“Because one of us has to.” He shoots to his feet and the wooden chair he’s been sitting on creaks loudly. The creak turns into a crash as the damn thing splits in half and topples over.
I feel marginally better. The loud noise breaks through my red haze of fury. Levi’s right. We’ve got to go about this with caution. First, we have to decide what to do about Olivia. She’s our number one priority.
“Do you think we keep this from her? She’s not techy, so I doubt she’s going to see this shit.”
“We could wait for her to bring it up,” my twin concedes. “But she could keep her mouth shut to protect us like how she’s been avoiding us since Saturday because she knows our control is thin.”
“Good point.” I look at my watch. “Let’s go fix this little problem and collect our girl for dinner.”
“This is not how I wanted to spend her birthday.” Levi’s getting mad. It cheers me up considerably.
“D-day starts in eight hours. We’ve got plenty of time.” I propel my brother out the door.
On the way over to the frat house, I give Sandro a call. He’s got a pirated feed of the campus security cameras. “Dude. Can you tell me the make and model of this assfuck?” I send a screenshot from the Snap story. A guy’s never very far from his car.
“Yeah. Give me five.”
“You have three. I’m almost to Greek Row.”
Keys click at a furious pace and then a “gotcha, motherfucker.”
“Typical. Silver Beemer parked behind his house. There are three of them there. His has the Illinois license plate with the vanity plate that says “BEARFCKR.”
“For real?”
“Not even lying.”
I relay this news to Levi, who rolls his eyes so hard I fear they’re going to fall out the back of his head. He swings a hard right, goes down a third of a mile and finds the alley entrance behind the frat house. It takes only a couple minutes to get what we need from the Beemer. I tuck it under my arm and get back in the car.
“Ready when you are.”
Levi swings around and drives right up on the frat house lawn.
Some pink-eared freshman comes running out. “Hey, you can’t do that.”
Levi slams out of the car, straightening to a full six foot five inches and peers down at the kid. “Who’s going to stop me?”
The kid stumbles back. “Um, ah, I don’t—you should—”
“Invite me in,” Levi says.
I join him and glare at the hapless boy who grows whiter than a sheet of paper at the two of us. “You heard the man. Invite us inside.”
“Um, d-d-do you want to come in?”
“Can’t say that I do, but I will anyway,” Levi answers and bounds up the stairs.
He busts open the door and starts going through rooms, looking for our prey. There are yelps of alarm and some whiney cries of “you can’t do that!” which we both ignore. We finally find our prey on the second floor, with a joint at his mouth.
He blinks owlishly at us. “What the fuck, man?”
“Come with us,” I order.
The frat boy frowns and his hair flops over his forehead as he bends down to stub out his joint. “Breaking and entering is illegal, you know.”
He sounds like an entitled prick. I crack my knuckles and smile. This is going to be more fun than I anticipated. Nothing better than seeing some smug asshole go down.
“We were invited in, weren’t we, Levi?”
“We sure were, Zeke. And they told us to take out the trash before we left, didn’t they?”
“I’m sure they’d appreciate it if we did.”
The kid’s reflexes are slow. Maybe if he hadn’t smoked the weed, he would’ve been able to avoid us. I doubt it. He looks soft around the middle. He’s probably lived off Daddy’s money so long that he wouldn’t know how to defend himself even if he’d been sober for a week.
Levi leaps over the coffee table in one athletic stride, grabs the collar of the frat boy’s white polo and drags him forward. A couple of Frat Boy’s friends try to stop Levi, but my brother shakes them off easily as if they were flies on a watermelon.
Frat Boy grabs at Levi’s hand, but is no match for my brother. “Fuck off, man. You’re hurting me.”
Levi marches forward, his grip relentless. I give the boys in the room a jaunty salute and follow my brother and the trash heap that is the frat boy out of the room and down the stairs.
Frat Boy’s knees bump against the treads and he howls in pain.
“It’d be easier if you just cooperate,” I suggest. This kid’s got a low pain threshold if a few knee bruises are causing him to cry like a bear who got his paw caught in a trap.