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"Tristen!" Heather admonishes.
I turn back toward the rest of the family. Heather's lips are pursed, Rhys's eyes nearly bulge out of their sockets, and Natty tries to cover her snicker behind cupped hands.
Tristen steps forward and shrugs. "You know what these little shits said about our daughter. They deserve much more than what Rhys did to them."
Heather throws her hands up and turns toward the stove. Rhys seems to be in the same state of shock as me because we just stare at his father, slack-jawed. Tristen walks over to his son, places a hand on his shoulder, and squeezes before leaving the room.
I haven’t seen that type of affection from him in years.
Later,after Heather and Tristen retire to the third floor and Natty is sound asleep, Rhys and I sit in my bathroom in front of the open vanity cabinet, each having one headphone in our ear.
I haven’t been able to concentrate on anything all evening. My nerves have been in a state of permanent buzzing since Tristen’s proclamation that we will talk about the phone.
"George. Let's recap what you could find out from your guy." My brother's voice brings me back to the present.
"Unfortunately, not much." George’s frustration is clear. When no one speaks, he continues, "I reached out to some old contacts. Francis Turner was a loner. He didn’t socialize."
"Sounds familiar," Rhys mumbles, and I elbow him in the side.
George chooses to ignore the comment. "Turner had a drug problem that, in the end, got him dishonorably discharged. He was not married, but there was a rumor of him having a child. Supposedly, he got some eighteen-year-old girl pregnant and moved her close by, but no one ever saw her. He kept an apartment on base as well. The speculation was he only used that to meet with his girlfriends. He was never caught with the actual drugs."
"Girlfriends? Plural?" I ask incredulously. I stop listening after that. The guy is so...eww. I shudder and Rhys side-eyes me.
"That's what was said," George confirms, oblivious to my thoughts.
"Do we know when that was? The year or base?" Nate is typing in the background.
"Georgia. He wasn’t clear about the timeframe. I will get back to you on that."
"Sounds good," my brother replies absently. We can still hear the faint clicking of keys.
"Do you think his girlfriend or kid are involved in this?" Rhys’s question makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Who are these people?
"I'm still saying Lilly should come to LA. At least we know she's safe here." Nate has stopped typing.
At that, Rhys barks out a non-comical laugh. "And do what? Hide in one of your mansions and hope it all disappears?"
"Nate, I strongly advise against pulling Lilly out of her current environment. It would raise too many questions and would make any future reintegration extremely difficult. You don't want her to be on the run her entire life, do you?" George attempts to reason with my brother.
"What life is that? Did you see what her so-called friends have been plastering all over the Internet? I want to send all of them a nice virus or, even better, put some unpaid parking tickets into the database, or give them a fun STD on their school medical records and leak them all over the Internet."
Oh boy, one really doesn’t want to get on his bad side. He’s hella inventive—and vindictive—which, embarrassingly, I quite enjoy at the moment.
Nate needs to show me how to do all these things—only theoretically, of course. Maybe. One practical execution test on the Wicked Bitch won’t hurt, right?
In the end, we settle on me staying in Westbridge, but George will be keeping me under 24/7 surveillance. Nate doesn't want to miss anything on the Turner front. George has not been able to locate him since the press conference, which I sense neither of the men in my immediate life like very much. They’re not used to being in the dark.
Who is Turner, and what does he want with me?
"Have you made any progress on Brooks’s transactions?" I’m desperate to change the topic.
Hearing Nate type again, I assume he’s pulling something up on his computer. "Some. I was able to trace it through four shell corporations down to South America, but I'm hitting a roadblock. The last one was owned by someone who died around the same time the transfers started in the U.S. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing, how to create false trails, use deceased individuals as a decoy, etcetera. Since there is no information exchange between these countries and the U.S., no one questioned it."
The frustration in his voice is palpable. Nate is one of the best, and yet he’s unable to find who’s behind this or who Brooks transferred money to all these years.
"Do we really care who he paid off? Maybe he had a gambling problem? Plus, it’s not like he didn’t have the money for it." Rhys remains unconvinced.
