Chapter 6
FREDDIE
The new guard at the east door has a thermos with a dinosaur sticker, and he drinks his coffee with a grimace like it’s a punishment.
The guards are my assignment. Tristan has cameras, Owen is stripping the rooms for anything useful, and Weller is turning our scattered discoveries into a plan. I got the humans because I’m the only one who isn’t on their shit list.
I have their shifts, rotations, and the slow churn of who covers what memorized to the minute. Who gets bored. Who follows every rule. Who hesitates before obeying. Any escape we build has to pass one of these men, so I need to know them better than their supervisor does.
“Okay, I have to say it.” I lean against the doorway with both hands visible. “That coffee smells like three-day-old ass.”
“Nobody asked,” he says without lowering the thermos. “Get back inside.”
He’s in his mid-fifties and built. FARROW is stitched above his chest pocket. He’s Tommy’s replacement, Tommy being the genius who got his wrist bent in half.
Owen is definitely not sorry about it.
“I’m only saying that a mansion position should provide better coffee. I make a great pot. Cinnamon and everything.”
“Don’t bother, kid. I need this job too much to make friends.” He keeps his attention on the tree line. “Back inside, please.”
“Yeah. I understand.”
It’s a reasonable answer and an inconvenient one. Farrow is planted beside the door we need, and I came outside looking for an angle. I’m still searching when the name on his shirt connects to a face I spent half my youth studying.
My brain scratches to a stop.
“Wait. Farrow? Timothy Farrow?”
That makes him look at me.
“I had your poster!” I chuckle awkwardly.
“Not in a weird way. My dad hung it in the garage gym to encourage me to work harder.” Thirteen rushing touchdowns his senior year, nine of them after first contact.
Emerald Hills legend. He still holds the school record for yards after contact.
“Coach Hendricks made us watch your highlight reel before every scrimmage.”
His expression loosens by half a degree.
“You played?”
“Quarterback. I wasn’t on your level, but I threw a decent spiral. We ran your offense too. Hendricks didn’t change a single play in twenty years.”
“Stubborn old bastard.” Farrow almost smiles. Then he catches himself and glances toward the house. The wall returns. “Listen, kid. My granddaughter starts college this fall. I’m not losing this paycheck over a nice conversation about high school football.”
“I get it.” I do. Every uniform on this property belongs to someone’s father or grandfather, and most of them are doing this because whatever waits without the paycheck is worse. That’s the problem with talking to the humans. Eventually, they become human.
Another guard rounds the corner for the shift change. Farrow straightens.
I wave lazily and head inside, doing the math. South post changes first, then east. Farrow won’t bend and can’t be bought, but a man who loves his granddaughter might hesitate for half a second before hurting someone. Hurting her.
Half a second is currency.
Owen is waiting in the mudroom with a laundry basket. When I lift an eyebrow, he nods toward the north hall.
“Found something. Storage room. No cameras.” He shifts the basket against his hip. “A lot of dust.”
I follow him past the laundry room to a door that sticks until he leans his hip into it and the latch gives.
“Okay.” I open the first crate and stop. “Okay, wow.”
Mortars as fat as soup cans. Bundles of Roman candles held together by brittle pink rubber bands.
A brick of bottle rockets wrapped in tissue faded like an old bruise.
Behind them, a deflated flamingo float stares at nothing with sun-bleached eyes.
The whole room smells like old sunscreen and gunpowder that never got its moment.
July packed into a box.
“Whitney’s parties,” Owen says. “Had to outshine everyone, including the fireworks.”
“Bless her rotten, competitive heart.”
Enough noise and color above the property will make every guard look in the same direction. We don’t need a clean door if everyone is watching the sky.
Owen continues along the shelves while I silently mourn the flamingo.
There are coils of real braided rope, cans of spray paint rusting around the rims, and stacks of plastic-wrapped sheets and blankets.
Enough bedding for an army - or enough fabric to knot into every foot of line we’d need from a second-story window.
He reaches for the rope. I catch his wrist.
“We don’t touch anything. This room needs to look untouched if anyone inventories it. We were never here. We’re two extremely handsome idiots doing laundry.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“You’re right. One handsome idiot and you.”
He huffs and lowers the crate lid. He takes his time straightening, though. Bianca’s death grip left him walking carefully, a fact he has somehow turned into a personal triumph.
“I’m still pissed you got to kiss her,” he says.
“On the temple. It was practically a handshake.”
It wasn’t. Her hair was damp, and she smelled like her and us, and she let me touch her. Maybe two seconds but still. I’m pathetic. I don’t care.
Owen looks at me, genuinely irritated. “I don’t understand how my dick is bruised and you kiss her and... you get no punishment for that.”
“Some of us have charm. Others threaten to tie her to a bed before breakfast.”
“She likes that.”
“She nearly tore your dick off.”
His mouth twitches. The bastard is gloating. I should have expected this. She buried a shiv in his thigh the first time we saw her again, and he spent the rest of the day acting like she’d given him an engagement ring.
“My dick must like the violence,” he says. “I’ve been hard ever since.”
Of course he has.
“Getting mauled isn’t the same as being forgiven.”
“As soon as we have some privacy, I’ll beg for her forgiveness relentlessly.”
Get in line, buddy.
Tristan sits cross-legged on the destroyed common-room floor, his father-issued work laptop on one knee and a legal pad open on the other. Weller stands at the window with one arm tucked close to his ribs, watching the lawn.
“Tell me something good.” I drop the basket.
“The west camera swings wide when it pans toward the garage,” Tristan says without looking up. “There’s a window at the end of the second-floor hall that belongs to no one for one full rotation. It’s narrow, but it’s there for the taking.”
“We found some things we might be able to use in that storage room at the end of the hall. Fireworks, rope, an ass ton of sheets.”
Weller turns. “The tunnels are welded shut. I double-checked. A blind spot and a distraction are more than we had this morning.”
“Mason has access to everything,” Tristan says, sounding deliriously pleased. “Every ledger, document, photo, recording. Every piece of dirt and blackmail they have. As soon as we’re clear, we’re releasing all of it. They’re dead men walking.”
“We need to be far away from them or else we’ll be the dead ones,” I say.
“It will be open season,” Weller says. His voice remains level, but he’s enjoying this. Weller, enjoying anything. “Once the material is public, they stop being untouchable and become targets. It will keep them occupied while we run.”
“I would feel better about the plan if I could get ahold of my mom.”
Tristan looks at the screen again and opens a messaging app. “Mason has a private investigator he trusts looking for your mom. Michael and Rex are still at boarding school, and Mason has eyes on them. The contact numbers we have may not be current.”
“What about Emma?” Owen asks.
“She’s with your mother at her mother’s family villa in Lake Como. Mason verified the location.” Tristan’s fingers pause over the phone. “She’s out of Vincent’s house. She isn’t out of his control. He still controls their money, and he’s still arranging a pack for her.”
Owen says nothing, but his scent sharpens.
“My mother and the twins are at the vacation house in Saint-Tropez,” Tristan continues. “Weller’s mother is on her family’s yacht. The only person we haven’t put eyes on is your mom. We’ll find her, Freddie.”
Mom doesn’t disappear. She sleeps with the ringer all the way up because what if one of you boys needs me?
But she has gone completely silent. For too long.
It stinks of my father, and he’s kept her from me before...
I’m looking out the window when I see movement... a group of guards huddling together. I crack the window as quietly as I can.
“At the gate...” Static swallows part of the message.
“Yes, the Quinn woman... this is the third time. Boss says she doesn’t come in, and doesn’t see the omega, but the offer to meet for dinner can be arranged...
yeah, over... the whole family is fucking nuts.
Walk her off. Boss would prefer not to call the police again. ”
“Gate,” I say in a hushed tone, waving Tristan and Weller over without alerting anyone outside. “Kate is at the gate.”
We stand in dead silence for the next half hour listening for more details on Kate and watching for Bianca out the windows while the clock over the mantel takes its sweet fucking time.
She’s been gone all day.
We feel her through the bond before the golf cart turns into view, fear and anger and enough frustration to make me want to punch someone.
A guard is driving. Bianca sits beside him with her face set in a scowl and one thumbnail caught between her teeth. The cart barely stops before she jumps off and marches up the steps to the door.
The guard outside calls after her. She answers without breaking stride, too far away for me to catch the words. The door opens, and she pushes past us the moment she’s inside. She smells like strangers, cosmetics, and fresh blood and it trails behind her as she disappears down the hall.
“B—” I start.
The bathroom door slams hard enough to shake the frame. Then the shower starts.
Weller knocks softly on the bathroom door. “Did anyone hurt you physically?”
Her answer almost disappears under the water. “No.”
She starts crying right after that, the sound muffled by running water and a locked door while the bond gives all of it back to us.
All day, I studied guards and told myself it counted as helping her. Great fucking job, Freddie.
Owen’s hand closes around the doorknob, and I hold my breath, waiting for Weller to intervene, for Bianca to scream at him, for whatever comes next.
His knuckles go white. The bathroom door stays shut.
One finger at a time, he lets go.