CHAPTER SEVEN
It’s been six months since Lachlan signed his contract while it poured rain outside.
He’s visited his slowly dying mother a total of five times.
Her debt is paid off. She’s comfortable at home, paid nurses are taking care of her now that Lachlan can afford them.
The few times she’s conscious when he visits, she tells him what she wants for her funeral.
The most recent time she asks about his new post, says Margot told her he was doing something good for once. He tells her about the kids.
Mostly about Mimi, not much about Jules who has so little privacy as it is that even telling someone about him feels wrong.
He shows his mom the tattoo and she looks at it with confusion, then at her son, her breathing laboured.
They’ve had a complicated relationship ever since he killed his father and she told him to either enlist or go to jail for it. He chose the former and his mom lied to the police, swearing that her husband fell down drunk, hit his head on the countertop. An accident.
Lachlan enlisted at seventeen with her permission, signed himself away.
She never said goodbye, never said much after that, but she asked him why he did it once and he just didn’t have the heart to tell her.
Their marriage was flatline cold as it was and what little good memories she had of Dougal Tanner, Lachlan didn’t want to ruin.
It doesn’t hurt anymore that she thinks he’s beyond saving, that she tolerates his presence only because he did everything she asked and he now pays her bills.
It does hurt that she’s confused when he all but tells her that he cares about Mimi Penhalyx.
‘Just do your job,’ she had said, line between her eyes, like she couldn’t fathom him being capable of more than that.
Lachlan knows what he is.
He knows he’s a killer.
But it still hurts, is all.
Carrigan studies the colourful tattoo like it’s a grim portent of the apocalypse and one time when they’re both off duty, a rare occasion he lets her drag him out for drinks, she tells him she thinks they’re both going to die on this job, one way or another.
Lachlan doesn’t really care if he dies on this job, he only cares that the kids are safe and happy, although happy is a stretch when it comes to Jules.
He has a suspicion about Mimi.
When he infiltrated a cartel some years back, they came in through the lower levels.
It’s where all the girls were kept. The ones who were trafficked, stolen, kidnapped and worse.
It was unlike anything Lachlan had ever seen outside of military bunks.
The whole floor had been turned into a secure dormitory for the girls imprisoned there, stocked with makeup, clothes, perfume and pretty little comforts. This was where they slept and lived.
And for every girl they extracted, there was a cat.
Each of the girls had one, and they screamed when Lachlan’s team tried to extract them because they couldn’t leave without their cat. Some of them fought back. One girl bit Lachlan so hard it left a small scar.
Later, when he “questioned” the Lupo of that level, an especially foul man who didn’t yield easily, Lachlan found out that kittens were given to each of the girls after their first month because it dropped escape attempts and rebellion to almost zero.
All he had to do was threaten the cat.
The girls they got out raised hell about their cats. Many went back trying to find them. He heard months later that almost every girl had managed to get their cat back. Lachlan has never seen a human version of this tactic before, but he thinks that’s what Mimi is to Jules.
During Blaire’s brief reign over the household, she was able to discover that Alistair Penhalyx paid an anonymous woman to carry a child of his own seed to fruition and then sign over parental rights.
When she told him this, it instantly made sense and while that part isn’t explicitly stated anywhere on paper, Mimi is Jules’ kitten, he’s almost certain.
Six months marks the introduction of a new head of household.
Mason Fenwick is in his early thirties from Newcastle in the UK.
Lachlan vets him thoroughly and he comes out clean.
He served in Special Forces, transitioned into Diplomatic Security Service and then, after excelling at logistical command, was picked out for high-society navigation and hired by wealthy families for private household oversight.
He’s a strong departure from Clara’s mode of operation and he hits the ground running once installed, starts making a lot of changes to the overall household, but many are elements that Lachlan quietly agrees with.
They only butt heads when it comes to the East Wing, which Lachlan very much considers his domain. They typically reach a compromise each time, but Lachlan often reminds Fenwick that asset management comes first.
Fenwick seems to be decent enough, although he is undeniably Penhalyx’s man. He reports everything to him. He questions everything, but in some ways it’s a relief to have a fellow tactical mind who sees the benefit of mounting anti-aircraft weaponry atop the roof under clever shielding.
Jules turns eighteen during Lachlan’s seventh month.
?
When Mimi catches a cold, she’s miserable, clingy and has no parents to comfort her the way children need, only employees and a brother thirteen years older who is desperate to taste freedom.
Lachlan can tell Jules is planning something, has been for a while now.
The few months without any escape attempts are directly linked to Mimi’s trauma after the Belkin incident, but Mimi is doing much better now.
She’s more settled, so Lachlan knows it’s only a matter of time before Jules starts eyeing up the real world again, especially given that it’s his birthday soon.
Mimi’s cold comes in much to the bafflement of the medical team who Lachlan occasionally wants to throttle. Kids need germs to build a healthy immune system and locking her away from anyone her own age makes her first experience with a virus a brutal one.
He expects her to want Jules, and she does, but she also wants Lachlan too. A lot. She makes her demands clear, little voice growing stronger every day, as she insists on Lachlan being brought here and not one of the childminders.
She’s never looked at them the same way after Belkin.
Lachlan cannot be spared from duty, but she’s so inconsolable that he wraps her up in a thick quilt and carries her while he makes low risk rounds, humming under his breath some song from a kid’s movie he saw a million years ago.
She falls asleep with her head on his shoulder, and he carries her for the rest of that day, ignores the way Carrigan looks at him.
Later, Mimi wakes hot and a little delirious, seems very annoyed that she’s still ill and she whines, ‘Daddy, make it go away,’ with impatient fatigue.
‘I’m not Daddy, sweetheart,’ he reminds her calmly. ‘I’m Lachlan.’
She’s quiet for a while, awake now as Lachlan finishes up the tail end of his alignment checks in a very secure section of the house.
Then she says, ‘Daddies in books are nice.’
‘Are they?’ he asks, conversational.
‘They keep everyone safe.’
Lachlan knows where it’s leading.
‘Well, your Daddy is very good at keeping you safe,’ he explains, stretching his generosity as far as it’ll go, ‘isn’t he?’
‘He’s far, far away.’ She then whispers, ‘You be my Daddy? Pay you lots of cookies.’ Cookies are the best currency in the East Wing, everyone knows that.
‘That sounds really nice,’ he says, double checking the alignment of various sensors, ‘but I can’t be your Daddy because you already have one and he loves you very much.’
‘Never see him.’
‘I know.’
‘You be Daddy?’ she asks again, this time it wobbles. ‘Pretend?’
Lachlan tries to think slow, but his heart is pulling all kinds of strange ways and shapes.
‘I don’t think that’s…’ She sobs near silently.
‘Well. Maybe just for today, Mimi,’ he allows, capitulating spectacularly, can already hear what Carrigan will launch at him later for such a slip. ‘But only if it’s just for today.’
‘Just today.’ She sighs shakily with relief. ‘Thank you, Daddy.’
He stares ahead blindly, stroking her back.
And Lachlan, stone cold killer that he is, knows he’s fucked.
‘It’s OK, babygirl. You sleep now. Daddy’s got you.’
It marks the first catastrophic crack in his ability to ever truly get free of the Penhalyx family, and Jules, who has had far too much time to plan, takes full advantage of it on the night of his eighteenth.
Mimi is still unwell and wants only Lachlan, who she continues to call Daddy in a very secret whisper, so he ends up staying with her more than he should.
Fenwick isn’t involved in the children’s wellbeing unless it’s marked serious and a cold doesn’t come close, so Lachlan sits in a rocking chair in Mimi’s bedroom and lets her sleep on him well past midnight.
At around one thirty AM, there’s a vibration alert.
No heartbeat in Jules’ threads.
Lachlan carefully but quickly sets Mimi down in her bed and then orders Carrigan to watch her while he runs flat out to Jules’ room and finds all his clothes on the floor, window open somehow without tripping the alarms.
The kid is gone.
‘Fucking great.’
Lachlan has to track him down manually.
It’s by far the kid’s best attempt because it takes Lachlan almost four hours to find him and when he does, he’s in a nightclub wearing borrowed clothes that barely fit, drunk and sweaty.
Gritting his teeth, Lachlan cuts a path through the sea of heaving bodies, cheap cologne and floral perfume, headed for Jules who seems to be having the time of his life. Beneath the harsh glare of neon, the boy dances and smiles to himself with eyes closed. He’s not even with anyone.
It’s just him and the music.
Jules is unhappy when Lachlan grabs him around the middle and physically hauls him away, but that unhappiness elevates quickly into anger when he realises who it is and he starts hitting Lachlan, yelling at him, even telling people he’s being kidnapped.