Chapter 2
Callum
My collar sticks to my neck, my tie growing tighter. I want to loosen it, unbutton the top button, but they’ll think I’m irritable because of him instead of the heat.
It’s too damn hot. I could’ve just waited for fall. Spent some much-deserved time abroad after what I put myself through the past four years, but I’ve done my time, waiting to face him again.
Besides…if half the town isn’t gone already, they will be soon. The mayor’s already taken off for his summerhouse in Maine, and the police will be rotating their vacations as well. It’s perfect. All those empty St. Carmen mansions…It’ll be too much for those Swamp Rats to resist. It always is.
I don’t care how organized they’ve gotten, paving their dirt roads, building a school, and positioning themselves into careers. They’re still Tryst Six. Orphans of Axel and Trysta Jaeger.
Criminals. Troublemakers.
“He seems more controlled than I remember,” Milo muses.
He meets my eyes from where he sits across from me in the town car, and I take in the scar Clay Collins left on his face in high school. A lot longer and thicker than the one I got that same night.
I never told my friends about my past with Dallas, but during that summer in high school—for one month—I didn’t work hard to hide that I was spending time with him, either. I knew where I was going all those nights and that one rainy afternoon, and no one was stopping me.
The great thing about rich friends, though, is that they owe you silence if they expect it for themselves.
Jerome sighs next to him. “No, he just grew wiser. A man knows there’s a time and place for indulgences. You’ll find out someday.”
Milo chuckles. “Fuck you.”
Jerome Watson is more than a decade older than us, but he still has no wife and no kids, so he fits in with the bachelors.
All of us sit in the back seats, Vincent and I with our backs to the driver, who guides the car smoothly through town, away from the school and up to Fox Hill. It’s almost one in the morning, but we’re far from late.
Turning my eyes out the window, I curl my fingers into my pants leg, feeling my heart beat against my chest.
My hands hum and haven’t stopped since I touched him. I can still feel my fingers locking around his wrists, remembering a time when it was the other way around.
I close my eyes for a moment. Then two. Milo is right. Dallas Jaeger was never a slave to his temper like his brother Iron.
But I could feel his pulse through his skin. He might be able to hide his feelings on the outside but not on the inside.
Obviously, he’s not stupid. Not only can I get him fired now, but he doesn’t want to make the same mistakes as his brother. He’ll pick his moment and make it worth it.
Five years ago, he tied me up into one knot after another, and a year later pulverized any last shred of self-respect I had, and it’s going to feel good, getting him out of my system.
Fuck, it’s going to feel really good. I lick my lips, the ridge of his ear still there in my mind, against my mouth.
“How the hell did he get a job teaching at our alma mater?” Milo shifts uncomfortably, looking between Jerome and me. “As if the board didn’t know those fucking Jaegers are sloppy, poor trash whose sense of culture revolves around beer can pyramids.”
“Because they’ve been playing chess while we’ve been playing checkers,” I reply, finally looking straight at my friend. “Father Bill baptized Dallas.”
His gaze falters, everyone in the car well aware that Father Bill is the priest at Marymount Academy and has been for thirty-five years.
“He baptized all of them,” I continue. “And Krisjen sits on the city council these days. And Trace’s storehouse supplies liquor to Fox Hill, which shares many of the same board members as Marymount.”
The fucking list goes on. Marymount hired Dallas to teach the philosophy course a year ago, and they could’ve had anyone.
A doctorate, a tenured professor slowing down for a few years, or someone with more experience, at least. But no, the job went to someone with only a bachelor’s degree whose priorities consist of fucking, breathing, and eating, in that order.
The Jaegers are more powerful than ever.
“A lot has happened in the past four years,” I state to my friends before looking pointedly at Milo. “And Dallas doesn’t drink beer out of cans.”
Just for your information…
“He’s clever,” Jerome says.
I dart my eyes to him. “And smart.”
We can boost our egos by joking around that the Jaegers are Neanderthal garbage all we want, but they didn’t keep hold of their land for five hundred years by force alone.
Dallas might not have had the educational pedigree to deserve that job, but the number of students requesting his class for fall has doubled in a year.
“But…” Vincent chimes in next to me, “isn’t it the boosters who fund the humanities and the arts now?”
I nod, smiling a little. “Yeah.”
Soft laughter echoes around the interior of the car, because Dallas’s class is an unessential course, unlike math or science, and his paycheck is covered instead by alumni donors.
By us.
We can decide if the class is useless and that the money should go to athletics or a trip for the seniors or fucking bidets in all of the bathrooms.
But I won’t do that. I don’t want him gone.
I don’t want him fighting for his life.
I just want him trapped, preferably in the same room as me.
“They’ll want revenge for what we did to Liv,” I point out.
“What we tried to do,” Milo grumbles.
The two of us were in high school with Dallas’s sister, and I took my anger with him out on her. I’m not saying I’m proud of it, but it did get his attention.
Milo tells everyone, “Macon is mine.”
“Macon Jaeger is mine,” Jerome retorts.
I shake my head at both of them. Krisjen Conroy went out with Milo in high school, and when she dumped him, Jerome Watson wanted her for himself.
Sadly, Dallas’s oldest brother, an ex-Marine with the most miserable fucking personality I’ve ever encountered, fell in love.
Jerome’s still seething, and Milo only gives a shit because Macon gave him a beating so bad he finally decided he’d rather be at college.
Their eyes find mine as if I’m going to have plans of my own for them to consider, but they can have Macon. They know which one belongs to me.
The car dips just before it inclines, heading up a long, steep hill, and I don’t have to look to know we’re at the country club.
“We should take off for a couple of weeks.” Milo’s gaze meets everyone else’s. “There will be plenty of storms to face and plans to put in place when we return.”
The car passes the clubhouse, veers around the restaurant and patio, and heads toward the field house.
I shake my head. “I already know what I’m going to do.”
“Care to share?” Milo teases.
“No.” I toss him a smirk as we stop at the side door of a lonely brick building off the golf course. “You blab like a motherfucker when you’re drunk.”
Everyone chuckles, Milo flashing a little snarl. He knows it’s true. He’ll find out soon enough, but I don’t want him running his mouth tonight once all the attention starts feeding his arrogance.
The driver opens our door. “And you’re not going anywhere,” I tell Milo, climbing out of the car.
The Jaegers have an army over in Sanoa Bay, and I need one, too.
Walking up to the steel brown door with an average sphere knob that looks like any door on any utility building, I open it and lead the group down the dim stairwell.
Dark carpet covers the stairs, small flame bulbs glowing against the black walls, and I hear the door slam behind us as I stop at the entrance at the bottom of the stairs.
Flipping open the keypad, I punch in the ten-digit password and then press my thumb to the scanner.
Any St. Carmen couple who contributes the club’s annual membership fee—successful payment of which simply proves you belong in this crowd—has access to the Wolfe Room.
For a little extra, rising adult sons twenty-one and over may also be admitted if their parents allow it.
Daughters, not officially. Until they become wives anyway.
But unofficially? That’s a whole different story. I snap the cover closed again, twisting my neck till it cracks.
The door opens.
A young woman in a tight sleeveless black dress with bone-straight brown hair smiles at us. “Good evening, gentlemen.”
We step into the antechamber, a small round table to the right, a tray with a decanter and glasses in the middle. Shelves and monitors line the walls, and a fake fire casts a heatless glow into the room.
“May I take any jackets?” she asks.
Another girl approaches, and Milo and Vincent remove their suit coats, handing them off to the two women. Four doors branch off from the room, but I only look at the one ahead.
“How’s the selection tonight?” Milo asks.
May, the redhead, throws him a smile over her shoulder as she hangs up his coat. “Some of them have delayed their summer travels simply so they could welcome you young men home.”
“Oooh.” Milo damn near bounces on his feet.
The last time we were in this room together was four years ago. We had Dallas’s sister in our possession, and Dallas thought he would teach me a lesson that night.
The thin scar, like a fucking teardrop spilling out of my left eye an inch long, tingles.
That night is when I started playing chess, too.
Closing the distance to the door ahead, I open it, the music spilling out as my friends and I walk through.
The antechamber closes, and the darkness engulfs us, blues, purples, and pinks glowing throughout the club.
“Enemy” fills the air, the laughter, the cheers, and the moans only faintly audible over the music.
The walls are lined with alcoves, each holding a small table and cushioned benches, but there are no lights.
A little more privacy for those who prefer that.