Janus: The Team, #4

By Romilly King

Janus - intelligence specialist, hacker, dominant, imprisoned by the past

I have memories I can't recover, and secrets I can't let out.
People die around me, an endless cycle of history repeating.
My enemies like to make them look like suicides, just to keep the mental pressure on.
Now the whole team is looking into my life, moving every rock, sifting through the dirt, delving into the jungle that is Washington DC to find how deep this conspiracy around me goes, and how long it has been there.
They are looking for the answers that could set me free. Or as free as I'll ever be, because it's the last secret that I alone hold that is the lock on the door of my prison. And rightly so. I don't deserve to be truly free.
All I hope is that by the time this is done I will have had a chance to show Static how truly sorry I am for everything I am putting him through. He didn't deserve this, but I always let the ones I love suffer.

Janus is the fourth book in The Teams series and forms a duology with Static which should be read first. You can expect dark and steamy romance, political intrigue stretching back generations, and the return of characters from The Handled series which shares the same universe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balloon Ride Books
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215243664

Romilly King

Romilly write's character driven gay romances that focus on the dynamics of intense relationships.  Romilly's plots tend to dive deep into the more fascinating aspects of human behaviour - basically there will be a lot of kinky stuff!

Book preview

Prologue

Janus

Where looks are concerned I think Wise got the puddle of water left over at the bottom of the gene pool.  My mother drained most of it for herself. 

She was inordinately beautiful, tall, elegant, dark of hair and rosy of lip. Fragrant, they called her, and she liked that.

Her brother is muddy, and has an almost unfinished look about him.  I can see her features in his face, but they are slightly wrong, as if shifted out of place before they were quite set.

He is aware that he is nothing much to look at but he is confident that he got the majority of the brains, being a psychiatrist and all that.  I’m not sure, he doesn’t seem to be doing much for me.

We’ve been at this for four years now, ever since I came out of hospital, and my feelings just get more entrenched. The desire to squirrel myself away somewhere safe and dark becomes stronger every day.

At least Wise is open to familial pressure.  I can play the poor nephew card and he goes easy on me.  Maybe that’s why I don’t get better? I’m manipulating him into allowing me to get worse.

Wise shifts in his seat and looks up at me as I sit shrouded in layers on the couch in his office. You look pale, he says.

Do I? I hardly ever look in the mirror.  I remember I shaved a few days ago and I didn’t like it.  It was all wrong. Not just the face that looked back at me but the fact that I had to shave more often.

I am moving away from him.  My dead brother.  I age, he doesn’t, but inside my head the picture hasn’t changed.  My frame of reference for me is wrong now.

I suppose I should tell Wise that.

Nope, not doing that.

Do you go out at all, Han? Wise asks gently.

Not if it is avoidable, I answer honestly.

Would it help if I came to the university and we made a plan, just one day a week where we would go out for lunch together, or go to the movies, something other than meeting here.

Once a month I scurry through the early morning streets to meet Wise in his consulting room for what he calls a "catch up" and which I know is therapy.  I insist on changing the day every month.  I don’t like discernible patterns in my behaviour, they seem unsafe.  He goes along with that.

I know you have moved out of dorms, Han. Wise is forcing his face into expressions that should be read as kind and sympathetic but I can feel his frustration.

I wasn’t comfortable there, I say woodenly.

Then we should have talked about that and come up with a solution together, he says, I’m your guardian, I need to be involved in this.

I’m nineteen, I don’t need a guardian.

He sighs, I imagine it is very frustrating for you.  I know I would have been angry about it at your age.

I’m not angry.

What do you feel?

Scared.  I’m scared.  I’m always scared, unless I am locked away and nobody can get in.

Where are you living, Han? Wise tries to put some coercion into his tone but it doesn’t work, I’m too scared to be co-operative.

You don’t need to know. I’m safe, I’m fine.

What about college?

I’m keeping up with my courses online, I cope better that way.

How are you funding this? The account I set up hasn’t been touched.

I don’t need it, I have my own funds.

How? I have control of everything.  I need to know how you are paying for things because if I don’t know I will think the worst.

That makes me laugh. Because the guy who can’t go out, who never speaks to anyone in person, is likely to be doing anything that puts him at risk! Wise’s expression is rueful, admitting my point, and I relent a little. I had a small fund of my own, savings you know, and I have made it grow with some investments.  I’m good online.  Online I can live a normal life. I wish you would just leave me there.

It’s not healthy!

I’m not healthy. I’m not right, Wise, can’t you see that? Can’t you just let me find a way to cope with what I am. I’m not harming anyone.

You’re harming yourself, he fires back.

Only in small ways. I have avoided the big ways, so far.

My brain supplies a flashback.

I’m sorry, says my brother in my memory, his face dirty, his eyes desperate. And I can’t answer him, my voice has gone, for the first time.

I don’t want to tell you where I am living, not right now, not until I am more settled, I say, But I’ll call you every few days, and I’ll keep up with these ‘catch up’ meetings.

He’s not happy but he goes with it.

Maybe he feels guilty for not helping me more.

The years pass as years do.

Wise tries, he really tries, but he gets nowhere.

Can we talk about your father? Wise asks me one day, out of the blue.

Snow is falling outside his office window.  I like the snow. I miss watching it fall.  Even more, I like that it makes me an anonymous figure on the streets. It means getting back to my lair will be less stressful than usual.  Nobody studies faces when they are tucked inside hoods hiding from the cold stuff.

I don’t think about him. It’s a lie, I think about him a lot, but I can’t put it into words, it’s guilt and sadness all mixed up with a little bit of anger.

How do you feel about his suicide?

He has caught me on a co-operative day because of the snow. That it doesn’t make sense.

I didn’t know him well, but suicide is frequently an option for people who are very driven and find all their paths blocked.  He was a driven man, I know that, Wise offers.

I suppose. He was certainly a man who made hard and fast decisions. 

By the way he taps his pen on his notepad I can see Wise wants to broach a subject he thinks might cause problems.  How did your mother feel about his death?

You mean your sister?

Of course, Wise all but snaps.

She didn’t believe it was suicide.

Did she say why?

No, but she didn’t believe most things by then.

He tries a different tack. You were in the house with her, for what, three months after your accident, and that’s two months after your father died.

Yes, after my accident. I’m heavy with the sarcasm here. 

I don’t know how Wise and I will achieve anything if he doesn’t believe in the very foundations of this story. He thinks my twin died in an accident, his car hit by a train on a railway crossing.  I wish that was true, one blink and he would have been gone.

Wise ignores my tone. How was she during that time? Did she look after you, did she care for you, and herself?

You want to know if she was depressed? I feel that is a profoundly stupid question, she was obviously depressed.

No, I just want to know how your day to day life was during that time. It might be helpful.

Is this about me, or is this about you trying to find out about your sister?

This is about you, about you getting better.  You are my sole focus in this, and my only source of information. I need you to talk to me so I can help you.

She started okay, bringing me food and stuff, helping me heal after the surgery on my mouth. I remember the ache in my jaw, the trips to the dentist to work on my implants.  Being thrown from a van does a job on your smile if you hit the ground face first. By the end she had stopped though.

The last thing my mother ever did for me was to take me for the final dental appointment.  By then she was pretty much checked out on the loving mother front. 

Angry and betrayed all round was her main mood the day she died.

So she got less caring over time, over that three month period.

Yes, I sigh. I am regretting coming to see Wise today, he seems edgier, more determined to get into areas I