TOBY
“Hey, it’s me.” A voice rings out after a soft knock on my front door. “Are you home and clothed?” she asks with a laugh.
“Yeah, the coast is clear,” I call back, not taking my eyes off the TV.
“Bro, you’re playing without me?” Stella gasps when she appears, seeing that I’m on the Xbox.
“Well, yeah. I wanted to actually win.”
“Fuck you, I’m still learning,” she barks, falling down beside me after grabbing the second controller.
“You want me to stop, don’t you?”
“What gave me away?” she asks, waving the controller in my face and putting her feet up on my coffee table.
“I thought we needed to leave,” I say, aware that I was just wasting time before heading to Galen’s—Dad’s—for dinner.
“Yeah, but Seb’s only just got back.”
“Fine,” I sigh, ending my game and turning it to two player. I might make out like I’m pissed off, but really, I quite like killing people with my sister. And at least this way, I don’t need to worry whether anyone is going to actually shoot her. Not that she’s not shit hot with a gun, or a knife. Fuck it, even her fists are deadly. Girl’s a walking fucking weapon. Something that I’m sure Damien wasn’t aware of when Galen brought her home. She’s one of us through and through, and I couldn’t be fucking prouder.
“Ready?”
“I’m always fucking ready,” she hisses as I press play.
I dive right while she goes left, hiding behind a wall waiting for the first guy she knows is going to come from the building opposite.
“Yes,” she cries when she gets him on her first shot.
“Good to see you’re improving.”
“You might be better with a gun on the screen, but we both know I’d outdo you on the range any day, big bro.”
“I think that’s something I’m gonna need to take you up on,” I say between shooting a few of our enemies and ducking behind a crate.
“You’re on. Name the day and time. I might even do it blindfolded to help you out. I’d hate to make my big, bad, scary brother cry.”
I bark a laugh as someone jumps around a corner that she wasn’t expecting and shoots her dead in one shot.
“You were saying, little sister?”
“Lucky shot.”
“Sure, sure.”
We’re still battling it out twenty minutes later when Seb lets himself into my flat and finds us hurling insults at each other.
“Ah, bonding again, I see,” he mutters, falling onto the other end of my corner sofa, watching us with amusement dancing in his eyes.
“You need to up your Xbox training with your girl, man. For a bad-arse, she’s pretty shit.”
“Pfft, we’ve got better things to do with our spare time than play games.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Stella mutters. “We play plenty of games. Remember the other night when we played hide the sa—”
“Enough,” I bark, ending the game and throwing my controller onto the coffee table, unable to listen to any of their sexploits right now.
“How was your night, anyway? You never said if you got lucky,” Stella says, turning to face me.