by Wren Weston
Oracles knew the score, but no one had defected this time.
“How’d they know these girls would be potential oracles?” Lila frowned, plopping back onto the couch with a mug of Sangre after their meal. “Breaking into pediatric medical records takes time.”
“Perhaps that’s why they stole children from smaller cities. They have less sophisticated security systems.” Tristan joined her with his own mug and picked up the girls’ files.
“Sioux Falls isn’t a necessarily a small city.”
“Yes, but they didn’t have to dig into Rebecca’s records, did they? She was outed as a future oracle during the investigation. It was all over the news. All they had to do was figure out where the girl was being held. That’s an easier problem to solve.”
“Apparently it is if you have tracers. They must not have been able to break into the FPS database. I suppose that’s some relief. It’s not easy, but it’s not that difficult, either. These mercs aren’t technical geniuses.”
“What did the oracle mean this morning when she said her vision was blurry?”
Lila shrugged. “She said it happens when someone hasn’t made decisions that impact the vision. Like if the mercs hadn’t decided how to take Rebecca yet.”
“Mercs from the empire are efficient. They have plans within plans and a thousand fallbacks if something goes wrong. They always know their play well before they act.”
Dixon whistled, still eating at the counter. Someone else involved hadn’t decided.
“That’s a good point,” Lila said. “If the oracle’s vision was blurry, perhaps their plan hinged on someone else, maybe someone deciding if the money was worth the betrayal.”
“Or someone trying to figure out if they’d rather give up a child, just so mercs would stop breaking their bones.” Tristan breathed out sharply. “This is a lot of work for one kid.”
“It was also an awful lot of work for Oskar.”
They don’t care much about getting caught.
“Yes, they do. It’s just that no one in the Allied Lands tests for tracers. We don’t even know what to look for. It was a fluke that my people noticed at all. The bullets make it look like an obvious setup. Natalie’s pissed off half the families in Saxony, not to mention her own. Her partners, too. There are plenty of people in New Bristol who might have done it and had the resources to implicate mercs. The only thing that’s hard for me to swallow is that Natalie would accept a drink from any of them. She was smarter than that.”
“You sound like you respected her.”
“I respected her as somewhat competent. That doesn’t mean that I wanted to be best friends.” Lila shut down her laptop. “I have to get home. I’ll be missed.”
“Stay. We’ll figure this out together.”
“I can’t,” she whispered in Tristan’s ear, her stomach churning, her cheeks burning. “Isabel will know someone was in my room last night, and she’ll know we weren’t just talking.”
Suddenly, Dixon became quite preoccupied with his fortune cookie.
“Isabel?” Tristan whispered back.
“The woman who cleans my room, since Alex hates me now. The woman who does my laundry, particularly the sheets.”
Dixon snatched up his food, then shuffled to the door.
Tristan hopped up. “Dixon, wait, I—”
Dixon waved him off and slipped out the door.
“He’s okay with us being…whatever we are,” Lila said after the door closed.
“Are you sure?”
“Talk to him, not me.” Lila shoved her laptop into her satchel. “Besides, I need to get home. I have a great deal of damage control on my plate for this evening.”
“From Isabel?”
“Yes. Sweet as she is, she isn’t loyal to me. She’s loyal to whomever signs her checks. She has to be. My mother knows about you now, and she’ll have her spies scrolling through every camera on the property trying to find a glimpse of you.”
“She won’t find any.”
Lila gave him a long stare. “You know this because?”
“Because I’m that good. I do manage quite well on my own.”
“Let’s hope you kept away from the cameras.”
“I kept away from the cameras,” Tristan said, rolling his eyes. “Besides, who cares if your mother knows you’re screwing someone? Isn’t that what highborn do?”
Lila reached for her militia boots, slamming the heels onto the floor. “My mother sees my womb as Randolph real estate, perhaps one of the most important locations. You don’t want her attention. Trust me.”
“I can handle it.”
“Can you handle the auction house? If I seem too enamored of someone right now, she’ll start to get suspicious. It won’t go well for either of us.”
“I don’t think you’re in any danger of seeming too enamored.”
“I don’t want to have a fight tonight, Tristan.”
“Maybe we should have one anyway.”
“Then fight by yourself. I’m tired, and I’m going home.”
“I don’t need to be protected from your family, you know. Stop using that as an excuse to slink away.”
“Slink away?”
“Yes. You’re always slinking away, and you’re getting your excuses mixed up. What will it be next time, I wonder?” Tristan knocked her boots away with a sweep of his leg.
Lila looked up, annoyed.
She wasn’t sure who reached for whom, but Tristan’s kiss wasn’t nice or sweet this time. It stung with anger and frustration all at once, nearly hurting with its ferocity. He tugged her down to the couch and whipped his clothes off between more nips, shoving her clothes away and tossing them on the floor.
There was no foreplay this time.
Luckily, Lila didn’t need any. She’d grown wet the minute he shoved her onto the couch.
He thrust into her, hard.
She didn’t even have time to wrap her legs around his waist before he thrust again.
Lila gasped as he kept going, grabbing at the couch cushions to steady herself, his unreadable eyes fixed on hers. Rather than happy or intense or love-stricken, they had completely blanked, but they fixed on her all the same.
She came after a dozen thrusts.
He did the same, gripping the back of the couch rather than her waist, biting back a moan.
They stared at one another awkwardly, as though neither of them quite knew what to do.
“Is this all you understand, Lila? Is this all you’ll ever want from me, and only when you’re in the mood?”
Lila nearly reached for her boots once more, but his cock flared the moment she looked at it. She no longer wanted to go home. Not yet.
Shoving him on the floor, she straddled him, rode him, but she wasn’t fucking him. Not really. She was fucking his incessant need to pull her close, to cling to her, to follow her. She was fucking his continued thrusts into her feelings. The fact that she’d not been able to enjoy their date for fear that a spy might snap a photo. The fact that she had to keep him a secret from her mother to keep him safe, and that he didn’t seem to appreciate her efforts. The fact that she had to wear some stupid hood in his shop to protect her identity from his people.
The fact that they were never, ever going to work out.
The fact that she was so damn tired of everything.
She rode him, not fucking him, but fucking all of society like a pissed-off whore turning tricks.
When she came, it wasn’t great. It just was.
Tristan gripped her thighs and pumped into her as he finished. After several strokes, his grip slid away and he panted underneath her, his arms slapping on the rug above his head. “That was shit, wasn’t it?”
He swallowed.
Lila watched his Adam’s apple rise and fall.
She hopped
up, not wanting him inside her any longer, then attacked the pile of clothes near the couch. “What are we doing, Tristan?”
“I’m trying to start a relationship. Trying being the key word. I didn’t realize I’d have to talk you into it every single fucking day.”
“And I didn’t realize that nothing I do or say will ever be good enough for you.” She fastened the clasp on her bra. “You’ll always want more.”
“All I want is for you to tell me that I’m important to you. That you miss me at least a little when I’m not around. That you want me, at least in some way. Is that too much to ask?”
“It’s complicated.”
“No, it’s really not,” he said, tossing her clothes to her as he came to them, then pulling on his trousers before he even found his boxer briefs.
“I have to go home. People are waiting.”
“Are they? Last time you didn’t want to be here because you worked better at home. Now it’s something else. It’s always going to be something, isn’t it? Always some excuse to leave.”
“Do you even care?” She pulled on her boots and grabbed her satchel. “I have to go whether you understand the reason or not.”
“Of course, you wouldn’t want to be late for Mommy.”
Lila’s head snapped up. Whatever he’d won over the last week evaporated all at once. “Fuck you, Tristan DeLauncey.”
His face crumpled. “Wait,” he said, sprinting forward as she grabbed her hood and dashed out of the room.
Tristan was fast, but Lila was closer and faster. She slammed the apartment door in his face and jogged down the hall and stairs.
Dixon sat on the base of them, stopping mid-bite as she blew past.
He stood up, turning back around to his brother, who blew down the steps in a rush of tumbling bare feet. “Will you just wait?”
But Lila didn’t stop. She’d had enough. She shot through the back door of the shop and slipped into the alley, nearly knocking Samantha over in her haste to get away.
“Heya, Hood.” Lila didn’t reply as she sprinted to the mouth of the alley. “Hey, Hood, where are you going so fast?”
The back door opened so hard that it thwacked against the brick.
But Lila was already gone. She turned the corner and ran the two blocks to the parking garage that held her Adessi.
She didn’t look back.
She was never, ever going to look back again.
After climbing into her sedan, Lila sped through downtown, charging through the streets like a restless panther. She didn’t want to go back to the Randolph compound any more than she wanted to go back to Tristan’s shop, so she didn’t. Instead, she exited onto the loop and circled around New Bristol.
The bluebonnets lulled her into drowsiness as she took another pass. Then another.
It was annoying, not being able to ride her Firefly. Darting around other cars was so much more satisfying with an engine vibrating between your legs, the wind clawing at your skin, the knowledge that you could take a lethal spill if you didn’t pay enough attention.
She would have been more awake, that was for damn sure.
She tried to clear her mind, to think about work, to think about Oskar, the oracles, Alex. It didn’t take long for her thoughts to circle back to Tristan, her mind on an endless loop, just like her Adessi.
Lights flashed in her rearview.
A haggard Bullstow cruiser turned on its siren, struggling to keep pace.
Lila cursed and pulled over, her sedan bouncing as she slipped off the road.
A fresh-faced Bullstow militiaman knocked on her window with a few sharp strikes. “ID,” he said when she rolled down the glass. He slipped his palm from his front pocket and began tapping on the screen. “Do you have any idea how fast you were going?”
“Not really.” She handed him her ID.
The blackcoat nearly choked as he read it, apologizing and stumbling over his words. He bowed and blustered for so long that his palm began to beep, prompting him for the next piece of information for the ticket.
The palm went unanswered.
Lila frowned. The leather blackcoat didn’t him fit him yet. It still bagged around his thin frame.
“I didn’t recognize you without your family colors,” he stammered at last.
“Give me the ticket. It’s not like I can’t pay it, and I deserve the damn thing. Besides, it’ll do my mother good to wonder why I was doing… What was it?”
“Two hundred and ten kilometers per hour.”
“Good. It’ll shut her up for a while.” She rubbed her chin as her brain finally caught up with the number. “Wait, two ten? Really?”
“That’s nothing. This car could hit two fifty. The roadsters climb even higher. At least that’s what I’ve read. My cruiser only goes up to one ninety. If you hadn’t stopped, I never would have caught you.”
“We’re militia. We stop for one another.”
The young blackcoat nodded and reluctantly tapped away on his palm. “Did you receive your ticket, chief?” he asked as though reading from a script.
Lila lifted her palm and scrolled, finding the message.
Oracle’s light. Two ten.
She was almost proud of herself.
“Yes. Remember, never let a highborn off with a warning if you wouldn’t let a workborn off as well. It disgraces the militia.”
The officer bowed before he darted back to his cruiser and sped away, perhaps worrying she might change her mind.
Lila leaned against the still open window. He’d remember this stop, this lesson she’d tried to impart for a very long time. Not only because he’d dared to give an heir a speeding ticket but because he’d dared to give one to a chief.
And because she’d given him permission to do it, instructed him to do it as though it were part of his training.
She hated that. She hated that people remembered such little things about her, such insignificant annoyances in her life, things that echoed in their memories. The time they gave Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph a speeding ticket. The time they saw Chief Randolph eating crème brûlée with the prime minister in Hotel Emeraude. The time they saw the Randolph prime outside a teenage highborn party, taking a break from the ridiculousness inside. The time they saw the heir in El Dorado, eating lunch with a man who couldn’t stop grinning.
Shaw would praise her words after he saw the ticket and brought the boy in for a debriefing. He would have done the same at his age, though without her permission. He’d put almost anyone in a holding cell for breaking almost any law, no matter the crime, no matter who they were.
He’d put her in one the moment he found out about the things she’d been doing lately.
He’d only hired her because the prime minister insisted on it, because Bullstow needed her help to solve its most desperate cases, because she worked for free, because he didn’t have to put the expense on a spreadsheet and justify it to High House. Because he knew she wouldn’t blackmail him.
Because he could trust her.
But he couldn’t, and he should never have trusted her at all.
Max was right. She’d been around Tristan and Dixon for too long. Not only was she not covering herself as she should, she was risking herself and others. And for what?
When had everything gotten so damn complicated?
She laid her head against the headrest, letting traffic pass her by, lost in thought.
Half an hour later, Lila awoke with a start, her engine cold.
Chapter 24
Lila stole through the front door of the great house, her countenance as grouchy as her mood. It was nearly midnight, far too late for anyone to be awake downstairs on a Thursday night. She didn’t care if Ms. O’Malley or Isabel saw her, or even if the cameras saw her. She didn’t really care if anyone saw her.
Her mother cleared
her throat.
Perhaps Lila cared a little.
She turned her head, peering through the entryway into the parlor. Her mother and father lounged on a white couch, sipping Gregorie.
“Sit,” Chairwoman Randolph ordered from afar.
Fuck. Lila had seen her mother’s Blanc convertible in the garage. The chairwoman had obviously seen what she’d done.
It seemed so funny this morning when she’d been half asleep.
Lila reluctantly shuffled toward the parlor. She propped herself up against the doorway, crossing her boots at the ankles. “You bellowed?”
“I said sit. Not skulk in the doorway like an eavesdropping slave.”
Lila shoved her hands in her pockets and plopped down on an uncomfortable wooden chair. The padding was thin, not because it was an antique, but because its maker had been a sadist.
Its owner might be one too.
Slouching, she nearly dropped her heels on the delicate glass table, stopping only when her mother hopped to her feet. “What are you doing?”
Yes, she’d definitely been around Tristan and Dixon for far too long, but that wouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Lila sat up, boots on the floor, and cleared her throat. “So, you bellowed?”
Her mother just stared until Lemaire tugged her back to her seat.
“There are oil stains on my rug, Elizabeth. Oil stains. I don’t even know how you got my car inside Wolf Tower, much less parked it inside my private apartment on the top floor, but—”
Lila couldn’t help herself. She giggled.
Her mother glared. “I could barely get inside, Elizabeth. The door kept bouncing off the bumper. You ruined a rug that’s been in the family for two generations.”
“Is that sentimentality I hear, Mother?”
“Don’t take that tone with me, child. I had to get our mechanics to take the Blanc apart and reassemble it back at the garage. It took the entire day. There were parts left over.”
“So buy a new one.” Lila shrugged. “Perhaps I’ll leave your car alone next time if you stop putting bugs in mine.”
The chairwoman cocked her head. “You did all that just because—”
