Chapter Thirteen Tristan
Chapter thirteen
Tristan
Focusing on my dissertation wasn’t ever going to happen.
No matter how long I sat at my desk, the house silent while everyone else was out, the words refused to fall into line.
The sentencing data I was meant to be analysing, the row after row of numbers masquerading as people, justice stripped down to pattern and probability, couldn’t hold my attention the way it normally could.
Somewhere in that spreadsheet was the evidence I needed, the proof for three thousand words on structural privilege in sentencing outcomes. But my thoughts were sadly elsewhere.
Razor.
The living proof of what I was critiquing.
And Oliver’s betrayal, of course. That loop wouldn’t stop either.
I should’ve seen it coming. The signs were there.
But I hadn’t wanted to see it. Hadn’t wanted to be proven that he’d only been with me for one thing.
My privilege. Now, with the illusion gone, I could finally see him for what he’d always been.
A social climber in a tailored suit, scaling my father’s dinner parties as if they were rungs on a ladder.
My mother used to warn me about gold-diggers.
She should’ve mentioned those who wore cufflinks and quoted The Economist.
Oliver Montgomery had become a stranger to me overnight.
The man I’d spent two years circling and defending, had become a traitor.
But the truth was, it hadn’t happened overnight.
It had been a slow, polite decay. I’d seen it.
Buried it. Focused on grades, on being better than my father and pretending perfection could keep the rot out.
But what stung the most? What had me in utter fury was how he hadn’t even asked if I wanted to be part of his rebellion.
This phase of him ‘trying something different’ as he’d put it. No, he’d asked Benji.
Of course it was Benji.
I couldn’t even bring myself to hate him for it.
It was too predictable. Too on-brand. Benji Rothwell: five percent psycho, a hundred percent sociopath, and somehow still the centre of every room he walked into.
If it weren’t for the Rothwell’s and the Hale-Fitzroy’s having shared social calendars since birth, I’d have cut him out long ago.
But that was the problem with our world.
Small pond, same fish. Everyone lying, networking or fucking their way through the same circle.
Did I believe they’d been fucking this whole time?
No. I couldn’t.
Surely, I’d have known.
Leaning back in my chair, I sighed then grabbed my phone.
I needed a distraction. Something to drown out Oliver’s voice.
His lies. And the worse one replaying under it.
Razor. The way he’d looked at me. The way I’d looked back.
I told myself I needed noise, so I opened an app I hadn’t touched in years.
Grindr.
Ollie and I had downloaded it once, “just to look.” It had ended with an argument and me pretending I didn’t care he’d enjoyed it a little too much.
Now it felt like pulling a fire alarm just to see what would happen.
I chewed on my thumbnail, updated the bio — single, curious, probably a mistake — and started scrolling.
Swipe. Swipe. Bored faces. Torsos. Bathroom mirrors. Was I really doing this? Apparently so.
A sharp clatter at the window made me jump. Before I could move, the sash shot up, and someone climbed through. I might have screamed. Definitely leapt, because the phone flew out of my hand, skidded across the floor, and stopped dead at the boots of the man now standing in my room.
Razor.
All in black.
All menace. And impossibly, devastatingly hot.
Every rational part of me said move. The rest of me forgot how. Or even why I should.
He cocked his head. “Did I scare ya?” He grinned. All teeth. All cocky swagger.
I swallowed hard. “You could’ve knocked.” I tried to reach for my phone as if my heart wasn’t about to punch through my ribs. Fear? Definitely. Shock? Completely. Turned on…?
Unfortunately, yes.
“And miss that face?” He crouched, picked up my phone and looked at the screen.
Never had I wanted the floor to open and swallow me as I did right then.
Razor grimaced. “What you scouting Grindr for?”
The only answer there was left my lips, “I’m newly single.”
“Huh.” The glow lit his grin as he swiped for a while. “Don’t let the bed go cold for long then, do ya?”
I sat back in my desk chair. “Well, they do say to get over one man, you should get under another.”
“Do they?” Razor dropped onto my windowsill, the whole frame bowing under him, his presence blotting out the night. “Wouldn’t know.”
I tilted my head, clinging to a scrap of bravado to match his. “Because you’ve never been newly single… or never been under another man?”
He lifted his gaze from the screen to meet my eyes.
Gradual. Unreadable. Devastating. And his stare stripped every thought I had bare, peeling logic from my skin until nothing was left of me but pulse.
Those eyes had seen things I couldn’t begin to imagine.
Violence, maybe. Loss. Survival leaving marks under the skin.
And still, some stupid, reckless part of me wanted to dive straight into them.
To see if I’d come out the same on the other side.
He smirked, then turned the screen around to show me the photo of a naked man posing in a mirror. “You wanna get under that one?”
No. No, I didn’t.
I wanted to get under him.
“I’m gonna do you a favour.” Razor turned the phone back to himself, gave it a few taps, a couple of swipes, then he stood and crossed the room towards me.
He moved as if he owned space. Big, solid, leisurely steps making the air thicken. When he stopped in front of me, the world narrowed to the sound of my heartbeat and the scent of him. Smoke. Sweat. Metal.
He held out the phone.
I took it and glanced at the screen. “You deleted Grindr.”
“I did. You’re welcome.”
He said it as if he’d done me a great favour.
A meaningful one. Then he inhaled and drifted around my room, eyes scanning over everything.
My books, the neat little rows of order I tried to pass off as stability, the framed photos pretending my life wasn’t coming apart at the seams. He touched the mantelpiece.
The edge of my desk. Light, casual brushes feeling far too curious.
And far too intimate for a man who was supposedly here to collect nothing but intel or cash.
“I could mistake that gesture.” I tossed my phone back onto the desk, aiming for cool and landing closer to brittle.
“Hmm?” Razor leant closer to my graduation photo, the one where Ollie had his arm slung around me as though he’d loved me.
He hadn’t.
He’d loved the suit I’d bought him.
I turned in my chair, hooking an arm over the backrest. “You deleting Grindr… that could suggest you don’t want me under another man.”
Razor laughed. Low. Genuine. Dangerous. “Or maybe I don’t want you getting over your ex.
” The humour drained from his face in a heartbeat.
“Considering the fucker owes me.” He stared me down with velvet-brown eyes I wanted to die in.
“And you’re the one stuck right in the middle of getting me what I want. ”
Always in the middle…
But whatever playful current I’d been clinging to snapped clean.
Note to self: Razor wasn’t out. Not even close. And whatever it was between us wasn’t flirting. Not safely, anyway. One wrong word and that glint in his eye turned from heat to something far sharper. And would probably lead to another punch to my face.
So I did the sensible thing.
I shut up.
He meandered over to me, sat his bulk on the edge of my bed and leant back on his hands. “What’s all that?” He jerked his chin at my laptop, the books spread out around it.
“My dissertation.” I said it with all the misery it deserved. Painful and heavy.
“What the fuck is a dissertation?”
A laugh escaped before I could stop it. I thought he was joking. In my world, not knowing that word was unthinkable. Education, academia, it’s bred into us like entitlement. But the look on his face wasn’t mockery. It was genuine curiosity.
“It’s a really long essay. Research. For my Master’s.” I cocked my head. “I take it you didn’t go to university?”
He barked a laugh. “What do you think?”
“Well, you run a profitable enterprise, do you not? Business studies graduate, perhaps?”
“Would that have taught me how to prevent cashflow disappearing off my line?”
“Possibly.”
He snorted. “What’s your subject, then?”
“Criminal Justice and Law.”
Razor widened his eyes. “You’re a law student.”
“Master’s.”
“You’re a master of law?”
“I will be. When I finish this. Criminal law.”
“Huh.”
There was an irony even he could’ve put into words.
For all his lack of formal education and the privilege I’d been drowning in since birth, he’d clocked it instantly: me, studying a justice system built to grind men like him into dust, and him, sitting on my bed, the living, breathing embodiment of every “case study” I’d ever dissected.
We were a paradox in motion, both of us too aware of the lines we were crossing.
“And what’s your dissertation dissecting?” he asked. “How to get away with thieving off thieves?”
“No.” I smiled despite myself. “Sentencing bias. How people from poorer areas get hit harder by the courts than people who do the same crimes but can afford decent lawyers. Basically—” I gestured to the data on the screen, the charts, the brutal disparity laid bare “—it’s a study on how money and privilege bend justice. ”
He chewed on his bottom lip. “Money and privilege bend justice, huh? Interesting.” He looked as though he was genuinely parking that for later. But then he leant forward and rubbed his hands together. “Speaking of which, what you got for me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I asked you to find out where my product went.”
“It’s been twenty-four hours.”