Page 13 of Savage Surrender

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.