Chapter Forty-eight — Trinity
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
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TRINITY
Ishoved the bite of ramen into my mouth.
“Oh my god I’m starving. Forgot to eat this morning.
” And the rest of the morning I’d had my head down doing research for the article.
I now had all the files from the flash drive—the ones that weren’t corrupted—and was actually writing the piece so I could present the story to Edgar.
But as usual, when I focused on something that hard, everything else went out the window. Including food.
Isolde laughed. “Good thing we kidnapped you then.”
We were at lunch, making up for me skipping weekend brunch. And telling them about everything was amazing.
“I’ve never seen you wear those before,” Ocean said, pointing.
I glanced down and laughed. “My hand chains? O, if you haven’t noticed these, we need to have a talk about your memory.”
She rolled her eyes and leaned forward to grab my hand and flip it over. “Nice try. Didn’t work. These. I mean these.” Her finger pointed to the miniature padlock on my bracelet. These were tiny silver ones that had inlaid opals in the sides.
I told Aiden this morning that putting opal on them was overkill. All he did was shrug and say that he always wanted me to feel beautiful locked in their chains. Which turned into him fucking me against the wall while he whispered in my ear how much he loved owning me.
Because I couldn’t leave the house with him dripping out of me, he made me clean the cum off his cock. Thoroughly.
“Rin?”
Ocean and Isolde stared at me, still waiting for an answer. While I was busy remembering Aiden. “Sorry. Yeah. Those are new.”
Isolde took a turn looking at the little locks. “Pretty charms. Where’d you get them?”
“Aiden ordered them.”
Ocean laughed. “Really? Can I see it?”
“Sure.” I held out my hand.
Her face moved through confusion into shock and then understanding. “Are these real locks?”
I swallowed. “Yeah. They are.”
“Wait.” Isolde set her drink down. “Like you can’t take them off?”
“They come off. I just don’t have the keys. They do.” My cheeks went hot. “We all wanted something symbolic, but I didn’t want something as obvious as a choker. Unless you know me really well, I doubt people will notice these.”
“Absolutely not,” Ocean said. “They’re tiny. Most people will think what we thought, that they’re charms.”
Looking back and forth between them, there wasn’t anything different in their behavior. “You guys aren’t weirded out?”
Isolde slurped some noodles and held up a finger, finishing her bite. “Why would we be weirded out? Girl, you’ve been to Element. You know what’s out there, and it’s way beyond being consensually locked into some bracelets.”
“I think there are people who would be weirded out,” Ocean said. “Because they don’t understand it. If you’re healthy, safe, and if it makes you happy, then it’s no one else’s business. But no, it doesn’t weird me out.”
I shook my head and took a bite of my ramen. “Sometimes it feels like I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Not with them, but with other people. Like I’m constantly on guard against reactions from everyone around me. I hate it. I know why though.”
It was time to tell them everything. I should have told them a long time ago. If I had, maybe things would have been different. I couldn’t focus on that regret.
“I have some stuff to tell you.”
My friends shared a look, and Isolde stretched her hand across the table to grab mine. “It’s about time. Spill.”
I did. A shorter version of what I told my Alphas. But enough for them to be horrified. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. There wasn’t anything you did to make me feel like I couldn’t. It was all them. So please don’t feel like you could have done anything differently.”
Ocean dabbed her eyes with her napkin. “Please tell me you plan on confronting that bitch. And your dad. Even with the guys knowing you can’t just accept this for the rest of your life.”
“I honestly haven’t even thought about it yet. Yeah, I imagine I’ll tell Dad at some point. First, I want to get the whole ‘hey, I’m the scent match to the son of the woman you’re marrying,’ thing out of the way first.”
Isolde nodded. “I get that. But don’t wait too long. After he’s married to Liz and they’re all settled into life with the rest of his pack, it will feel that much harder.”
“Yeah.” She wasn’t wrong. “I just have to figure out how. It’s not easy because… I’m mad at him too. For leaving me all the time. For being late or forgetting to do things. For not noticing. What they did isn’t his fault. At all. But we have more to talk about than that.”
The comfortable sounds of the restaurant filled the silence.
“I’m proud of you,” Ocean finally said. “It’s not easy facing your own abuse. It’s hard, and it hurts.”
My friend had suffered her own share of abuse at the hands of her aunt and uncle, who’d been her guardians for most of her life. Thanks to her Alphas, she’d managed to find more peace with her trauma, though I knew she still struggled.
“It’s definitely not comfortable.”
“It never is.” Isolde’s smile was tight. She’d dealt with shit too.
I looked back and forth between the two of them. “We’re pretty fucked up, huh?”
All three of us burst into laughter, dissolving the feeling of sadness in the air.
“At least we’re getting fucked well while we’re fucked up.” Isolde lifted her glass, making a toast which Ocean and I answered.
Considering I could still feel Aiden on me, there was no way to disagree.
I grabbed all the materials I’d prepared before lunch once I returned to the office. Here went nothing. It was an incredible story. I didn’t have it all yet, but I would.
Taking one more breath, I knocked on Edgar’s door. “Come in.”
“Hey, Edgar.”
He looked over the top of his glasses. “You need something?”
“Remember the broken filing cabinet?”
Leaning back, he tossed his glasses on the desk and chuckled. “Yeah, what about it?”
“It actually wasn’t broken. After you left, I took everything out of the drawer, and it was a file that had gotten jammed. I looked through it, and it’s an incredible story. I’ve been working on it for the last few weeks.” I sat and placed the folder down in front of him.
“You want to run it?”
“I do. It’s pretty much written, only missing a few details and pictures. Once I have those, yes. It’s a huge story.”
His eyebrows rose, but he nodded and retrieved his glasses. As soon as he opened the folder, his shoulders wilted. “This is about the conservation project?”
“Yeah. They—”
“I already know about this story, Trinity. I told Tracy to drop it.”
It felt like my reboot button had been pressed for how blank my mind went. “What?”
“You’re not incorrect. It would be a big story.
But this isn’t the kind of reporting we do, and we’re not large enough for the story to draw the attention we would need.
You know how it is. If there’s something to find, one of the heavy hitters will have already been sniffing around it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw an exposé in the next couple of months. ”
The immediate denial stung. I felt heat building behind my eyes, but I would not cry. “I know it’s not what we normally print. That doesn’t mean it’s not important. You ran that animal trainer piece. We could make a name—”
“I’m sorry,” Edgar said. Then he sighed. “I really am. This is exactly the kind of thing that’s up your alley, and I get that. But we’re a feel-good magazine. We don’t publish stories about companies poisoning wildlife. The answer is no.”
He stared at me, and I couldn’t meet his eyes.
I grabbed the folder and left before he could say anything else.
Grief and sadness gave way to anger. I understood where he was coming from—I just didn’t agree with it.
When it was something this big and this important, who gave a shit if it didn’t match our usual vibe?
And deeper. One of the heavy hitters. I could be one of those reporters, and this could be the story that made it happen.
If Edgar didn’t want to be a part of it, fine.
He didn’t want to publish it. That didn’t mean I would stop working on it.
I only needed a couple more things to finish the exposé, and the sooner the better.
It was time to take a field trip.
Trinity
I’ll be home late today.
Logan
I like it when you call it home.
Theo
Everything okay?
Trinity
Yeah, just have to go on a field trip.
Aiden
Where are you?
I didn’t answer. He wouldn’t be happy about where I was going. But I didn’t tell him I wouldn’t do this. I said I would be careful. And I would be.
Aiden
Trinity.
Why the fuck are you up there?
Trinity
I’ll be home when I can!
The collaboration with the conservation project happened in many places, but often in ports, where things could be loaded onto the boats and then taken to where they needed to be sunk. It wasn’t purely coastal reefs that were being rebuilt. There were some places further out as well.
Which was why I was an hour north of home, almost to Sunset City, driving into Port Sunset. The guard at the gate looked at me sideways as I drove up. Which, fair. I didn’t exactly look like the kind of person who had business at a port.
“Hi there. I’m working with the conservation project, here to pick up some information about what they’re sending out this week.”
Not one word of that was a lie. I was working with them. They answered all my questions. And I was here to pick up information. Just not the kind I was implying.
The schedules of the boat drops were public. It wasn’t easy to find them, but I did. They did their best to make it difficult.
The man frowned at me, his expression saying he thought I was nothing more than a cockroach. Like I was personally offending him. “Name?”
“Trinity Crawford.” I showed him my ID.
He stared at it for a long moment. “Office is down and to the left. Don’t wander around. It’s a hard hat area.”
“Got it. Thank you.”
Adrenaline slid through my veins and made my heart pound. I wasn’t doing anything illegal. Taking pictures wasn’t illegal. As far as sneaking around? I would ask for forgiveness rather than permission. What’s the worst that would happen, being escorted out of the port?
I parked my car where the guard had told me, and then I just… didn’t go into the office. If there was one thing that being a journalist had taught me, it was that you could go almost anywhere if you pretended you belonged and had enough confidence.
Now, to find where they were loading the cars. Closer to the water, obviously. The schedule I found said it was happening right now.
Heading for the water, I walked between stacks of giant shipping containers. The further from the office, the less likely I was to be seen.
A giant crane rose ahead of me with a car attached to it. Bingo.
There was far more noise and chaos here. Several of the truck-sized car carriers sat down at the edge of the water, and men in vests and hard hats rolled them down towards the stacks of shipping containers. Open shipping containers.
The boat they were loading had its own smaller crane, but the boat itself wasn’t small. Big enough to fit plenty of cars. I could barely see the deck, but it seemed like it was open, revealing a large portion of the interior where they could store them.
There was no way for me to sneak around and see what was inside if I wanted to keep myself unseen. But there was something here. Why weren’t the cars being lifted onto the boat as soon as they rolled off the carriers?
A man in a bright orange vest double-tapped the trunk of a white car that came back into view. Too much noise to hear him, but it was clear he was signaling the crane with the giant magnet.
It lowered slowly over the car, ready to snap it up. That was kind of freaky. Remind me to never go near something like that.
The man was on the far side of the car. From here I could see that it wasn’t fully lined up, but he couldn’t.
The magnet engaged, and the car was ripped off the ground—straight onto its side.
Brown liquid immediately streamed out of the car wherever it could.
The trunk. The windows. Hell, it looked like it was coming out of the wheel wells, and that wasn’t oil.
I pointed my phone at the scene and took rapid-fire pictures as the workers frantically waved at the crane, trying to stop it. I might be able to get another angle if I moved. Plus, it was better not to stay in one spot.
One glance behind me told me I hadn’t been spotted, but I didn’t sprint. I walked quickly past the next stack of shipping containers, and the next one, and one more for good measure before creeping forward and peeking around the corner once more.
Several of the men had their arms over their faces, like something stank. The one who’d first signaled the crane was yelling and red-faced, directing people to open the car and…
Two men rolled a metal barrel out of the shipping container while the others lifted the leaking one out of the trunk. They replaced the barrel, shut it, and this time the magnet worked like a charm.
If that wasn’t a smoking gun, I didn’t know what was.
Time to go.
The other thing journalism taught was never to overstay your welcome.
I was walking back towards the car, circuitously weaving through the shipping containers, when someone saw me. “Hey.” He had on a white hard hat and a highlighter yellow vest. “What are you doing here?”
“Oh, thank goodness.” I pressed my hand to my chest. “I’m just trying to get back to my car, and it is such a maze. Can you help me, please?”
The man’s face immediately softened. “By the office?”
“Yeah.”
“Go down this row for four containers, then take a right. You should see it.”
I smiled. “Thank you so much.”
“No problem.” He did a little hat-tipping motion.
No one else stopped me, and the guard at the gate waved as I passed through. I blew out a breath and turned for home. This story was mine.