by Mari Carr
Hollywood Lies
Trinity Masters Book 11.5
Mari Carr
Lila Dubois
Published by:
Farm Boy Press,
Sacramento, California, United States of America.
First electronic edition: May 2020
Copyright © 2020 by Lila Dubois, all rights reserved.
Cover design by Lila Dubois
Book formatted by Farm Boy Press
ISBN: 978-1-941641-52-1 (ebook)
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owners and the above publisher of this book, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Publisher’s note:
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
The Trinity Masters and Masters’ Admiralty…
About the Authors
Also by Lila Dubois
Chapter One
The banner above the door said, “Welcome Home Asslicker.”
Levi paused at the foot of the stairs, staring at the back door and the sign his shithead roommates had strung up. Made from cut-up cardboard boxes and hastily scribbled in block letters, the sign was at odds with the house itself, a beautiful brick and white Federalist-style home. The place was worth millions, and that was before taking into account the prime riverside location in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
They must have heard the car because the back door opened and two massive men walked out onto the small stoop. Montana and Andre started clapping as Levi put his foot on the first stair. Levi raised both hands and flipped a double bird.
Tate, who’d been his ride home from the hospital, locked the car. It was one of the four vehicles the eight building residents had crammed into the small lot behind the house since off-street parking was a treasured luxury this close to Boston.
“Glad you made it. We were worried about your delicate constitution.” Andre opened the back door of unit B—the west half of the duplex house—then bowed gallantly. Levi reached out to smack the other man on the back of the head, but Andre jerked up and ducked out of the way, grinning.
“Did the widdle taser hurt you?” Montana said in an irritating baby voice as he followed Levi inside.
“Shut your fucking cock holster,” Levi snapped. The words might have shocked a civilian, but Montana only laughed. Like Levi, Montana, Tate, Andre—and the other housemates—who lived in the unit A side, had all served in the U.S. military. “Cock holster” was a common military term for mouth, and “Asslicker” a nickname for anyone, like Levi, who’d been in the Army.
Tate was a former Marine with fifty-four confirmed sniper kills, who hid the black spots that had put on his soul with a warm smile and easygoing manner.
Montana had been a Navy SEAL. He’d never talked about how many ops he’d run or what his specialty within the team was.
Andre had been a special operations airman, serving in a tactics squadron. He’d never told any of them about the injury that caused him to limp, but knowing the unit he’d served with, it was a safe bet he’d probably broken the shit out of his leg jumping out of a plane. Still, as badass as that sounded, Andre had been Air Force, which meant he was usually the focus of their insults.
It seemed Levi was going to be the primary target for insults and jokes for a while, and it was more than fair. He’d failed at a mission. And he’d missed a week of class.
Dammit.
He was going to be so fucking far behind on his reading.
Levi dropped the plastic bag with his ruined clothes on the floor. The first responders had cut off his shirt and pants when they’d worked on him in the parking garage where he’d been shot by a modified fatality-capable taser gun.
Tate had brought him clean clothes when he’d come to pick him up from the hospital. Because Tate was a dick who thought he was funny, the pants were too-short sweatpants that said “Yale” in big blue letters down the side, and a USMC sweatshirt.
“You look good,” Andre said, crossing his arms. “The whole look.”
The damned pants ended midway down Levi’s shins. It looked like he was wearing capris.
“Did you morons actually buy these just to make me wear them?” He pointed at the offensive Yale sweats. His roommates, who were more like his brothers, all nodded.
“Dipshits,” Levi said. “I should never tell you fuckers anything.” He’d applied to programs at both Yale and Harvard, and gotten into both, but had only gotten a fellowship offer at Harvard, and that was thanks to some help. He’d mistakenly told his fellow students—Montana and Tate were also in grad programs at Harvard, while Andre was getting his masters at MIT—about his pathetic offer from Yale, and they had yet to pass up an opportunity to rub it in.
“I’m going to shower, and then later tonight, I’m going to strangle one of you assholes with these pants.” Levi left his bag of ruined clothes on the floor of the mudroom and walked through the kitchen and living room, toward the front of the house and the stairs.
“Need some help getting undressed, poor little guy?” Montana called out as he headed for the living room. In lieu of a couch, they had four plush recliners, one for each of them, positioned in front of a massive TV. The designer who furnished the inside of the house probably would have had a heart attack if he’d seen the way they’d shoved the elegant sofa aside in favor of expensive, but ugly, recliners with cup holders in the arms.
“Stop lusting after my body,” Levi called down as he took the steps two at a time. That was probably a mistake—his ribs twanged—but he wasn’t going to show any weakness. Not because he didn’t trust his friends, he did. But he didn’t want to listen to them make shitty jokes.
The three-story building, a mansion when it was built, had been divided and remodeled into a duplex in the eighties, each side with four bedrooms—three on the second floor and a master suite on the upper—attic—floor. The residences were mirror images of each other, with their own front and back doors. The third-floor suites shared a small deck that gave a view of the Charles River several blocks away and also provided escape access via a spiraling wooden staircase in the event of an emergency.
After several days away, he was reminded anew of how lucky he was to call this place home.
The front had maintained the classic Federalist look, with nearly aligned windows in white trim casings, although a porch wide enough to span both front doors had been added. The dormer windows, four each in front and back, were freshly painted. The red brick exterior was free of creeping ivy, and the large pots of flowers that flanked the stairs were carefully maintained by a landscaping company. It was both grand and
understated, the kind of place old money could buy and maintain.
The kind of place someone like Levi would never have stepped foot in on his own.
Levi had the en suite bedroom on the second floor, while Montana and Tate had the other two rooms and a Jack and Jill bathroom. Andre was up in the attic suite, and at this point they’d exhausted the possible comedy they could come up with about an airman wanting to be on the top floor.
Levi opened his door warily, in case they’d left any surprises, but his room was untouched.
An unkind soul might have questioned how Levi could know the room was untouched, since it looked like it had just been tossed by a B&E team. It was a myth that people who’d been in the service maintained the levels of cleanliness and order expected of them on base once they left. Levi had devolved. It was a term his sister, who was neat as a pin, though it was her nature rather than any military training, had used to describe his room the last time she’d been in Boston.
Levi shucked the offensive sweatpants, then cursed under his breath as he gingerly pulled off the shirt. He’d probably stick to button-ups for a few days until the ribs felt better. The ribs were just cracked, thanks to having an electricity-induced seizure while also being halfway out a car window. He didn’t remember much beyond the cold calm he’d felt when he had sighted center mass and pulled the trigger.
He would have killed the man, whose name he now knew was Luca, but according to Mina, the VIP he had utterly failed to protect, Luca had been wearing a bulletproof vest.
He should have gone for a headshot. Instinct had him aiming for the chest because people with bullet holes in their faces were harder to ID postmortem.
He grimaced. He could thank two tours for that disturbing bit of reasoning, he thought, as he shuffled into his bathroom. Ten minutes in the big walk-in shower, with all the showerheads going, and he was free of the residual stickiness from various medical tapes and the vaguely medicinal smell that had clung to his skin and hair.
Next stop was his walk-in closet, where he rummaged around for a hoodie. Wearing that and a pair of basketball shorts along with socks, he headed back downstairs for food and to see what else Tate and the others had learned while he’d been in the hospital.
Tate and Montana were in their recliners. Tate lifted a fist above the top of the chair for Levi to bump as he went past.
That was about as touchy-feely, glad-you-didn’t-die as they could manage.
“I’m about to put on steaks,” Andre said as Levi walked into the kitchen. “You in?”
“You know I am. Potatoes?” he asked, looking at a stockpot sitting on the island.
“Riced cauliflower. Add in some Greek yogurt and seasoning for me.”
“Why can’t we just have potatoes?” Levi grumbled. Andre wasn’t a health fanatic so much as an incredible strategist. Bodies function best with the appropriate allocation of nutrients, therefore, Andre would make sure to ingest those nutrients so his body, his weapon of choice, was always at optimal performance levels.
And if it meant doing weird shit like eating oatmeal and baked fish for breakfast, that’s what Andre did. Since he was an incredible cook, the rest of them fell in line.
Once the steaks were down for their initial sear, and Levi had done his best to turn the riced cauliflower into something like mashed potatoes—he’d managed to sneak some butter in—he turned to his friend.
“What happened? Tate told me you didn’t get Luca.”
Andre’s jaw clenched. “No. He got away, thanks to a citywide distraction.”
“The smoke bomb prank they were talking about on the news.”
“We switched to crowd control. My call.” Andre flipped the steaks, tipping the griddle pan just enough so he could spoon some of the olive oil and rendered fat from the pan over the meat.
“He passed within a couple feet of me,” Tate said as he walked into the kitchen, Montana behind him. “I could have grabbed him.”
“And the asset?” Levi asked, then shook his head. “I mean Mina?”
“She’s safe. Langston was able to talk her through disarming the bomb. But it started making noise. We thought it was about to go off. Especially when the target started running away from her, rather than grabbing her to maintain her as a hostage.”
“This dumbass ran toward her,” Montana said, pointing at Tate.
“I was going to try to get the bomb off.”
“She had it under control.” Montana hopped up to sit on the island.
“She jumped into the harbor,” Tate retorted.
“Good way to minimize a blast impact.”
Levi rolled his shoulders, hating the vague feeling that he’d left something undone. The guys had all come by to visit him in the hospital and filled him in, but he couldn’t remember everything they’d said.
That was thanks to the massive dose of drugs they’d given him at the hospital to keep him calm—apparently he kept trying to leave—and they’d decided it would be easier to monitor his heart, and then later his brain for any signs of damage from the seizure, if he was doped to the gills.
“I should have shot him in the head,” Levi said, as Andre set the steaks aside to rest.
“Why are you all in here when I’m the only one cooking?”
“Because this is where you’re cooking, so this is where the food is,” Montana said in a too-reasonable voice.
“Who’s tracking him? Looking for him?” Levi asked. “Are we still on this duty?”
Tate struck a pose, one hand up, holding an imaginary skull. “Are we, the Warrior Scholars, on a quest to defeat this foe?”
Montana jumped off the counter and put the back of his wrist against his forehead. “We, who are strong of both body and mind, may be the only hope to seek out a villain who is both clever and cunning.”
“I’m gonna knock your heads together if you make me laugh,” Levi warned. He was on a strict no-laughing regime for at least two more days.
“Alas, our efforts, though valiant, were thwarted when we, noble creatures that we are—”
“Jesus Christ, Andre, will you answer the question?”
Andre glanced over at him, then dramatically flung himself facedown on the counter. “We failed, and in our failure are disgraced, disgrace that will—”
“I hate all of you.” Levi wrapped his arms around his ribs as he started to chuckle.
Andre popped up. “Okay, dinner, and then we can actually talk about it. But the short answer is no. The assumption is he’s left Boston, and our coverage area is Boston only.”
Andre put steaks onto plates, then passed them out so they could serve themselves the sides. They ate in the dining room, since Andre’s steak deserved better than a recliner. Stomach happily full of non-hospital food, Levi asked his friends to go over what had happened on Long Wharf one more time.
“There’s a European secret society,” Montana said once they’d debriefed. “I think my grandpa mentioned something like that.”
“I always forget that you’re a legacy,” Levi said.
“Fancy motherfucker,” Tate said genially.
Montana snorted but didn’t disagree.
These men, his brothers-in-arms, were also fellow members of the Trinity Masters, a powerful secret society that had been secretly shaping and securing the future of the nation since before the Revolutionary War.
Montana was third-generation military, and fourth-generation Trinity Masters via his mother’s family. Both of his dads had been in the armed services, and recruited to the Trinity Masters after exemplary wartime service. With the support of the Trinity Masters, they were two individuals who had started as enlisted men and had risen through the ranks. One of Montana’s dads was now a Marine Corps Brigadier General, and the other worked as a civilian in an undisclosed branch of the Pentagon. Given that Montana’s mom, who was herself a legacy, did dark matter research and was based in Alaska, Levi was fairly certain that if the country were ever to launch manned deep space explorat
ion, or make contact with E.T., at least one of Montana’s parents would be in the room.
If—when—he got married, Levi’s kids would be like Montana. They would grow up safe and secure in a way that only money and resources could provide. And if they wanted, and when they were ready, they would have the opportunity to belong to the Trinity Masters, a secret society brimming with power and wealth. The power was created and maintained by alliances and marriages.
Trinity marriages.
Levi slumped back in his chair, fists in his hoodie pocket. He’d first gotten involved in the op that led to the taser to the heart when he was sent to guard a newly married trinity. Seeing Langston, Mina, and Rich together had made him start thinking about his own marriage.
When he’d joined the Trinity Masters, he’d given up the choice of when and who he would marry.
Joining had also allowed his life to take a totally different course. He’d grown up dirt poor and hadn’t even bothered to go ROTC because he’d known that even with scholarships and loans, he wouldn’t have had money for food and books. Instead, he’d gone straight into the Army, with a vague notion that maybe someday he’d use the GI Bill to go back to school. After all, he’d always loved learning and was a good student.
Now money and access were no longer barriers for him, and he, Levi Hart, was going to be a Classics Professor, with a PhD from Harvard. It was a world away from what he’d imagined for himself, and he was so damned lucky.
Instead of slogging through war zones, putting his life on the line for stupid reasons like access to fossil fuels—after ten years in, the patriotic zeal had worn away to cynicism—he was going to spend his life researching dusty Latin and Greek texts, writing papers no one would read, and traveling the world to meet with and talk to other professors.
