Collin walked in the kitchen to get a wet cloth so he could clean the milk he had spilled. He found Sterling rummaging in the middle of all kinds of pots and pans, opening and closing the kitchen cabinets. He turned around when he saw the boy.
"Where does Sophie keep the knives?" He asked on his raspy voice.
"Sophie doesn't cook; I doubt she even knows where the knives are. My dad keeps them on a sealed box inside the bottom drawer on the stove's left." Sterling twirled around on his heels, opening said drawer and growling in frustration.
"They aren't here." The agent said as he scrambled through the notes Eliot left for Amy and Maggie over the years since they were the two people that usually took care of them. Peering over the Interpol Agent's shoulder the blond boy was able to read a few:
Izzie is highly allergic to chocolate. Do not give her brown candies and tell her there's chocolate in it; she'll figure out it's a lie and you will wake in the middle of the night wet and with your room flooding because she took revenge by turning on the fire security system while you were asleep.
Jake is never allowed more than one portion of sugar a day. If he does get more than one portion Parker and Hardison will punish you by making you take him to the park and he will disappear. You will only find him seventeen hours later showing "Sugar withdrawal" symptoms, whatever that is. He will sleep for fourteen hours after that.
Autumn hates strawberries, Emily loves them. Do not buy strawberries, don't bring them home, don't think of it, don't speak about it, and don't remind them of it. If you do they'll make you buy them and spend the rest of the day pretending to be one another, constantly changing your mind about the damn fruit and leading you to the path of insanity until you throw out everything you cooked that day.
Always have milk at home, enough milk for all the kids and an extra stash because milk is never enough. If you forget to buy milk and Collin doesn't get his normal of two litters and half per day he will get cranky and aggressive, and you will have to ground him for violently pushing Autumn out of the couch because she was insistently trying to braid his (short) hair.
The rest was a long, long list about what vegetables the kids did and did not like and how to combine them so they'd eat properly and be healthy.
"Check again!"
Sterling grumbled, but checked again, finding the drawer had a hidden compartment.
"Why does your father hide the knives? Aren't you kids old enough to know you shouldn't play with them?"
"Have you ever seen Parker and Hardison fight because he fell asleep on a job inside Lucille, not telling her the guards were coming and almost getting her killed by said guards? That's why!" Sterling frowned in disbelief, showing he thought Eliot's method was naïve.
"Are you telling me, Parker, the best thief in the world and also the noisiest, doesn't know where your father keeps the knives?"
"Oh no, she does. But when she's mad to the point where she wants to break Uncle Hardison in half she just grabs whatever comes at hand, not bothering to search. That's why the knives aren't handy." Collin made a small pause before continuing. "Once she used one of Jake's stuffed bears. Those things are deadly!"
Collin walked away with the cloth and came back about fifteen minutes later. He put the cloth away and started taking food from the fridge. "What are we cooking?" He asked as he rolled up his sleeves.
"We?" The adult asked sceptically.
"I just want to make sure you don't poison us." The boy retorted; he started putting all the pots Sterling had unnecessarily taken out on their respective places.
"I don't poison small children."
"You could drug us to keep us asleep until our parents got back..."
Sterling chuckled, also rolling his sleeves up. "Why didn't I think of that before?"
"Do you even know how to cook?" Collin smirked arrogantly.
Collin was chopping tomatoes next to Sterling, who was cutting the meat, when the Interpol Agent started making small talk.
"So, Izzie, the redheaded..." Almost immediately the knife in Collin's hand buried its tip on the chopping board between Sterling's fingers, almost cutting through the place where said fingers united.
"You do not fuck with Izzie!" Collin's tone was grave yet calm, deadly calm, every word carefully paused as a sign of warning. The boy had turned around to face a very surprised Sterling. The boy was standing very straight, his chest out making him bigger as his brown eyes stared coldly into Sterling's.
"Do you kiss your family goodnight with that mouth?" Sterling asked trying to ease the mood. Collin didn't speak. Instead, his face grew even more somber and he stepped forward standing inches away from Sterling, his eyes never looking away from the agent's. It was so effective the older man even forgot the kid was shorter than him. "You can try to manipulate the twins. You can. You can tell them how their father went so low from the life he used to have and how their mother is a pathological liar that can't live with her true self and creates all of those alias because she is just a coward. You can do that. They won't listen, they will be so bored by your weak attempt at turning them against their parents they won't even notice it." The kid's eyes were expressionless; that made Sterling shiver and Sterling was not the kind of man to scare easy.
"You can try to mess with Jake's head. You can tell him how screwed up his mother is; you can tell him how his dad failed in life because he could have been anything and he would have been great, but he wasted his life and became an immoral criminal instead. He will not think on it for enough time to forget it. He probably won't even listen to you. And you can tell him how screwed up he is and that it's their parent's fault. He will laugh in your face and tell you that's a good thing."
And then the boy smiled slightly, though the smile was quickly gone as he continued, his right hand still grabbing the knife's handle.
"And me. You can go on and tell me that my dad was, still is, nothing but a murder and that he deserved to pay for his sins or you can tell me about how he's not my real dad and try to convince me he only adopted because he felt guilty since he never made an effort to save my lost mother. You can tell me every bad thing you know about my real parents, tell me that in the end I am just white trash, like them and I will never be anything more. You can try to bring me down Sterling, because in the end I know who I am and nothing you can say will ever change that. But Izzie..."
He lowered his face for a moment looking down; when he looked up, he had a strange smile on his face, like he was blood thirsty. "You. Do. Not. Mess. With. Izzie!" His head titled a little towards the knife as he spoke. "Because if you do..." He pulled the knife from the chopping board stabbing again, the blade actually grazing Sterling's skin this time, leaving a small cut on the place where the index and middle fingers from his right hand unite.
The boy left the kitchen after that, whistling like a maniac. Sterling cleaned the small cut with a clean cloth and kept cutting. He was clever man, he had understood the message and he would definitely not try to manipulate that girl, yet he smiled because Sterling never loses, and he now knew something about those two kids no one else did...