Читать книгу Toxic: The addictive new crime thriller from the best selling author that will have you gripped in 2018 - Jacqui Rose, Jacqui Rose - Страница 19

‘What’s wrong with you? Can you just shut the hell up?’ Johnny Dwyer snarled at his brother as he sat on the couch in the living room of Ma’s mobile home. He rubbed his head.

‘Come on Ryan, what’s with the tears? You’re doing me head in.’

Sobbing noisily into his hands, Ryan’s whole body shook. ‘Can’t find them. Can’t find them.’

‘What can’t you find?’

‘Can’t find them.’

Leaping up, Johnny roughly pulled his brother’s hands away from his face. ‘Jesus Christ, Ryan, stop crying and just tell me.’

Ryan looked up, blinking away his tears. ‘Yeah? Tell Johnny?’

‘Yeah. I’m your brother, ain’t I? You don’t keep secrets from Johnny, unless you want to be in trouble. You wanna be in trouble?’

Panicked, Ryan shook his head. ‘… the kittens. Kittens have gone.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘My kittens ain’t there.’

Pressing his temples to try to stop his headache, Johnny snapped. ‘Then I’ll get you some more, just stop fucking crying.’

‘Don’t want more. Want my kittens.’

Ryan burst into tears again, which sent Johnny rushing back over to where his brother sat. He grabbed Ryan by his tracksuit top, dragging him up off the sofa and pulling him across to the mirror. He yelled, the veins on his temples, bulging out. ‘Look! Look! Look at you, Ryan! What do you see?’

Johnny and Ryan both stared into the mirror. Where one stopped the other one began. Even Johnny couldn’t see any differences. So startlingly similar. The same piercing blue eyes. The same thick, dark hair and the same handsome, chiselled face. But as Ryan cried, Johnny snarled and suddenly the difference appeared; the cold, hard cruelty in Johnny’s eyes.

‘I’ll tell you, shall I, Ryan? I’ll tell you what I see. I see a baby and not a grown man! That’s what you are Ryan, a baby!’

Ryan continued to sob as Johnny held and shook the back of his brother’s neck as he talked.

‘What did Ma always say to us? What did she say?’

‘No crying. No crying.’

‘That’s right, because we’re the Dwyer boys. We should never cry, and if one cries, Ma will make sure both of us cry, and after what you were going to do to me, I ain’t never going to cry for you no more.’