Chapter 4
TRISTAN
Our wing looks like a crime scene, and I prefer it this way.
At least the destruction is honest. No one has come to repair any of it, which bothered me at first. I kept waiting for the guards to storm in, take Bianca somewhere else, and prove that a few hours of privacy weren’t worth the cost.
But no one came. Only Montgomery’s assistant, delivering that bullshit invitation.
The quiet is stranger than the damage. For years, there’s been a low current of surveillance under every moment - cameras recording, sorting, breathing inside the walls. We searched every room twice. Behind chairs and cabinets. Inside fixtures. Along the baseboards. Nothing is watching us now.
An old laptop heats my thighs. Winston’s burner has given us the connection to the outside world we’ve been starving for, while Whitney’s USB occupies one port and Mason’s notes fill the screen in no useful order.
Three separate complaints about our fathers’ systems, each less polite than the last. He’s been busy.
I rub my eyes. I’ve been staring at the screen so long I’m getting a headache.
Everyone else is working too. Freddie and Owen are searching the rest of the house for anything useful and are hopefully managing the concept of stealth.
The tunnels Bianca used the last time she broke in have been welded shut.
None of us expected Montgomery to leave that mistake available twice.
Bianca’s been giving us the cold shoulder since the parents’ house. Fair. I’m still not sorry.
New guards took over this morning. They found their positions and haven’t moved since.
No chatter, no checking phones, no weakness to exploit.
Montgomery increased security the moment Bianca blinded his cameras, but he still hasn’t sent anyone into our wing.
Not to question us. Not to replace a single lens.
I swallow, and warm metal shifts against my throat.
The surveillance is gone. The cage isn’t.
I haven’t seen Bianca in at least half an hour. The faint scrape of metal against tile has been going for three minutes.
I work faster. We can’t waste the opening our little hellcat made for us.
Weller lowers himself beside me with one arm kept close to his ribs and angles one knee toward the screen. “Catch me up on everything.”
I open Mason’s newest note first. In the Dashwood shells.
I tap Mason’s line with one finger. “He found the holding companies.”
“How many?”
I click through the list while it grows. Seven. Eleven. Fifteen. “Do you want the current number or the number it’ll be by the time I finish answering?”
Weller takes the laptop long enough to scan the account names, then hands it back. “Current. I can extrapolate.”
Our fathers are going to be furious when they discover we’ve planned for them.
We’ll lock them out of all their shit one piece at a time.
Money will disappear into places they’ll never find.
Assets frozen, or put in review for investigations.
Every contact copied, every private file archived.
By the time they notice the door closing, we’ll already be locked inside.
I move to the calendars. Lunch dates. Travel plans. More personal information than any son should have to know about his father. Especially fathers as shitty as ours.
The detail that matters sits four calendars down. I turn the screen toward Weller. All four of the bastards are expected at the gala.
“Should be fun.”
“Our definition of fun differs.”
The corner of his mouth almost moves. The metal scraping down the hall stops, and both of us look toward the doorway.
I click into the next item. Mason traced the Havershams to a hunting lease upstate, where I would prefer they remain indefinitely, shooting anything that isn’t my mate or one of us. I add the property to our watch list and move on.
I switch back to Whitney’s drive. A video thumbnail from the refuge catches Weller’s attention before I can sort past it.
“Open that.”
“We’re supposed to be working.”
“Tristan.”
I open it. Bianca is younger, her hair hanging past her waist as she crouches beside a tree line in the early morning light.
She resets a snare with her bare hands like she’s done it a hundred times.
Someone outside the frame says something, and she throws back her head and laughs.
The microphone barely catches the sound.
My thumb catches under the warm edge of my collar. Whoever spoke earned that laugh. She laughed like that without us.
Weller leans closer. “Look at her.”
“My favorite thing to do.”
“She just finished turning a toothbrush into a weapon and has moved on to giving the butter knives a razor blade edge, if you’d like to court death in person.”
I laugh under my breath.
I found her stash beneath the mattress this morning: a wooden spoon with two nails hammered through the bowl, a pie cutter, a butter knife she’s grinding into something sharp, a lighter, and a fistful of zip ties she stole from the guard.
I let her believe I haven’t noticed.
The next Mason note is six lines and one problem.
TRUSCENT. F.M. / T.B. / W.D. / O.W. Age 16. Target W.M. Barrett trial index, underlying record missing.
Weller’s thumb stops against the laptop’s edge. “Sixteen?”
“That’s the part you’d like clarified?”
“Every part needs clarification.”
So far, the note clarifies nothing. The TruScent file we found before the preserve was designed to fake a scent match where none existed.
This one names the four of us four years before they forced a bond on us, and Mason found only the index entry.
No objective. No result. Nothing that explains what Montgomery and our fathers were trying to do to us at sixteen.
I switch to Whitney’s USB and type TruScent into the search field.
No results.
Thousands of files sit beneath dates, invoice numbers, initials, and labels that mean nothing outside Whitney’s head.
I start building an index of the files. The fan wakes with an asthmatic whine, and a progress bar appears at the bottom of the screen.
Weller watches the progress bar advance by one stubborn pixel. “How long will this take?”
“Longer if you keep asking.”
His hazel eyes lift from the screen and stay on me until I return to the files. I sort the unfiled documents by date and begin opening previews while the index crawls behind them. Most are useless. Receipts. Screenshots of messages. Invoices.
Two saved articles appear beside a photocopied payment slip.
Local man critical after red-light collision.
Driver killed in single-vehicle crash on Route 9.
I open the first and scan it. A drunk driver ran a red light and hit another car head-on. The victim was left in critical condition.
Winston Quinn, 26, longtime resident of Emerald Hills.
The second article was published weeks later. The drunk driver, who was released on bail, died on a back road when his car hit a tree. The death was ruled an accident. He’d fallen asleep on the way home after a bartending shift.
The payment slip is for ten thousand dollars. No memo. No name. I drag it beside the headlines.
Weller braces one hand on the back of the couch and presses the other forearm against his ribs. “This makes it seem like Winston’s accident wasn’t an accident.”
But only one man needed Winston in a hospital badly enough to guarantee Bianca would come home. Anyone who spends five minutes with her knows there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for her brother. If Montgomery wanted to bait her into range, Winston was the line to pull.
I enlarge the payment slip until the amount blurs at the edges. “I would agree. It doesn’t prove anything, though.”
“No.”
I turn toward him. “Compelling rebuttal.”
“We don’t tell her before the fitting.”
“Don’t—”
“She’ll go for his throat. And every time Montgomery needs leverage, Bianca offers him her body and calls it a plan. If she attacks him tomorrow, they put her in secured quarters until her heat. No.”
“So we hand her another reason not to trust us.”
“Until we’re out of this house and out of the collars.” His voice lowers. “Then all five of us see everything.”
The laptop chimes.
Index complete.
One result sits beneath a file named with fourteen meaningless numbers. I open the preview, and a clinical header fills the screen: TruScent — Trial cohort. Dosage tables follow it, then scent-response baselines and a column of designations.
F.M. — T.B. — W.D. — O.W.
Us.
Objective: pharmacological redirection of established scent-match orientation to designated target (W.M.).
Established.
Not created. Not induced. Redirected. They weren’t trying to build a match. They were trying to cover one that already existed.
When Bianca was only fourteen, they tried to separate us for the first time.
I scroll to the result.
Response: failed.
They failed at sixteen. They failed at twenty, even if we ended up ensnared. They could cut off my nose, and Bianca would still be under my skin until the end of time.
“So, are we keeping this from her too?”
“Just for now.”
I could walk down the hall and tell her. I should.
The word established sits on the screen. Ours before the drugs, before Whitney, before they tried to choose for us. I read it twice before my fingers move again.
I encrypt all of the files and bury a copy in the archive only Mason can reach.
Her voice carries from down the hall, dry and bossy. She’s ordering Freddie around and enjoying every second of it. From the hard-on he keeps trying to hide, he is too. I snap the laptop shut. Weller is already on his feet, setting his mouth into the neutral line he uses in hostile boardrooms.
Bianca slips past him with her hair twisted into a knot that’s coming loose at the sides. Her thin shirt does nothing to hide the outline of her nipples, which I would very much like to put in my mouth. Her tiny shorts could stop traffic.
“Find anything useful?”
“We’re getting our ducks in a row. The ducks are spreadsheets. You’d hate it.”
She looks from Weller’s boardroom face to my hands on the laptop. No smiles for us. “That’s not what I asked.”
No. It isn’t.
I pack every ounce of boredom I possess into a shrug and walk two fingers up the curve of her hip beneath her tank, heading somewhere much more interesting.
She slaps my hand away. “Hard pass. Secretive assholes don’t get to touch me, in case you forgot.”
I think I’ll die if I don’t sink inside her soon. My knot doesn’t care that the world is ending. It wants to return home.