AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Not every family is like the Holguíns.”
“No, some are like the Randolphs. You’re so used to having everyone below you that you don’t even notice the imbalance. Ms. Wilson is not your friend anymore, Lila, not when you own her. Even the most well-treated slaves are still slaves.”
“Then they shouldn’t have gotten themselves into trouble.”
“Like her little brother?”
“Like your mother? Are you still working out your teenage angst? All that jealously toward those rich kids who had everything you couldn’t afford as a child? You claim to hate the rich and everything they stand for, but you sure do spend a lot of time stealing their toys and enjoying the spoils of their labor.”
“To fund my work,” he said, clipping each word sharply at the end. His eyes ordered her from the room, but she knew he would not ask her to do that. He still needed her as a tool.
“Not always. You keep the Amazon and other trinkets when it suits you.” She placed her mug on the coffee table. “Not to shoot down your brilliant plan, Tristan, but instead of hacking into Liberté and waving our butts to the militia and the Burgundy government, perhaps we should speak with Simon first. If he knows anything about this, he might be willing to talk.”
“To you? Why?”
“Because according to Alex, he has a little crush on me.”
“Poor kid.” Tristan hopped up, stamped to the door, and flung it open. The knob banged against the wall so hard that it left a hole in the plaster.
He didn’t wait for Lila to follow.
Chapter 10
Tristan’s sour mood did not improve on the hour-long drive to the Masson vineyard, located in Massonville, a city named after the highborn family. Unfortunately, Lila had not taken her Firefly. Dixon had already pulled out one of the trucks for their journey, offering a wink, a kiss on the cheek, and a wave to Lila as the pair pulled out of the garage.
Things were fine in the truck; at least, that was what she kept telling herself. Fine also meant awkward, for the truck was much too quiet. The radio did not work, for Shirley never wasted her time fixing unnecessary luxuries, and the silence only highlighted Tristan’s lingering annoyance.
Lila didn’t bother trying to make conversation.
What would they talk about, anyway? Motorcycles? Wine? Music? The stars? Early on in their working relationship, they used to talk more, joke more. After their first job together, Tristan had even taken her to the top of the Victory Tower and pointed out the constellations. It was something that no one had ever bothered to teach her as a girl and something she’d never seen the point of learning. The stars weren’t useful to a young chairwoman-in-training, and even less useful to a future militia chief.
Perhaps the stars and their stories only belonged to the poorer classes.
She still remembered lying on the hard stone, pointing up at the sky, and laughing as they made up their own patterns and stories, half-drunk from stolen bottles of Sangre. There was Whiskers, the manic kitten, who Frigg had put into the sky after biting her ankles one too many times. Rind, who had been put into the sky because Odin was afraid she’d lop something precious off his body should he fall asleep. Amoeba was a hideous monster that kept growing and growing every time one of them suggested a new limb or a new attachment. They decided finally that it was put into the sky to give drunk people something to talk about in the middle of the night.
Lila hid her smile. They had almost been friends.
She’d been stupid to think it, though. He’d shown his true face, for the next morning she’d dug in her pockets and found her palm missing.
Lila had sped to the hotel on her Firefly, pushed past a bleary-eyed sentry, and fired a tranq dart directly into Tristan’s neck before he even opened his mouth. Dixon had thought it funny until he learned what had angered her. He’d sheepishly led her into Reaper’s room. They’d found the chubby hacker bent over her palm, muttering to himself, still trying to break her encryption.
Reaper had cowered the moment he saw her temper, claiming that he had found it in Tristan’s room and just wanted a peek.
Tristan never denied stealing it, though he wouldn’t admit to giving it to the hacker.
They’d fought nonstop ever since.
Lila’s half-smile turned into a scowl, but she kept her mouth shut. She sent a quick message to Sutton, asking her to handle the morning’s holo-meeting with the other Randolph properties, suppressing a snicker when the commander messaged her back.
Anything to keep me away from the Beast tonight.
Lila didn’t waste the rest of the drive. As the bluebonnets passed by her window in a blur of violet and white and blue, she jotted down notes on her palm, ideas on how to dig into Zephyr’s identity.
Such thoughts left her when an alert flashed on her screen. The snoop had dug through the third layer of Prolix’s identity.
Why had she agreed to go to Massonville? She had bigger things to worry about than investigating Tristan’s conspiracy theories.
She hadn’t agreed for Tristan, though. She cared about Simon, a boy scarcely older than her younger brother Pax, a troubled brother she had not even seen in several days, even though he lived right across the hall.
