The soft classical music suddenly sounded like death metal to her ears.

Jamal was leading her in a waltz dance before she could protest, his hands slipping down dangerously to her waist and his other hand holding hers. Grace opened her mouth and closed it like a gaping fish, as a shiver snaked down her spine. He was saying something but she couldn't hear anything over the ringing in her ears.

Grace caught Amina's concerned gaze and forced herself to nod, because no matter how much she wanted, they couldn't cause a scene and Amina needed to find the man they were looking for — especially because Jamal's presence meant he was seeking out the same person, she knew that much that The ORION Project and The MEDUSA Project were rivals, enemies and each one was always seeking to sabotage the other.

Go, Grace mouthed to a still standing Amina, the other girl nodded and then she was gone, sweeping into the crowd, leaving Kendrick behind. He gave her a single look that told her that he was ready to make a scene if she gave the word. It was one of his traits that she liked — the fact that he was fiercely protective — and hated because it meant he wore his emotions on his sleeve, with people like Joshua Phillips, it meant vulnerability.

A tap on her shoulder made her snap back to the present and she hoped that Jamal hadn't noticed her looking at Kendrick. Jamal smiled his crooked smile, the one she had had a brief crush on, but now it just made her want to smack his teeth down his throat.

"I see you're running with the wolves now?" Jamal asked in a low voice as they resumed their dance, he was leading and she was just shuffling her feet along, wanting to step on his feet, but he was careful.

"Wolves?" Her voice was a fragile whisper.

"The ORION Project, everyone on campus calls them the wolves." Jamal answered, watching her face twist into something bitter.

Jamal laughed, and it drew the attention of the couple dancing near them. He let his hand lower down her back, and almost touching her butt when she gave him a withering glare, daring him to.

Grace looked at Jamal, wondering why she had ever thought him attractive, everything about him seemed fake and manufactured, his smile was too wide, his face was rough, crooked nose and slanted eyes — she remembered commenting on it and him telling her that girls dug boys with scars. — and a mouth that was feminine, he knew how to twist it into that smile that made it seem like he was laughing at you. She tried to sneak a glance at Kendrick wanting to mentally compare both boys when she saw that he was gone, no longer standing by the buffet table.

Grace scanned her eyes around, searching for him but Jamal's hand tilted her face back to his, he looked angry but tried to hide it with that mocking smile he usually wore.

"What is so fascinating than me that you keep looking around?" Jamal asked, tsking his tongue. "I know you are in awe of all the wealth around."

Grace narrowed her eyes. "What do you want?"

"I am being a good person by looking after you," Jamal said with a shrug that came off as anything but innocent. She wasn't deceived by it.

"Since when have you ever looked after anything but yourself?" She snapped, regretting it when his grip on her waist tightened. Fear made her palms clammy, would Jamal dare to hit her in front of people?

"Be careful, darling, I am not a very patient man." He told her softly. No, she wanted to say, you are brash and it will be your downfall someday.

Grace wished she could say it to his face, but she found out she couldn't, not when he was peering intently into her face with something that looked like awe shinning in his eyes as if he couldn't quite believe he was looking at her. It made Grace wary, and desperate to leave, the pressure in her chest increasing. She was foolish for thinking that she could be brave like Amina and face Jamal after how things had ended a year ago.

It had taken almost a month after the incident with him for her to safely walk the campus alone, she had been afraid that Jamal was going to pay her back for saying no to him, she had heard tales of what boys like him did to girls like her. It hadn't helped that he was a badminton player like her — it was how they had met — and that they usually practiced together on Wednesdays with the rest of the school team but suddenly a week after the incident, he had stopped showing up to practice, he never bothered her at all. She thought she had been safe.

Until now.

"What do you want with me, Jamal?" She hated that her voice was barely above a timid whisper.

He spun her around, in synch with the other dancing couples around them.

Grace had half forgotten she was dancing, she had forgotten she was in the midst of powerful people who earned more in a day than her family did in a year, she had been back in that dark corner at the back of that same restaurant, Jamal's body pressing into hers, backing her against the wall and his lips peppering sloppy kisses on her neck and going lower, despite her muffled protests. He had been drunk.

It had taken a staff who had chosen the dark corner to smoke to notice them and her protests to get Jamal off her.

"I'm looking out for you," He repeated, drawing her close that his breath was fanning her cheek, she caught the faint smell of alcohol on his breath and recoiled visibly. He didn't notice.

"The ORION Project aren't who you think they are, Grace, they don't recruit people like you —" He sneered in her face, looking her up and down, the disgust in his face, she found that it didn't hurt her like she thought it would. She just wanted to get away from him.

"Except they've suddenly become a shelter for whores." He spat the words like venom and with each word her chest tightened, as if was crushing her heart with his fists.

"You don't know anything about them, and I know too well how you've always wished to be them." She cut back, blinking back tears and hoping that the dim light of the hall prevented him from seeing her weakness.

She should have known that her luck was far from good.

Jamal grinned wider, it was an angry slanted smile, he was enjoying the fear he was driving into her chest, so she forced the fear aside and let all her anger show instead, because it was the only emotion she could afford to show.

"I know enough, none of the societies on campus would ever accept you, you'd have no luck even with the lowest of the lowest; The Zeus society." He said, he released his grip slightly. "Shouldn't it make you wonder why?"

"Why would they want you? What do you have that they don't have already?" He recited the questions, the music was faster now, a hip twisting reggae song and people around them seemed to be having fun making up moves to the songs.

Jamal was still holding her still.

"The ORION Project always looks for three things in potential recruits; they call it 'essentials' — power, money and brains — and you don't seem to have any." Jamal continued. "You aren't that stupid of a girl, the sooner you find out what, then the sooner you know how to play things to your advantage before they decide they want nothing to do with you anymore."

Jamal was a dick, an asshole, there was nothing good about him that Grace could think of but he was right, and it scared her. Kendrick talked of destroying ORION but he was as clueless as her, he didn't even know where to begin from, he spoke of taking them down from the inside, but that was more difficult than taking them down from the outside, because the inside was a fucking maze and they would go mad in it without any directions.

"And you have all the answers to anything?" She mocked, pleased when his features tightened in a frown. One of Jamal's weaknesses was being outsmarted — it wasn't even a particularly difficult feat since he wasn't particularly a smart person, it was a wonder that he hadn't burnt down his society to the ground. People like Jamal liked to make themselves feel better by bringing others down with harsh words.

"I do have the answers you don't," He taunted. "If you ever want the answers — you know where to find me."

He let her go abruptly, spinning on his heels and disappearing into the crowd, she was still dizzy from his words when someone took her hands, leading her in a new dance, when she looked up, a shiver snaked down her spine — the elderly man looked down at her, smiling slightly, it was the target they were looking for, Grace remembered the thick scar that ran from his left eye down to his chin.

"Ms. Ilori, it is nice to meet you, I've been told so much about you."

***

Sanmi jerked back, he was standing up so swiftly that he was disoriented from the motion. All he knew was that he wanted to be far away from that man, no, Grace's — Tamika's father. He did the last thing he expected to do, he laughed, it started out slow then blooming to a full hysterical laughter.

He doubled over, slapping his knees and gripping the mahogany desk because he knew he would sink to the ground if he didn't.

Tolu Kingston watched, emotionless.

Sanmi was wiping tears from his eyes.

"You're joking." His voice cracked. The man shook his head.

"There's an original birth certificate in that file, not the false one we got when we gave her away." Mr. Kingston said, flicking his eyes at the untouched file on the desk. Sanmi wanted to burn it in the artificial fireplace.

"Grace is my sister," he told the man softly, "My sister, my blood sister."

"She is your sister in every way possible." Mr. Kingston said fiercely. "But she isn't your blood sister."

"I know it hurts finding out, you probably feel cheated and lied to and you have every right to. But she cannot know about this." He continued.

"So she isn't even allowed to know the truth, her truth?" Sanmi said bitterly, half wondering how he was calm, although calm might be an exaggeration, he wanted to cause harm, he wanted to hurt something, hurt someone but he wasn't doing so right now.

"The truth can be more dangerous and cause more harm than a lie." Tolu said, he tapped a slow offbeat on the table. "Do you think it hasn't killed me to keep this to myself, to watch her grow up from so far away and knowing that there is nothing else I can do for her."

"If you love someone, Sanmi, you will want to keep them from harm at all costs, even if you end up hurting them."

Oddly, Sanmi could relate to that statement.

He sat back down, his eyes burning with unshed tears. What did this mean for him? What did it mean for Grace? He almost laughed, his sister was the heir to a multimillionaire company and she didn't even know him, what would she think when she found out?

Would she be so willing to leave everything about her past behind? Including, Ewatomi, Rafe and him.

Sanmi shook his head, a thought occurring to him.

"Is that why you visited my father some weeks ago?" He asked, "To tell them the truth?" He remembered that day and how their mother had been fidgety and his father, too boisterous in his manner to be true, had they been keeping that secret from Grace?

Tolu Kingston shook his head and Sanmi braced himself for the answer he knew he wouldn't like.

"You know your father was once a medicine student, we were course mates and then later, friends. He had to drop out because he got your mother pregnant, but I kept in touch." Tolu said, his eyes distant as if he was reliving the story. "I helped them stay afloat after they had you."

Sanmi flinched at the pointed words, he knew very well that his parent's marriage had never been the traditional love story and sometimes he wondered if it was because of him that they began to despise each other. It was why he never wanted Tope to keep the pregnancy, because he knew deep down that he could never be a good father and he never wanted to subject his future child to a childhood like his.

"Long story short, Mika and I got into trouble with ORION because we found out what they intended using Eden for, it stood against everything we were and we decided to leave."

"By then, it was too damn late." He snorted. "Mika was pregnant, it was during this period that we completed the program, it was one hideout to another, never remaining safe for long. Things got too complicated, and Mika knew we weren't going to last much longer alive, because make no mistake, ORION would have found us sooner or later."

Sanmi listened, trying to imagine the woman that was Grace's mother, how had she been like? Was Grace so much like her?

"Around this time, your parents had another baby, a girl."

"Ewa?" Sanmi frowned because the timeline made no sense, Ewatomi was a year older than Grace.

"No, she was stillborn."

Sanmi blinked in shock.

"Raymond and Linda were devastated and we had just had a baby girl," Tolu's voice wobbled slightly. "It was the perfect deal, we had to give her away and they wanted a daughter — it sounds twisted but we were both deep in our grief. I offered them Tamika and a monthly stipend to help them out of their financial issues too."

Sanmi felt fury well up in him, he wasn't sure who to be angry at, his parents or this sad man.

"Who named her Grace?" Sanmi asked softly.

"You did." Mr. Kingston's answer surprised him.

"I couldn't have, I was just four." Sanmi scoffed, toying with the silver watch on his wrist, rolling it over his wrist.

"Yes, you were, when your parents were picking out a name, Linda told me that you had popped into the room and announced that you liked the name Grace because that was your favourite teacher's name."

He almost smiled at this, because he still remembered the tall kind woman in his nursery school who always had a biscuit waiting for him whenever he arrived at school.

"You never visited." Sanmi said instead.

"No, never." The tapping ceased.

"Why?"

"Because I was a coward." Tap tap.

"What do you want me to do now?" Sanmi finally said after a terse moment of silence.

Tolu Kingston looked relieved, his brows smoothening to that familiar emotionless look, he still didn't look much like Grace, and Sanmi wondered if Grace looked like her real mother instead.

It explained why she had never really looked like any of them in the family, Sanmi remembered Ewa commenting on it when they were kids and their parents had been quick to say that Grace looked like Linda's dead grandmother, there had been no pictures to prove it or to prove otherwise so the topic had been dropped.

"I want you to comb through every piece of information on that file, because The ORION Project is on the move with Project Eden and I want to figure out what it is before they know what to do with Grace."

"I wouldn't put too much faith in me," Sanmi said wryly. "You have the wrong guy, I'm no good at mysteries."

"Tamika, my wife, wrote hundreds of journal entries about The ORION Project and her work for them up to her death, she also wrote about our daughter, there might be hundreds of secrets in that file, things I've never even read," Mr. Kingston said. "I want you to go through it because you know too much about The ORION Project, and too much about Grace."

"Which is why you chose me in the first place." Sanmi pointed out.

Kingston nodded, leaning back in his chair.

"Whatever you do, be quick with it."

"Oh, and Sanmi?" The man hummed when Sanmi stood up, with the bulky file under his armpit, he wanted nothing more than to leave the stuffy room, he wanted nothing more than the familiar numb that drugs provided.

"Yes?"

"Don't let The ORION Project find out."