Allison Brennan - Cutting Edge

She tossed the apple core into the trash can chained to the bench and followed her sister with her eyes until Quin turned the corner and disappeared from sight.

If it wasn’t for Nora English, Quin would have been her sister. Her full sister. They would have grown up together, been best friends, done everything together. Inseparable.

Eleven years ago, April brought Maggie to visit her mother. At the prison, Maggie told April to leave them alone. She didn’t like her listening in on her private conversations with her real mother. April was dumb as a doornail and always said such stupid things .

April was happy to leave. Said she’d be back when the hour was up .

Mother and daughter met in the recreation room. It was where the female prisoners with good behavior could meet with their children. Sometimes, when Lorraine was in trouble, Maggie had to go to a small room with a table and hard chairs and a mean guard glaring at her through the window. Maggie hated that. She hated being in a box with no windows and no sun. At least in the rec room there were windows that opened-even though there were bars on them-and lots of light .

They sat on a stiff couch with rough fabric. Her mom was happy today. She said, “Guess who visited me last week?”

Maggie frowned. Why was someone else visiting HER mother? She pouted .

“Don’t be sad, Maggie.” Lorraine beamed. “You should be happy like me! Quin came to see me! And she’s coming back, she promised. I can’t wait for you to meet her.”

A sliver of jealousy cut through Maggie. Her mother talked about Quin all the time, how she was stolen from her. Did her mom love Quin more? Why did it take so long for Quin to visit? She was a bad daughter. When Maggie didn’t want to come one day last year because Lorraine had made her mad, the next visit Lorraine told her she was a bad daughter for missing their scheduled visit .

“Why? She’s never been here before.”

Lorraine scowled. “Nora kept her from me. All these years, I thought Quin didn’t want to see me. But it was Nora all along. She wouldn’t let her come. Quin turned eighteen and came right away to visit. And she’s coming back.”

Maggie knew who Nora was. Nora had killed her father. Maggie hated her. If Nora hadn’t betrayed her own mother, Maggie would now have a real family. Not the stupid April and the sickly sweet David. She called them her stepparents. She didn’t like them, but she’d figured out how to do pretty much anything she wanted .

“Why so sad?” Lorraine asked .

“Do you still love me? Even though Quin came back?”

“I’ll always love you the best. You never left me. You’re a good girl.”

Maggie smiled. “I want a sister.”

“Quin is lovely. She’ll like you. Someday you can meet her.”

“When?”

“She has to be very careful. Quin said Nora would be furious if she found out, and I don’t want her to find a way to stop the visits. She’s an FBI agent now. She can probably stop me from having any visitors.”

Maggie’s stomach felt sick. Lorraine was the only person she could really talk to. Her mom was the only person who talked to Maggie about her father, about all the incredible things he had done to save the earth, to save animals, to change things .

And Nora had killed him. She had sent their mother to prison, and had stolen Quin away .

“I hate Nora.” Inside, Maggie felt her emotions raging .

“Don’t say that. Hate is a negative emotion. It turns us inside out and we make mistakes. Nora doesn’t know better. I don’t know what I did wrong, I don’t know why she set your father up to be killed by the police. They must have lied to her, brainwashed her. She’s even so misguided she’s become part of the Establishment. But not Quin. Quin still has me in her heart, and I know we’ll be great friends, the three of us.”

Maggie wasn’t so sure. But her mother was happy, and Maggie liked it when her mother was happy .

Maggie frowned as she stared at Quin’s office building. Quin had gone off with friends to lunch. Laughing, living a normal life with a normal job, Maggie’s sister never called her anymore. The last time Maggie had seen her was two years ago, when Maggie had decided to go to Rose College. Maggie had shown up at Quin’s town house to surprise her. Quin wasn’t happy. She said that Maggie and Lorraine were another part of her life, separate from her job and friends here in Sacramento.

Maggie had hated her then, had very much wanted to hurt her. But then Quin had apologized, said she was sorry, but Nora couldn’t know.

Nora stood in Maggie’s way.

She’d always been in Maggie’s way. Basically, from Day One, Nora had ruined her life. After killing her father, imprisoning her mother, and stealing her sister, Nora became one of them , the Establishment. Maggie had learned a lot about Nora English, and was determined to find the very best way to make her pay. To make her suffer. To hurt her more than she’d hurt Maggie. She could kill her the way she’d killed Scott and the others; she could kill Nora the same way. Watch her get sick and fall over paralyzed and in pain and lie there for hours suffering until she croaked.

But then she’d be dead and out of pain. There had to be something worse than death, and Maggie had spent months figuring out what that was.

Now she knew.

She rose from the bench and walked down Eleventh Street until she hit O Street, then turned west. She’d been to Quin’s town house before. Quin was now at lunch. Maggie would break in and make herself at home while waiting for her sister.

Nora would kill Quin. It would be her fault. And how she would suffer! She’d feel so guilty. So angry. Full of revenge. And then, Maggie could make her suffer even more. Push in the knife and twist, twist, twist it.

Nora would pay with her own life for killing Maggie’s father. But not until she was emotionally and physically devastated.

“She’s at lunch!” Nora got in the passenger seat and slammed the car door shut.

“It is twelve-thirty,” Duke said.

“I can’t tell her in front of her friends and colleagues. But I have to warn her. And try to figure out why she lied to me.”

“Email her, ask her to come by Rogan-Caruso right after lunch. We’ll wait for her.”

“I have to get back to headquarters. I should have called her first, I was just so mad I thought she’d hear it in my voice.”

“You can work from my office for an hour. Make your calls, I’ll help go through the background information with a fresh set of eyes, see if we missed anything. Any connection between Maggie and Jonah, Maggie and Russ, anything. And Jayne, my computer expert, said she wanted me to look at something in the video files.”

“I thought you were the computer expert.”

“I’m the security expert,” Duke said with a half smile as he pulled onto the street. “I break into computers and security systems. Jayne works on keeping me, and people like me, from doing that.”

By the time they arrived at the sleek office building where Rogan-Caruso occupied the eighteenth floor, Quin had emailed Nora back. “She said she’d be here in forty-five minutes. Wants to know why.”

Duke offered an oblique response for her. “It’s about the case, isn’t it?”

“Gotcha.” She typed a vague message to Quin into her BlackBerry.

Duke was worried about Nora and how she was going to handle Quin. He kept thinking about Sean and how close he’d been to chasing him away-away to Kane and far more dangerous situations than he’d face working here at Rogan-Caruso.