AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m not hungry.”
“That’s okay. You don’t have to eat all of it. I’ll get you some pork lo mein. You like lo mein. You order it all the time.”
“Really, I don’t want anything. I just want to sit.”
Dixon shook his head too, and Tristan tossed his palm back on the coffee table with a dull thump. “Are you okay? That asshole didn’t—”
“I’m fine.”
His eyes snaked to her jaw, but he didn’t say another word. “Fine, we’ll start planning how we’ll get into the Holguín estate. The news vans followed Oskar. He’s in there.”
“Doesn’t mean he’ll stay. The boy is a security nightmare, and Chief Holguín will certainly want him moved as quickly as possible. They just won’t do it tonight. One leak and the press will follow them down the interstate. My father has stationed Bullstow militia around the compound. They’ll keep an eye on him for us. I put a few spies on it too. They’re monitoring the news vans and ferreting out his location on the compound.”
“I’ll get my spies on it as well.” Tristan grabbed his palm and typed out a few messages.
Lila did not say a word against his rare note of caution. She was surprised he hadn’t suggested infiltrating the compound that very night. Then again, he’d become more conservative over the last week even though he’d been rash in trying to save Phillip. Peering at Dixon, she couldn’t help but think she knew the reason why.
Dixon avoided her eyes and trundled toward his room, yawning, ready for bed. It was a place he’d likely been for half the day.
Lila glanced at Tristan, not ready to leave. She hadn’t come just to talk about their failure at LeBeau’s. She’d come to talk with him about the gunman, about how she’d felt when she thought she’d killed him.
He’d be one of the few people who would understand.
But now that she was with him, she didn’t know how to begin the conversation.
Instead, she kept silent. She didn’t share the message she’d received, either. It wasn’t like Tristan could do anything about it, and it was all a little too much, too suddenly. She needed to get back home and work on it, to trace it back to the source.
She stood up to go.
Predictably, Tristan tugged on her hand before she could step away. They had done the same dance for nearly a week.
Lila didn’t say a word.
Neither did he.
She let Tristan guide her into his bedroom and close the door. A string of bottle caps swayed in the window as he cracked it open, the metal rattling like bells as it shook back and forth on a warm breeze. The crossbows and knives and mace on the walls glinted as he turned off the lights. Papers peeked from an open door on the filing cabinet in the corner.
She’d spend one more night curled around him, their fingers touching nothing but sheets, their lips unused.
She couldn’t keep doing this to herself, being so close to him without skin and motion and whispers and more.
But she couldn’t leave, either.
Chapter 5
Lila yawned and crept up the stairs of the great house well before dawn, careful on the third and ninth steps to avoid squeaky boards. The show of it annoyed her. The fact that she had to pretend to sneak back into her own house at six o’clock in the morning—somewhat badly—just to give her mother’s spies something to report back to the chairwoman, just so that they all thought they could still catch her if she was up to something.
Lila wasn’t sure why she even bothered. For fuck’s sake, she was the chief of Randolph security. She could do better than this. Her mother should expect more.
As she turned to slink down the hall toward her room, her younger brother Pax hopped up from the floor, a questioning look in his eyes.
Busted.
And not by whom she wanted.
“You were out all night again,” he whispered, his loose brown waves falling over his eyes. He fidgeted with the drawstring of his pajama bottoms. His t-shirt stretched across his chest, already tight even though he’d just gone up a size. At sixteen, his body was already too large for his age. He’d grown clumsier and clumsier, too, as though a mouse lived inside him, working the levers.
A perpetually inebriated mouse.
