Chapter Fifteen Tristan
Chapter fifteen
Tristan
I slept like the dead.
No idea why. You’d think guilt might’ve kept me up, but apparently exhaustion wins every time.
When I’d got in, Zara and Henry had come charging out of her room, both half-dressed and pretending they hadn’t been doing what everyone already knew they were.
They’d looked worried, though. About me.
It’d been sweet, in the way a chokehold could be sweet.
I’d told them about Benji. The betrayal, the drugs, the fact I didn’t want him back in the house.
I didn’t tell them about Razor.
Honestly, I don’t think I could’ve even if I’d tried. How could I explain that I’d let the man who’d probably dragged Ollie into the gutter, robbed him blind, then came back to fuck me over a car, touch me the way he had?
It sounded impossible.
It was impossible.
And yet—God, the pull was raw. Bone-deep.
This wasn’t new. Not to me. No huge surprise I felt this way.
That was the most unsettling part. I had a hunger for roughness, for being reduced to something smaller and dirtier than my name and my bank balance.
That had lived in me for years, buried under silk sheets and polite beds.
And I’d wanted Razor to own me the way he owned everything he touched—Ollie, the street, his world.
The way he moved through it as if it already belonged to him.
Of course, I’d thought it would end there.
That it’d be nothing but dirt and regret, a one-time degradation I could file under self-destruction and reckoning.
A taste of the dark I wouldn’t want again.
I could move on. He’d be nothing but a brute. I’d be nothing but a mistake.
But of course not.
Of course he’d had to be like that.
When he’d kissed me, it wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t careless.
It had been rough, yes, but there’d been something else under it.
And when his phone had rung and he’d stayed close to me anyway, as if he didn’t want the spell to break, I’d felt it then.
That terrifying rightness in something so completely wrong.
It was madness.
Delirium.
Because I wanted him. More than was reasonable. More than was smart. More than was moral. If loving someone meant inheriting their world, what did that make me?
So I’d told them the phone had been slipped to me anonymously, and they’d nodded as if that was perfectly plausible. Maybe they believed it. Maybe they didn’t want to dig. Either way, it stuck. The evidence was there, and we all agreed Benji had to go.
But evicting a Rothwell wasn’t as simple as tossing out a flatmate.
It required… choreography.
The house wasn’t ours. It was my father’s.
Bought outright, no mortgage, no questions.
A sweetener to soften the blow when I’d chosen UCL over pupillage.
His way of keeping me close enough to control, far enough to pretend it was freedom.
He’d filled the place with the children of his social circle.
Perfectly curated young professionals who could report home who I spent time with, how late I stayed out, how well I played at respectability.
We paid rent. Well, they paid rent. Mine was less financial, more spiritual.
I’d eventually be paying for this prime real estate with my soul on a long-term lease, payable to Charles Hale-Fitzroy upon graduation.
All that meant the Rothwell eviction would involve a delicate exchange of emails between families, lawyers, and whatever century-old social etiquette applied to the children of the well-bred.
The Hales and the Rothwells didn’t fall out, they “reviewed arrangements.” And somehow, in the middle of it, I’d be expected to smile, play mediator, and pretend none of this felt like bloodletting in dinner jackets.
And the first stage of that delicate execution was seeing my father in person.
Never a simple errand.
I was halfway through my coffee the next morning, fresh out of the shower, scrubbed clean of the best and worst night of my life, when Zara and Henry orbited me like well-meaning flies.
“He’ll be fine about it, Tris.” Zara leant down to kiss my cheek as if reassurance could be transferred by osmosis. “This is all their fault, not yours.”
“Perhaps.” I stared into the swirl of my coffee. “But it’s still a problem I’m delivering to him gift-wrapped.”
Henry was on a study day, no leaving for the A case files stacked neatly; and behind the desk, my father.
Immaculate as ever, three-piece navy suit, tie perfectly knotted, not a strand of silver hair out of place.
“Father.”
He didn’t even glance up from the document he was reading. “What’s so urgent it couldn’t be handled by email?”
To be fair, I’d have rather conducted this via email, too. But I knew it wouldn’t be that simple and I wouldn’t get a reply until Friday, meaning Benji might even come home. Then I’d be invited to dinner to discuss. Far better to get it over with.