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Lila snorted and broke away.
He leaned against the counter and crossed his arms over his chest, a satisfied smile on his face. “Let me help, Lila. You look like you need it, even if you refuse to admit it. You have my full discretion. You know that.”
Lila recalled the messages from Reaper’s partner, something Max could handle just as quickly as she could, perhaps faster. She could strip the text, but Max could easily find them in the logs. Would find them, eventually.
But he’d never betrayed her.
“Your discretion is what I would need. I want to trace a few messages back to their source, but I haven’t the time to do so.”
“Is it about Oskar?”
She waved his concerns away. “It’s nothing to do with Natalie and Oskar. Just me, but other things take priority. It’s not a favor. It’s a job. I’ll pay at my usual rate.”
“As you wish.”
“I’ll send you the details tonight. Find the sender, Max, as quickly as possible.”
He nodded, curiosity evident in every line in his face. To his credit, he didn’t ask any questions, but Lila couldn’t help but feel that getting Max involved was a mistake.
What other choice did she have, though?
She thumbed off her jammer as she left the glass house. Opening the door to her roadster, she whipped out her palm computer and checked for bugs. Max’s minions often went behind their boss’s back and planted one.
Finding nothing amiss, she sped down Max’s driveway, thinking about taking a detour to Tristan’s shop. She always stashed servant’s clothes in the trunk in case she needed sudden anonymity. Unfortunately, the oracle’s warning still unnerved her, melting the small ache in her chest that had tightened throughout the day, an ache she’d begun to feel more and more acutely over the last week whenever she left Tristan’s side.
She hated the feeling. It didn’t befit a highborn to moon after a lover. Lovers should be enjoyed and cast aside when whim or family politics necessitated it. Having one you couldn’t cast aside meant marriage, and she’d never let that bind her.
They weren’t even lovers yet. Somehow that made her feelings worse, to feel so altered when they’d barely touched.
As she cruised through an orange light, her thoughts lost to Tristan, a motorcycle ran the red behind her. The cheap, beaten-up Barracuda looked as though it’d been ditched and rolled on the streets of New Bristol.
Often.
She could have sworn she’d seen same bike recently, perhaps coming home from the oracle or on the way to her council meeting.
Had Max put a tail on her?
Frowning, she turned on LaSalle, annoyed to find the bike still following. After a few more turns, it was obvious the rider didn’t belong to Max. The spy lord would never take on someone so clumsy.
Lila stopped near a convenience store, parking her roadster at the mouth of an alley. As she dug through piles of candy inside, she watched the front window out of the corner of her eye. The bike zoomed by and parked a few stores up in plain view. The rider didn’t remove his helmet, though. He locked his gaze on the register and the door, waiting for her to emerge.
Lila memorized the license plate. While the woman at the register rang up another patron, Lila put back the candy and snuck through the store’s side exit, emerging back in the alley.
The stench of piss and vomit nearly choked her. She held her breath until she returned to her car. Then she popped the parking brake, shifted into neutral, and let the heavy car roll to the end of the alley before slipping the key into the ignition. After starting her car, she hung a left at the corner. She had little desire and even less time to chase someone down. She had too many other things to do.
Fifteen minutes later, she slipped into her bedroom and removed her Colt and sword, placing them on her desk before sitting in front of her computer. She traced the rider’s plate in the militia database, letting it search while slipped off her gloves and boots.
It didn’t take long to get a hit.
Finn Nottingham, 2404 East Third Street.
A familiar stare and familiar scar appeared onscreen. They belonged to the same workborn who’d rowed her to the oracle’s temple that afternoon.
Mr. Nottingham should have known better than to follow a blackcoat, and the oracle shouldn’t have ordered it in the first place. Perhaps this was how she made her predictions.
After all, lies worked best when surrounded by truths.
That didn’t make much sense, though. The oracle had known about Tristan, at least enough to offer a vague description. But Lila had always careful when she visited him, far more careful than she needed to be. She’d always made sure her GPS was disabled and that she had no bugs attached to her car. She always took many twists and turns to get to his part of town, dodging every security camera as she walked to his shop, and employing her jammer when she could not. If Max had never been able to follow her, if her mother had never been able to track her, then the bumbling Mr. Nottingham could never have managed it.
