The Lost of New Bristol (Lila Randolph Book 2)

by Wren Weston

  “But Finn’s not our uncle.”

  Lila shrugged. “Uncle and dad and sister just mean family. Sometimes you have to make your family where you can.”

  Vivian pulled at her lip, lost in thought. She wasn’t old enough to realize that Lila had been fishing through her diary, or perhaps she was just too innocent to believe that someone could read it if there was a lock.

  “Be nice to your uncles,” Lila said, leaving them to their cartoons. She entered the dining room in time for Tristan to shovel a last bite of eggs into his mouth. Dixon spooned his bowl of oatmeal, squinting at the cartoons in the other room.

  “Are we good?” Tristan asked around his food.

  “His story checks out. The kids are happy enough here.”

  Jake turned his gaze on the two girls in the den. “They told you that?”

  “They didn’t have to. I read Vivian’s diary.”

  Jake’s mouth gaped. “That’s an invasion of privacy. You shouldn’t—”

  “Take it down a notch, Jake. I had to make sure they were okay. I hope you’d do the same thing in my position.”

  “Are you going to arrest us? Are you going to take the girls away?”

  “Why should I? You’ve become caretaker to two girls at the request of their parents. This isn’t a matter for the militia or anyone else, as far as I’m concerned.” She returned his palm and stalked toward the door. “I’ll have my people release your husband. Tell him to stop following me, or I’ll charge him.”

  “Wait,” Jake called out, just as she reached the door. “The oracle wishes to see you as soon as possible.”

  “Well, the oracle can see me in a vision giving her the finger.”

  “You don’t believe in the oracles?”

  “No.”

  “She had a vision of you coming here. How else would I have known you were coming?”

  “She didn’t have a vision, Jake. She knew because your husband called her from a Randolph holding cell. He burned his one call on the oracle.”

  “How’d she know the others would come?”

  “Because it would have been stupid of me to come alone.”

  “You’re wrong.” He frowned.

  “When I was teenager, my best friend made me go see the oracle.”

  “You saw her mother?”

  Lila nodded. “She claimed she had a vision about me, too. I was walking down the staircase in our family’s great house. My hair was still dark, I had a toddler in my arms, and I wore a sad expression. I also wore the whitecoat. The woman is a fraud, Jake, just like her mother. They’re all frauds.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” he called out while Tristan and Dixon followed her from the apartment.

  Chapter 13

  “Thanks for helping out,” Lila said as they reconvened in front of the lowborn convenience store a block from Jake’s apartment. A trickle of people entered and left the store, small bags swinging, feet skipping.

  Dixon held his hands out for the truck keys.

  Tristan wordlessly tossed them to his brother.

  “It was no problem really, but I want to know what’s going on with you and the oracles.”

  A door slammed. An engine started. Tires squealed.

  Tristan’s truck pulled out into the street without him.

  He chased Dixon for half a block before giving up. People on the sidewalk stared and giggled. One bored workborn held his beer aloft as a toast. “May you have better luck catching a cab.” He snickered, cracking the tab with a hiss.

  Lila grabbed Tristan’s arm and tugged him down the street. “We’ll take mine.”

  “Did you see that? He just took off without me!”

  “Dixon interacted more with his oatmeal than with us. You should talk to him. An actual conversation, not just painting his room a rainbow of tacky colors and hoping the weirdness goes away.”

  “It’s not that tacky.”

  “Yes, it is,” Lila insisted, unlocking her sedan.

  “How can any of it go away? It’s never going away.”

  “Well, it’s certainly won’t get better if you let it fester.” Lila could think of another conversation Tristan should have. The one where he confessed why he kept bringing her into his bed if he had no intention of touching her.

  “Let’s talk of something else.” Tristan slipped inside the car and strapped on his seatbelt with a sharp little click. “The oracle, perhaps? How come you didn’t tell me you were mixed up with her?”

  Lila pulled out her palm and began to check for bugs. “Because it doesn’t concern you? Because I don’t need to run every job I have past you? Because—”

  “Don’t be snippy.”

  “I’m not being snippy.”

  “Your father asked you to investigate them, didn’t he?”

  Lila plopped in the driver’s seat and started the sedan’s engine. “Yes, Tristan. He did. I often take jobs for my father. You know that.”

  “You’re exhausted, and you just took a job that almost killed you less than a week ago. You can’t even ride your Firefly right now. Doesn’t he care?”

  “Should I forget about finding Oskar because I can’t ride my damn motorcycle?” Lila replied, pulling out of the parking spot. “If I hadn’t spent the last week planning how to break Oskar out of LeBeau’s, then I would have had plenty of sleep.”

  “That’s different. The oracles can wait. Oskar could die if we don’t save him.” He grazed her cheek as she drove. “Did you get any sleep at all last night, Lila?”

  Her toes curled in her boots when he said her name, his mouth lingering on the vowels like one might tongue a sweet. He had just begun using it the week before, and even still, said it rarely. The man obviously had no idea of the effect it had on her.

  She batted away his hand, unsure what might happen if she let him carry on. “I had a few hours. Besides, very little of what I researched last night had to do with the oracles, so don’t blame my father just because I’m a little tired.”

  “You’re not a little tired, and you’re not fine. You already have dark circles under your eyes, and it’s only going to get worse until we find Oskar. If your father saw you now, even he would notice, and—”

  “He saw me this morning.”

  “Didn’t he care?”

  Lila nearly wanted to laugh at how uptight he’d become over a few hours of lost sleep. Such a fuss when he didn’t care that he’d turned her away from his bed for a week.

  The workborn really were different.

  “I’m a grown adult, Tristan,” she said, stopping at a red light. “Grown adults often have to work when they’re tired.”

  “Good parents would give you time to recover. Good bosses, too. There’s too much going on lately. He’s going to lose you as a resource if he’s not careful.”

  “What do you propose? If he put someone else on this case, they would have arrested Jake and returned the girls to their parents. Part of why he puts me on these cases is because he trusts my judgment.”

  “Your judgment or your moral flexibility?”

  “Both.”

  “I propose a vacation when this is all over. We’ll go somewhere nice, get away from everything for a few weeks.”

  “A few weeks?”

  “You drive a hard bargain. A month, then.”

  “This isn’t a negotiation.”

  “Isn’t everything a negotiation with your kind?”

  Lila studied Tristan, her gaze drawn to his long eyelashes. She couldn’t imagine a vacation with Tristan being fun. Not now, anyway. He’d become a Winter Solstice gift she wasn’t allowed to open, for the winter holiday never came.

  She nearly longed for the days she couldn’t stand him.

  “Whatever you’re thinking, stop.” He frowned, turning up the air conditioning. “What’s g
oing on with the oracles?”

  Lila quickly told him all that she knew. “There’s really nothing to investigate, and I have no desire to trek all the way out to the temple.”

  “But she summoned you for help. She just wasn’t sure if she could trust you.”

  “So?”

  “The oracles don’t summon outsiders for help. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

  “It means she wants me to back off from my father’s investigation.”

  Tristan shook his head as the light turned green. “I don’t believe that. We should go and see what she has to say.”

  “What about Oskar?”

  Lila saw the struggle cross his face. “It’s only a fifteen-minute drive. We’re halfway there already.”

  Lila eyed the clock, remembering Oskar’s face onstage.

  “I don’t like this.”

  “I don’t either.” He fiddled with the air conditioning again. “You never told me about that before.”

  “Never told you what?”

  “What the oracle’s mother said when you were a kid, about you holding a child and wearing the whitecoat.”

  “I’d mostly forgotten, Tristan. The oracles likely tell every prime the same thing. Yes, you’ll be prime. Yes, you’ll have heirs. They’re con artists and charlatans. They tell people what they think they want to hear.”

  “What did she tell Alex?”

  “I don’t know. She didn’t say. Do you actually believe in the oracles?”

  “I never thought about it much. Slaves don’t get much of a chance to visit them, much less the children of slaves. I would have had to get permission from my mother and my matron, then bribe someone to drive me to the temple and bring me back. Even then the oracle might not have seen me. How many slaves do you think want to waste a day off waiting for something that might never happen?”

  “So slaves don’t believe?”

  “Oh, most do, they just don’t often visit the temple. Can’t say that I blame them.”

  “What about Dixon?”

  “Funny you should mention that. I saw him with a book a few days ago. Apparently, he asked Samantha to fetch it for him. It was a book about the oracles and the gods. A few more have turned up since.”

  “Is that odd?”

  “He’s never shown an interest before. I think what happened last weekend shook him up.”

  “What about your parents? Does your mother believe?” Lila turned down another street. They passed shop after shop, lowborns and servants carrying packages and sweating in the heat.

  “Yes. Who knows what my father thinks, though.”

  “What do you mean? How can you not know if your father believes in the oracles?”

  Tristan just shrugged. “When he came around, he only had eyes for my mother.”

  “So he ignored you?”

  “Not exactly, but it wasn’t like he could take me out. He’d married into the Holguíns. If he had acknowledged me publicly, his marriage would have been ruined and his matron never would have accepted him back. You know how your kind are, always believing the fallen have come back as spies, especially from a family like the Holguíns.”

  “It depends on how long they’ve been gone and the circumstances they married under.”

  “He left the Vargas family under less-than-ideal circumstances. He’s little more than a pet to Chairwoman Holguín’s youngest sister, thrown in to seal the deal on wine grapes. She’s in love with him, though. He could have said no, but that Sangre you enjoy has to come from somewhere.”

  “Is he in love with her?”

  Tristan shook his head. “My mother always kept his identity a secret in the BIRD, but when she was arrested and he arranged for our placement in Beaulac… Well, you can bet everyone on the Holguín compound knew exactly who my father was. The fact that I look like him never helped. Whenever he slipped away to visit, which wasn’t often, he’d spend twenty minutes or so catching up with me, shove some new toy in my lap, then spend the rest of his night with my mother. By the time I was ten, I started disappearing before the visits.”

  “Your mother let you?”

  “How could she stop me after I was already gone? I knew when he was coming by. She never knew how, but it was obvious. The smiles, the long shower, the perfume, the extra care with her hair and a bit of makeup. Sometimes I think she was relieved to find me gone. It meant they could be together longer, since he didn’t have to waste his time with me.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “I was fourteen. I saw him walking toward me on the compound. I was usually good about avoiding him, but I was thinking of other things. I didn’t notice him until it was too late, but it was the same for him. I decided to walk right on by. Usually whenever I tried that, he’d stop me, at least for a few minutes, and chat. This time he didn’t. No one else was even around.”

  “He gave up?”

  Tristan rubbed his chin and didn’t answer. He merely looked out his window as the lowborn shops turned into manufacturing plants.

  “What did you do next?”

  “Stole my first bottle of whiskey to celebrate.”

  “To celebrate or to mourn?”

  Tristan didn’t answer. “I didn’t mean to tell you all that.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s whiny.”

  “Life often is.”

  “What about you? Tell me something.”

  Lila pulled up to another light. She racked her brain for something to tell him, but her experiences with her own father weren’t so horrible. What could she say about her mother without sounding like a spoiled heir? Boohoo, my mother constantly demanded that I run a multibillion-credit empire, but I just wanted to fiddle-fart around as a blackcoat for the rest of my life? Poor me, I was so oppressed?

  “You’re not going to share anything, are you?”

  “I have nothing to match it.”

  “You don’t have to match it, Lila. This isn’t a competition. Just tell me something, anything. What’s the most annoying thing you had to deal with growing up?”

  “You already know.” Lila shrugged as she merged onto the interstate, dodging the scattered traffic. “I didn’t want to be prime. I wanted to be the militia chief for the entire Randolph family, so I fought for it.”

  “That’s what I don’t get about you. Why? Why join the militia at all?”

  “Because I have no interest in my family’s business dealings. I just want everyone to be safe and protected.”

  “You took over the hospital.”

  “That was for different reasons entirely. For starters, it was my mother’s idea of a test.”

  “What about the other reasons?”

  Lila didn’t want to answer. She didn’t want to remember Holly. “Let it go.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you about my father. I thought we were friends.”

  Friends?

  Lila cut her eyes to Tristan, more and more annoyed with herself. Perhaps there wasn’t anything between them after all, not anymore, not after what had happened in the tunnels with Reaper. He’d cleared it all up with that one little word.

  Friends.

  Why on earth did he insist on sharing a bed with her, then? Sending her messages about how he missed her? Making jokes about going on vacation together?

  The workborn were very, very different indeed.

  But she’d lost Alex, and now Dixon wouldn’t speak with her either. Maybe she needed another friend.

  “Chef Ana has cooked for our family since before I was born,” Lila began as the bluebonnets, cedar trees, broken-down gas stations, and workborn diners slipped past the car. “Her oldest daughter was named Holly. We were the same age, and as close as my mother would allow before propriety took over. If I had kept my damn mouth shut, we might have been clos
er.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I asked my mother once if Holly could be my sister instead of Jewel.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Five or six. My mother didn’t take it well. I had to sneak around more to play with Holly after that, but Chef didn’t try very hard to keep us apart.”

  “Where’s Holly now?”

  “Dead. She got sick when we were eleven, and she never got better. Watching Holly spend her last few years dying was hard enough, but I saw what it did to Chef. It tore her apart a little more each day. And every day she grew a little more desperate. My mother saw it too. She sent Holly to the best doctors, even got her into an experimental trial in Our Lady of the Light.”

  “That was Randolph General before you took over?”

  “Yes. But in the end, Holly still died.”

  “Most matrons wouldn’t have bothered for a servant’s child,” Tristan said.

  “I never said my mother was evil, Tristan. We just don’t get along. We have different concerns about the family and different priorities, and she wants me to be someone I’m not.”

  “So you took over the hospital to save little girls like Holly?”

  Lila shook her head. “No. When I watched my friend die, I learned that you can’t save everyone. People just die sometimes, no matter what you do. And every morning, the sun still rises even when it shouldn’t, and it laughs at whatever you’ve done to stop it.”

  “That might be the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard you say.”

  “Well, I became quite the angst-ridden teenager after she died.”

  “Anyone would be after losing their best friend. Why did you take over the hospital if it wasn’t to save other kids?”

  “I saw what my mother’s persistence had done for Chef. It wasn’t much of a consolation, but it gave her peace of mind in the end. Me too. And I think it helped Holly too, as horrible as that sounds. She couldn’t keep reaching for treatments that weren’t there because she knew that doctors didn’t have the answers. Holly was able to go home for a while and be a stupid, goofy kid at the end, at least when she wasn’t sleeping. It seemed like that’s all she did, tubes in her nose, those stupid machines wheezing in the background.” Lila frowned, remembering how she’d snuck into her friend’s room some nights, just to snuggle next to her, terrified Holly might die alone.