Chapter Ten Hollis
Chapter Ten
Hollis
“Was that planned? Good cop, bad cop?” I asked my brothers once our mother was thankfully gone and I could breathe now that the air wasn’t so heavy. “She, uh, switched up on me real fast. Came in kind of nice, then turned into that real fast.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Julian aligned himself with Gideon as I sat back down. “Mum can’t handle not being in control, and she has no clue how to deal with you being helpless like this. It’s probably a fate worse than death for her, you forgetting all of us.”
“Her death or mine?” I grumbled, unsure whether she’d rather have left me buried in that box. In her eyes, probably a more dignified way to go.
Neither brother bothered to respond to my slightly metaphorical question. They just swapped uneasy looks.
“What about the other stuff she said about me?”
“Don’t we all want what we can’t have?” Julian gave me a sly grin, and nope, that didn’t work. “And what daughter isn’t the apple of, uh, her dad’s eye?”
“He has Lyra for that,” I said bitterly.
“Dad never wanted his youngest daughter to follow in Mum’s footsteps. Mum disagreed, so she’s a little resentful at him for winning her over to his side. Now she’s probably worried she lost another.” If Julian ever wanted a career change, he’d make a decent therapist.
Unfortunately, his words didn’t undo whatever damage our mother had left behind with her words.
“Do me a favor, will ya? Let the guys sleep in the house tonight.”
I finally garnered big brother’s attention. Gideon heaved out a deep exhalation, and something told me he was stuck on the same page as mummy dearest about Delta Shield being outsiders.
Julian spoke before Gideon had a chance to presumably reject me. “You really think Mum is going to let them spend another night on the property, even in the bunkhouse?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I knew exactly what that meant, but I needed them to spell it out for me so I could adamantly refute it.
“How about we table that conversation for now? Mum is right—you should see the vault. Maybe it’ll help,” Julian said, another deflection attempt.
“Fine.” I folded my arms. “But first things first, I’d like an update on Tristan. Is he still on your suspect list? In danger?”
Gideon immediately turned and walked over to the windows facing the front of the house. One hand went to the glass pane, the other into his pocket. He was much more reserved today compared to how he’d been last night, ready to commit murder and all.
“Someone wiped out half of Rome’s CCTV footage while you were there.
Like from the time you left the da Vinci airport up until a few hours after your tracker went dark.
The source code used to do that was mine, and no one else outside of me could’ve done it.
” Julian’s words slammed into me harder than I thought they would.
“Unless they were ever in close proximity to my computer and stole the code that way.”
“I assume you’re about to tell me Tristan is that someone?”
“Could he pull that off?” Julian lifted a shoulder. “Maybe. He visited me in Singapore last month. I was distracted enough that he could’ve done that. I haven’t seen or talked to him since that visit, but that’s the norm with us.”
“Any chance I stole it to cover my own tracks and he has nothing to do with this?” I winced at the idea, but our mother seemed to think this was my fault somehow, so. “Maybe I was working with someone who knew about my tracker and they stabbed me in the back?”
“Everyone who knows about your tracker, and that your protector is off-grid in South America, is on our suspect list.” Gideon’s hand dropped from the window, and he turned back to face the room. “And no, I don’t believe you did this to yourself.”
“My protector?”
“There’s a bloodline of trained men who’ve been guarding our family for hundreds of years.
Nowadays, we consider them teammates, but we each still have one protector assigned to us.
But right now, they’re all in the Andes for a training exercise,” Gideon steadily explained, remaining by the window.
“Which is why I allowed Delta to help me locate you in the first place. Needed more bodies.”
“Your protector isn’t due back for five more days, and the only way we can contact him, or any of them, is by flying to Peru and climbing a mountain, which we’ll do if we need to,” Julian added, drawing a hand to the back of his head, threading his fingers through his hair.
“But I don’t think your protector knows anything, because he was due to leave the day before your trip to Rome.
That’s why we think you chose to go to Italy when you did, so you could avoid him following you and finding out what you were up to. ”
Great. “You said you didn’t know why I was in Rome, so I kept that hidden from you for a reason.” I hated that my mother was potentially right about me. Partially, at least. “Looks like I could be complicit in what happened in some way, shape, or form.”
“You told your best friend you were meeting up with a guy,” Julian said in a hesitant tone.
“No names on the flight manifest we recognized, and we didn’t see you with anyone at the airport before we lost sight of you on surveillance.
The hotel staff also never saw you with anyone, and I can’t recover the CCTV footage from the city to see if you were with someone. ”
“Something tells me you don’t think there was a guy—or if there was, I wasn’t there to have some romantic rendezvous.” Clearly, not with Jason Reed.
“Maybe Tristan asked you to meet him there? I don’t know why or for what, but he could’ve said to keep it a secret, and it was a trap,” Gideon said in an anguished tone, like the mere idea our brother might be involved gutted him to his core.
“Or, hell, it could’ve been a contact or friend you trusted, and they flew into Rome on a different day and stayed elsewhere. ”
“Regardless, I just don’t believe you’d choose to go dark without giving us a heads-up first,” Julian noted with conviction in his voice. “Or allow someone to dope you up and delete your memories. Let alone bury you in a coffin. You’re not a fan of being in tight spaces.”
“Are there people who are?” I let a small smile come and go quickly, and Julian did the same.
“Any chance this possible friend or contact of mine was someone I was secretly dating and I knew you wouldn’t approve of him?
What if I let him know about the tracker?
” My pulse picked up as I let my mind wander into Theory Land.
“Maybe he was using me to get to our family, and he—”
“That exact thing happened to you in college. Well, minus the tracker and source code part. But you haven’t been in a serious relationship since,” Julian remarked, brows pinched, eyes sharp on me, as if in apology to be the one to be the bearer of that trauma dump.
“What happened?” Nerves fluttered from my stomach to my chest, all the way to my throat, forming into a solid lump.
“Your boyfriend used you to get to Dad. Dad killed him first.” Blunt and to the point. I wouldn’t expect anything less from Gideon, even if this me barely knew him.
Got it.
“Dad took Lyra to check out your place in London,” Gideon shared a few seconds later. “She knows you the best of all of us, even though she doesn’t operate, and if you left behind any clues about why you were in Rome, she’ll find something.”
“And when was I last there?”
“About two weeks ago. You took one of our planes to the city and flew to the French Riviera after that before heading to the States,” Julian answered before turning to Gideon. “Maybe I should reach out to Gwen Montgomery? She’s as good as me, if not better. If anyone can help, it’d be her.”
“Mum will never approve of that and you know it.” Gideon tipped his head toward the back window. “She won’t even let those Tier One operators in on anything.”
“Who’s Gwen?” Did they forget I wasn’t exactly briefed on my own life?
“Gwen’s a cyber genius like me.” A wicked smirk cut across Julian’s mouth for some reason.
Did he have a thing for Gwen? Or was that a touch of cockiness about his own skills?
“Her father’s a Navy SEAL sniper who leads a team that works for President Bennett.
And Gwen’s grandfather is the US secretary of defense, Admiral Chandler.
Delta Shield also works for the secretary and president in an indirect way. We do sometimes as well.”
“Yet you don’t trust them enough to share a roof with us?” I jutted my chin forward, arms flying over my chest in defense mode on Reed and his teammates’ behalf.
“I do, I suppose.” Gideon grimaced, like that was painful to spit out.
“But we got our asses handed to us by Mum last night when we let her know we told the team about Tristan,” Julian tacked on. “She called President Bennett and ordered their secrecy.” I didn’t hear sarcasm there, so that was . . . well, not great.
Chills spilled down my back in a dramatic fashion as the reality of my situation struck me all over again, along with the reality of who I was before waking up in that coffin.
I came from a family that had the American president on speed dial, which meant our family was a hell of a lot more important than I’d previously realized. “Who are we? For real?”
“Get dressed. Shoes on, too.” Julian nudged his chin toward the closet. “And I’ll do what Mum told me to and show you.”