all the way to my bones.

Her pain reached me even across the distance that separated us.

It lived inside me to the point that I didn’t know where her emotions ended and mine began.

It was so gut-wrenching, confusing, soul-crippling.

And then Dad told me that Evy wasn’t welcome in his house.

We didn’t even attend Mom’s funeral.

Heartless bastard.

I might not have even known about my mother’s passing if cops hadn’t shown up at the door and refused to leave until they personally informed me.

William had been pissed about it, his entire body seeming to vibrate with rage as he stood at my side in the foyer while the two uniformed officers had explained what had happened to the woman who’d birthed me.

After her funeral, Evy was sent to live with Mom’s aunt Mildred in Los Angeles until we turned eighteen.

We had one more birthday together. During that final visit, nothing went as planned.

Our life together didn’t magically begin like we’d always promised each other it would.

I didn’t leave there with my sister. If anything, I left a piece of myself behind.

I lost Evy that day…

I lost myself.

That was when it really hit me how wrong my life was. How much I was missing. That was when a piece of me died inside.

Grabbing my hand, Evy didn’t give me a chance to let Dad’s voice get too loud in my mind, constantly telling me “no” or that I had to be careful.

Or that no one wanted me around. That I was defective.

Nothing. There was a time when I’d hidden from life, the entire world, because of him.

Now, I didn’t have to do that any longer.

Throwing the already partially open front door wide, she tugged me outside.

Giggling, I ran with her into the parking lot. Our one-bedroom apartment was on the ground floor, our matching Jeeps parked side by side only a few yards away. With the streetlight glowing down on us, we splashed in the puddles already forming.

Hair dripping, we danced around, our laughter lifting into the late-night sky.

Moments of pure happiness were something I cherished. We’d had so few that we couldn’t squander them now that we were finally together. Not when we had fought so hard for this. I wasn’t going to waste a single second of time being sad for what should have been.

I couldn’t let the darkness win.

Tipping my head back to the pouring sky, I let my tears fall, baptizing our fresh start. I’d pushed everything down so deep when I’d lost Evy. I’d hidden my pain for so long that it had almost consumed me.

How Evy had survived not just losing our mother, the only parent she’d ever known, but me as well, I still didn’t know. I couldn’t understand it.

Not when I’d been so utterly destroyed.

Death had once seemed like the only answer to escaping the overwhelming loneliness.

Now, I desperately wanted to live.

“Evie.” Her voice pulled me back from the mangled thoughts, the memories of being locked behind door after door. Memories of that night…

My twin’s voice coaxed me from the ledge where the darkness was waiting, always ready to suck me back in.

Don’t go there, Evie. Don’t think about what nearly happened. Almost doesn’t count. Your heart is still beating. You’re still here and getting better now. Every day with Evy heals all your broken pieces.

Blinking through the blur of tears and rain, I saw my sister’s beautiful smile. “We made it,” she reminded me, her eyes unwavering, never judging.

I gulped in a deep breath, nodding, returning her smile. “We made it.”