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Now she’d have another hard few days recovering the boy.
Her back hit the mattress, the gray and white paint on her walls calming her, the emptiness of the room soothing. She’d always kept her decorations simple and orderly. Bedding in black with little pops of crimson in the pillows. A black leather couch along one wall. A headboard, desk, coffee table, dresser, and bedside table, all carved in ebony. Jewel had crafted a small Randolph coat of arms out of silver, much like the one stitched upon her clothes, and Lila had hung it above her couch. That, and a collection of framed photos on her dresser, rounded out the room’s decor.
Her palm buzzed upon her desk, reminding her of the blackmailer’s message.
Reluctantly, she returned to her desk and checked her message. Commander Sutton had sent her an update from the security office. Luckily, she hadn’t mentioned the gunman.
Lila switched on her desktop computer. She sent out spies to watch the Holguín compound and, for the next hour, fiddled with her snoop programs, altering them slightly to gather what she could from the blackmailer’s message. After setting them to run their searches, she pulled open a secret compartment in the back of her closet. She withdrew a pair of black trousers, gray gloves, and a long-sleeved gray shirt, none of which displayed the family’s coat of arms. After dressing quickly, she added a pair of worn boots. Though cheap, the boots felt like pillows and clouds after spending so many hours in heels. The unmarked, drab clothes would be a damn sight more anonymous than faffing about in Randolph red on Shippers Lane, and faffing about was exactly what she intended to do. She had a few choice words for Tristan. She also had no desire to be alone after what she’d done—what it felt like she’d done.
It would only make her dreams worse. She’d had a steady stream of disturbing ones the week before, dreams of an ancient oracle prodding her to visit the New Bristol temple, dreams of Reaper holding a knife to her throat, dreams of Tristan stabbing the hacker and firing a bullet into his neck, dreams of Dixon writhing on the floor. She had no interest in crawling into bed and risking another.
A giggle pierced the air as she opened her bedroom door. Her mother and father must have moved their wine drinking upstairs. Perhaps Lemaire would spend the next week in the chairwoman’s bed, rendering them both too busy to bother Lila about silly things, leaving her free to rescue a potential monarch of their country’s sworn enemy.
Lila slipped downstairs, passing under the full-length version of her sister’s silver coat of arms and a few centuries of Randolph family portraits. When she thought about her life like that, she wondered who she’d become in the last couple of years. She certainly wasn’t the woman her mother raised her to be. That didn’t bother her much, for she’d never wanted to be that person, but the fact that she was drifting away from her father’s notions of right and wrong did. Her father had always been her moral compass. If he looked at her tonight, really looked at her and all the things she’d done recently, what would he say?
He certainly wouldn’t be proud.
If he was just, he’d most likely ask Shaw to arrest her.
Then again, he’d tried to bribe her mother a few hours before, all to save a boy from a lifetime of slavery. Perhaps he’d understand.
Lila slipped through the great house scullery, avoiding the footman in their coats and breeches. She jogged down a rose-strewn gravel path to the garage. It contained the cars of the chairwoman and her daughters, most shared between the three women. But no one dared touch the chairwoman’s sleek Blanc convertible, just as no one dared touch Lila’s Adessi roadster or her silver Firefly, a motorcycle full of curves and moxie. Unfortunately, she could not ride it due to the stitches on her palms. Instead she stopped before a nondescript Cruz sedan, one of the cheaper models the workborn could attain, so long as they belonged to a profession. There were thousands of such cars in New Bristol, which meant that it would afford her some degree of anonymity.
Pulling out her palm, she brought up her snoop programs and searched for her mother’s ubiquitous bugs. Finding an audio bug and a GPS tracker, she tossed them onto her sister’s Firefly in an ever-growing pile, then sped through the Randolph estate. A stone wall topped with iron surrounded the compound, just like the other eleven highborn compounds in New Bristol.
The Randolph estate shone just a bit brighter than the others, though. It spanned ten kilometers in each direction, far wider than any other compound. Wolf Tower soared above it all near the center of the compound, housing her mother’s penthouse office as well as the offices of the other Randolph executives. No other skyscraper in the city came close to reaching its forty-five stories. Her mother wouldn’t allow it.
Other skyscrapers crowded around Wolf Tower in the north, including the twin Garza buildings and several condos covered in glass. The south held the palatial homes of the heirs, including the chairwoman’s great house, named Villanueva House after the architect who designed it. The Greens housed the legion of slaves who toiled as groundskeepers. They were all needed, for much of the compound contained nothing but lawns and flowers and trees. It made for a nice jog in the morning, but it took a great deal of care to maintain.
She reached the south gate quickly and flashed a distracted wave to Sergeant Tripp and his rookie.
The two blackcoats drew themselves up tighter when they glimpsed their chief. Sergeant Tripp bent at the rolled-down window and inclined his head. His pipe peeked from his coat pocket. “Evening, chief. Heard there was a fuss at the auction tonight.”
“A bit.”
“The security office is buzzing about it. Great save, chief.” A ghost of a grin appeared on his face. “Were you really wearing heels at the time?”
“Yeah, I stole them from your closet.” Lila sped off, knowing the security office would be covered in ribbons and heels when she arrived the next morning.
She drove the sedan along the darkening downtown streets, speeding past the lowborn and workborn crowds who had ventured out for dinner dates and anniversaries. Couples lined up with intertwined hands, young and old alike, waiting to enter restaurants they could barely afford. With little knowledge of the season’s trends, they did not judge their partners for their attire, only noting it with simple descriptors: sexy, cute, sporty, and smart.
Lila knew they used more, she just couldn’t think of them. She tried, though, all so she didn’t have to think of the gunman’s face while he lay on the ballroom floor, the way he’d looked when she—
Lila licked her lips and hit the gas, speeding toward the entrance for the interstate. Few cars drove upon it so late in the evening, and she slalomed through what little traffic remained.
Sexy, cute, sporty, and smart. What else had she read in those teen magazines all those years ago?
Ah, trendy. It described those from the poorer classes who snatched up counterfeit designer goods and try to pass them off as highborn ware.
Gods, she and Holly used to—
Lila swallowed hard. She didn’t want to think about her, either. Mashing the gas, Lila sped along, not caring a whit abou
t her speed.
It didn’t take long for her to reach Shippers Lane. She parked in a parking garage near a Chinese restaurant called the Plum Luck Dragon, hoping her car would still be there when she returned. Plastic bags and cigarette packages skittered past her boots on the sidewalk. Today her stomach rolled at the smell of pork lo mein and stir-fried rice. Usually after a job, Tristan and Dixon celebrated with enough food to launch her into an MSG coma, but this job had not gone well. She hoped he hadn’t bought food at all, for the last thing she wanted to do was eat.
Perhaps Tristan wouldn’t want food either. Perhaps he was too busy explaining to Maria why her brother had not been brought back from the job as promised. Perhaps he was too busy bringing her tissue after tissue after tissue.
