by Wren Weston
Had he gone red, too?
Lila tried to catch the boy’s eye again, but he refused to look up. He just kept his hands in his pockets, fidgeting as fifteen-year-old boys tended to do.
“Of course, as a German citizen, Oskar Kruger will never be allowed to purchase his mark,” the auctioneer concluded.
Onstage, Oskar frowned.
“I’ll start the bidding at ten thousand.”
Chairwoman Hardwicke raised her paddle.
A man beside them countered it, another proxy for a foreign bidder, by the look of his coat. “The boy doesn’t belong here,” he hissed, his desperation overriding his propriety.
“He doesn’t belong in Germany either,” Lila said. “I suppose you’ll help shuffle him along if your patron wins the bid.”
“Of course not. It would be illegal for me to conduct business on behalf of a Roman citizen. The laws are strict—too strict, if you ask me.”
“That’s almost treason.”
The laws weren’t too strict, and they both knew it. Only citizens of the Allied Lands had the right to bid on slaves. If a non-American won the auction, Chief Shaw would have to verify everything before allowing Oskar out of the country. Papers would be signed, contracts would be validated by both governments, and many promises and assurances would be made on both sides.
None of that set Lila’s mind at ease. Some of the less scrupulous matrons likely had a plan for smuggling Oskar out of the country, right under Bullstow’s nose.
The lowborn ignored her parting shot. He turned on his heel, stalking closer to the stage.
Lila wondered whom he represented.
She could find out. It wouldn’t be that hard.
“Fifty thousand to Chairwoman Hardwicke,” the auctioneer said, offering a slightly inebriated chuckle. “I bet that flawless opal around her neck cost more.”
After his comment, so many bids came in that he could hardly keep track. But as the amount pushed higher and higher, fewer paddles flashed throughout the room. Oskar’s price had quickly soared above what most were willing to spend. The winner would still have to pay for the boy’s education, medical fees, and security. Oskar Kruger would cost a great deal in upkeep.
That lesson had been burned into the heirs less than an hour before.
It didn’t take long for the bids to dwindle away. Soon only Chairwoman Hardwicke and Chairwoman Holguín flashed their paddles.
“Six point five million to Chairwoman Hardwicke.”
Chairwoman Holguín narrowed her eyes, peering at her rival. “Seven,” she called out.
Half the room clucked their tongues. Calling out over the crowd was tacky. Highborn eyes bounced back and forth as though they watched a tennis match.
“Do I hear seven point five, Chairwoman Hardwicke?” the auctioneer asked.
The matron nodded, and the bidding started anew.
After Chairwoman Holguín raised her paddle for ten million, Chairwoman Hardwicke shook her head, letting her rival take the boy.
“I didn’t know the Hardwickes were interested in Oskar,” Lila said.
“They aren’t,” her mother replied. “Everyone knows that Chairwoman Holguín likes ones and fives and tens at these things. Chairwoman Hardwicke just wanted to drain her coffers.”
As soon as the gavel banged against the podium, Chairwoman Holguín click-clacked toward the ballroom entrance, the hand-crafted lace on her orange dress swaying with every step. The twin tigers on her coat of arms, stitched on the breast of her silvercoat, snarled at one another.
“It’s the loyalists,” her father said as the LeBeau militia led Oskar back to the holding cells. Phillip Wilson stepped up beside the podium next, his chin raised, his lips frozen in a pout. “I suspect killing Oskar was Plan A. Plan B is dealing with the Holguíns. They’ll buy the boy and murder him to secure the empire, and it will only cost them ten million to do it. I should never have let you sell him, Bea.”
“The prime minister does not let the matrons do anything. And I sincerely doubt that Chairwoman Holguín has found a loophole around the slave regulations. She’s not smart enough for that.”
“She doesn’t need a loophole,” Lila reminded them. “If I wanted the boy dead, I’d promise one of the families whatever it took, just so I knew where the boy would be after the auction ended. It would only take one shot from a high-powered rifle a kilometer away. A trained sniper—someone like Commander Sutton—could make that shot easily.”
Her mother’s face paled. Clearly, she hadn’t thought of the most obvious solution.
Perhaps there was hope for her yet.
“Lila, you need a vacation.”
“I’m only saying what someone has already planned, Mother. An assassin doesn’t even have to take the shot tonight, especially if half the journalists in New Bristol follow the boy. They can just keep him in sight and wait for a clear shot. My advice, Father? Get Chief Shaw on it, and advise the Holguíns to keep the boy underground. It’s hard to find someone on thermal through several tons of dirt.”
Her father pulled out his palm and began typing a message. “I’ll have Chief Shaw escort the boy to the Holguín compound and keep a few patrols in the area. The chairwoman can contest our interference with the council later.”
“She will,” her mother predicted. “I suspect two groups are out tonight, Henri. The loyalists want Oskar dead, but the traditionalists will want him alive. At ten million credits, the boy would make for a cheap and grateful puppet, one still young enough to be molded.”
“It beats being a slave, doesn’t it?” Lila asked.
“It’s just a different kind of slavery. We should all be more concerned with the empire’s aristocracy. If they fetch Oskar and take his father from King Lucas, then they could gain control of the empire, so long as they can sway public sentiment and gain the support of their clergy. Warmongers, the lot of them. King Lucas does a fair job of holding them all in check, but if he loses the reins…”
The chairwoman took a sip of wine and fixed her daughter with a stare. “War is generally bad for business, unless you’re the one supplying the bullets and the rations and tossing someone else’s children into the breach. It only takes one excuse to beat the drums.”
“Well, let’s hope they don’t find an excuse.”
“Let’s hope they take up a new pastime and stop playing at politics.”
“You dabble all the time, Mother.”
“Dabbling isn’t what they do. We push through favorable zoning laws and pollution regulations. That’s a lot different than poking at foreign leaders and governments. It’s why we let the senate handle such things. Buffers, if you will. Buffers who have too many children scattered among the highborn and lowborn alike to risk their offspring falling on the front lines of a war without reason. It gives us boundaries, Lila. That’s the difference. Ask Commander Sutton if you still don’t understand.” She drained her glass and nodded at Lemaire. “Are you ready to leave, Henri?”
He tapped out one last message on his palm. “Yes. Lila, would you like to ride with us?”
Lila frowned. The pair seemed to have made up. “As much as I love trying to carry on a conversation while you both paw at one another, I have my own car and a prior appointment.”
“Such a grouch. Maybe she does need a vacation, Bea.”
The chairwoman looked smugly at Lila.
“Come to Falcon Home tomorrow morning for breakfast, Lila girl. Nine o’clock. I have an early meeting, but I’ll wait to eat until you arrive.”
Lila nodded, steeling her face so that she would not tip off her mother. Her father didn’t want breakfast. He wanted her help with Oskar.
And that was too bad, for Lila had every intention of stealing the boy herself.
“I’d love to have breakfast with you, Father.”
“Good. Perhaps I’l
l even try my hand at making pancakes.”
Lila tried to smile. Though she appreciated the effort, she’d eaten burned pancakes too many times as a child. “Hmmm,” she answered diplomatically.
“Fine, I’ll ask Chef Mathieu make them instead.”
“No sausage?”
“No sausage,” he promised, his hand over his heart.
“Well, in that case, I’d be delighted to attend.”
Chapter 4
Lila exited the bathroom, her silken white robe light upon her skin. Two wolves had been stitched in red upon the breast, both snarling and biting in different directions. She dried her damp hair with a towel and sat upon her bed.
She had a blackmailer to catch, but all she wanted to do was sleep. Tristan had promised her a long rest after they caught Oskar. Her mother had promised the same after the auction.
Now she’d have another hard few days recovering the boy.
Her back hit the mattress, the gray and white paint on her walls calming her, the emptiness of the room soothing. She’d always kept her decorations simple and orderly. Bedding in black with little pops of crimson in the pillows. A black leather couch along one wall. A headboard, desk, coffee table, dresser, and bedside table, all carved in ebony. Jewel had crafted a small Randolph coat of arms out of silver, much like the one stitched upon her clothes, and Lila had hung it above her couch. That, and a collection of framed photos on her dresser, rounded out the room’s decor.
Her palm buzzed upon her desk, reminding her of the blackmailer’s message.
Reluctantly, she returned to her desk and checked her message. Commander Sutton had sent her an update from the security office. Luckily, she hadn’t mentioned the gunman.
Lila switched on her desktop computer. She sent out spies to watch the Holguín compound and, for the next hour, fiddled with her snoop programs, altering them slightly to gather what she could from the blackmailer’s message. After setting them to run their searches, she pulled open a secret compartment in the back of her closet. She withdrew a pair of black trousers, gray gloves, and a long-sleeved gray shirt, none of which displayed the family’s coat of arms. After dressing quickly, she added a pair of worn boots. Though cheap, the boots felt like pillows and clouds after spending so many hours in heels. The unmarked, drab clothes would be a damn sight more anonymous than faffing about in Randolph red on Shippers Lane, and faffing about was exactly what she intended to do. She had a few choice words for Tristan. She also had no desire to be alone after what she’d done—what it felt like she’d done.
It would only make her dreams worse. She’d had a steady stream of disturbing ones the week before, dreams of an ancient oracle prodding her to visit the New Bristol temple, dreams of Reaper holding a knife to her throat, dreams of Tristan stabbing the hacker and firing a bullet into his neck, dreams of Dixon writhing on the floor. She had no interest in crawling into bed and risking another.
A giggle pierced the air as she opened her bedroom door. Her mother and father must have moved their wine drinking upstairs. Perhaps Lemaire would spend the next week in the chairwoman’s bed, rendering them both too busy to bother Lila about silly things, leaving her free to rescue a potential monarch of their country’s sworn enemy.
Lila slipped downstairs, passing under the full-length version of her sister’s silver coat of arms and a few centuries of Randolph family portraits. When she thought about her life like that, she wondered who she’d become in the last couple of years. She certainly wasn’t the woman her mother raised her to be. That didn’t bother her much, for she’d never wanted to be that person, but the fact that she was drifting away from her father’s notions of right and wrong did. Her father had always been her moral compass. If he looked at her tonight, really looked at her and all the things she’d done recently, what would he say?
He certainly wouldn’t be proud.
If he was just, he’d most likely ask Shaw to arrest her.
Then again, he’d tried to bribe her mother a few hours before, all to save a boy from a lifetime of slavery. Perhaps he’d understand.
Lila slipped through the great house scullery, avoiding the footman in their coats and breeches. She jogged down a rose-strewn gravel path to the garage. It contained the cars of the chairwoman and her daughters, most shared between the three women. But no one dared touch the chairwoman’s sleek Blanc convertible, just as no one dared touch Lila’s Adessi roadster or her silver Firefly, a motorcycle full of curves and moxie. Unfortunately, she could not ride it due to the stitches on her palms. Instead she stopped before a nondescript Cruz sedan, one of the cheaper models the workborn could attain, so long as they belonged to a profession. There were thousands of such cars in New Bristol, which meant that it would afford her some degree of anonymity.
Pulling out her palm, she brought up her snoop programs and searched for her mother’s ubiquitous bugs. Finding an audio bug and a GPS tracker, she tossed them onto her sister’s Firefly in an ever-growing pile, then sped through the Randolph estate. A stone wall topped with iron surrounded the compound, just like the other eleven highborn compounds in New Bristol.
The Randolph estate shone just a bit brighter than the others, though. It spanned ten kilometers in each direction, far wider than any other compound. Wolf Tower soared above it all near the center of the compound, housing her mother’s penthouse office as well as the offices of the other Randolph executives. No other skyscraper in the city came close to reaching its forty-five stories. Her mother wouldn’t allow it.
Other skyscrapers crowded around Wolf Tower in the north, including the twin Garza buildings and several condos covered in glass. The south held the palatial homes of the heirs, including the chairwoman’s great house, named Villanueva House after the architect who designed it. The Greens housed the legion of slaves who toiled as groundskeepers. They were all needed, for much of the compound contained nothing but lawns and flowers and trees. It made for a nice jog in the morning, but it took a great deal of care to maintain.
She reached the south gate quickly and flashed a distracted wave to Sergeant Tripp and his rookie.
The two blackcoats drew themselves up tighter when they glimpsed their chief. Sergeant Tripp bent at the rolled-down window and inclined his head. His pipe peeked from his coat pocket. “Evening, chief. Heard there was a fuss at the auction tonight.”
“A bit.”
“The security office is buzzing about it. Great save, chief.” A ghost of a grin appeared on his face. “Were you really wearing heels at the time?”
“Yeah, I stole them from your closet.” Lila sped off, knowing the security office would be covered in ribbons and heels when she arrived the next morning.
She drove the sedan along the darkening downtown streets, speeding past the lowborn and workborn crowds who had ventured out for dinner dates and anniversaries. Couples lined up with intertwined hands, young and old alike, waiting to enter restaurants they could barely afford. With little knowledge of the season’s trends, they did not judge their partners for their attire, only noting it with simple descriptors: sexy, cute, sporty, and smart.
Lila knew they used more, she just couldn’t think of them. She tried, though, all so she didn’t have to think of the gunman’s face while he lay on the ballroom floor, the way he’d looked when she—
Lila licked her lips and hit the gas, speeding toward the entrance for the interstate. Few cars drove upon it so late in the evening, and she slalomed through what little traffic remained.
Sexy, cute, sporty, and smart. What else had she read in those teen magazines all those years ago?
Ah, trendy. It described those from the poorer classes who snatched up counterfeit designer goods and try to pass them off as highborn ware.
Gods, she and Holly used to—
Lila swallowed hard. She didn’t want to think about her, either. Mashing the gas, Lila sped along, not caring a whit abou
t her speed.
It didn’t take long for her to reach Shippers Lane. She parked in a parking garage near a Chinese restaurant called the Plum Luck Dragon, hoping her car would still be there when she returned. Plastic bags and cigarette packages skittered past her boots on the sidewalk. Today her stomach rolled at the smell of pork lo mein and stir-fried rice. Usually after a job, Tristan and Dixon celebrated with enough food to launch her into an MSG coma, but this job had not gone well. She hoped he hadn’t bought food at all, for the last thing she wanted to do was eat.
Perhaps Tristan wouldn’t want food either. Perhaps he was too busy explaining to Maria why her brother had not been brought back from the job as promised. Perhaps he was too busy bringing her tissue after tissue after tissue.
She and Tristan would fight about that. The fighting would annoy her even more than usual. They’d been getting along so well lately, ever since they’d narrowly escaped the Wilson compound. Reaper had bluffed that he’d poisoned Tristan’s brother and that only he held the antidote. He’d also lunged at Lila with a knife. Tristan had shot Reaper, not realizing the gun held bullets, rather than tranqs. He’d killed a man and condemned Dixon to death with one shot.
Luckily, Dixon had only been given an anesthetic. A harsh one, but it hadn’t killed him.
Reaper’s death had amped Tristan up, though, had made him nervous and fidgety. It weighed on him but not as much as his split-second decision to save Lila’s life at the expense of his brother’s. Though he claimed he didn’t regret it, he still hadn’t come to terms with it.
He hadn’t come to terms with Lila, either. Sleeping in bed together, curling up in one another’s arms, was a welcome change from their perpetual arguing, but Lila still didn’t know how to feel about it. Highborns were much more casual about sex than the poorer classes, and he obviously didn’t know how difficult their new normal was for her. To be so near someone and not have sex was torture.
It was even worse when you’d begun to develop feelings for them.