“I am not going to stop worrying.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Are you going to your apartment? I should bring your monitor back.”
“I’ll let you know if I need it, but I’m not sure where we’re going to be.” Colleen needed to phrase this next part delicately. “Yeah, all three of us are going to be back in Phoenix in about an hour.”
“All three? Jian is coming to Phoenix? Oh! Did I tell you that he texted me?”
“No, do tell.”
For the next few minutes, Anjali described several texts with more excitement than most people summoned about winning lottery tickets.
While they’d been talking, Tristan had also returned to the table near the front of the plane. Then, seeing her on her phone, he’d wandered a few yards away and dialed someone on his phone.
Colleen was listening to Anjali with all her attention, practically memorizing the texts that Jian had sent and Anjali’s tortured ruminating before each response.
Anjali scolded her, “I needed you here, you know. Because you are a sister to me. I needed you here to talk about these texts that Jian has sent me.”
Colleen smiled big even though they were just talking on a voice call. Anjali was so great when she was happy about something. “I’m on my way back. We can parse them out tomorrow, okay?”
Nevertheless, she could hear what Tristan was saying because the plane was small, and the whining engines weren’t that loud.
Tristan said, “Nope, Blaze. I haven’t received anything.”
Liar.
11
Blaze
Tristan
Tristan followed Colleen back toward the front of the plane, watching her cute little butt jiggle in the clingy shorts she wore. She began to hurry, and then at the table, she dug around in her purse until she found her phone. “Hello?”
She probably wanted some privacy for that.
Tristan veered off and answered his phone, which was ringing so furiously that it was skittering across the galley countertop. He checked the caller ID before he answered. “Blaze? That you?”
Blaze’s deep voice growled through the phone, “Micah said he rescued you in a helicopter? What the hell is going on with you, Twist?”
Tristan chuckled at him. “When I toss up a red flag, I really toss up a red flag.”
“No shit! People were shooting at you? In California?”
“Luckily, they sucked at it.”
“Micah said it was the Butorin Russian mafia.”
Micah must have been busy texting everyone they knew, considering he was probably just landing at the heliport in San Francisco. “Looks that way.”
“You aren’t involved with the Butorins or any of those guys, are you?” Blaze asked him.
“No. God, no.” Or he hadn’t been.
“Or, um, with any of the other Russian syndicates? Like, you haven’t received anything from one of them, have you?” Blaze asked.
Jesus, had Blaze gotten a letter from Mary Varvara Bell, too?
But that was from Logan’s grandfather’s estate, not a Russian bratva. “No, I haven’t gotten anything from the bratvas, other than an offer they thought I couldn’t refuse in Mayamiko Botha’s office yesterday. I can’t talk right now. Micah knows everything about it anyway. Did you receive something from someone?”
A suspicious pause filled the dead air on the phone, and then Blaze said, “No. No, not really. You sure? Are you sure that you didn’t get something from one of them?”
Odd answer.
An impulse trickled into Tristan’s brain that he should come clean to Blaze, that he should spill everything to his friend of nearly twenty years and beg for his help in this most untenable of situations.
But he couldn’t.
It wasn’t just that Tristan was mortified that he would be asked to do such a thing. It was that if he broke down and did it, they would never look at him the same way again.
Even if Tristan had refused and lost everything, the other guys would be tasked to do the job, and their scorn would follow Tristan for the rest of his life because he would agree with their condemnation.
He didn’t want them to think he was the kind of guy who would ditch something so that his friends would then be on the hook for something like that.
Even his friendships with Blaze, Logan, and Micah had limits.
Asking for a rescue because the Russian mafia had kidnapped him?
Sure.
Needing a discreet ride home from the Cannes Film Festival because he was buck naked after three starlets had stolen his Aston Martin and his clothes?
Of course.
Screwing up thousands of innocent people’s lives at the command of Russian crime lords?
He wasn’t even going to tell his friends that someone was trying to make him do it. He didn’t want them to look at him like that. “Nope, Blaze. I haven’t received anything.”
They hung up.
Tristan saw that Colleen was also finished with her call, so he strolled back to the front of the plane.
Jian still hadn’t said a word to either one of them. Those texts he was rapid-thumbing into his phone must be exceedingly important. Hopefully, the epic Jian was writing wasn’t a blow-by-blow account of their kidnapping and rescue to be posted in his secret group for PAs.
Tristan didn’t think Jian would do that.
When Tristan reached the front of the plane, Colleen was lazily spinning her phone flat on the table with one finger. “Important phone call?”
Tristan sat down on the opposite side of the table. “A friend.”
“When we were in there,” she gestured toward the back of the plane where the bathroom was, “you said something about a letter you’d gotten by courier and not by the post office.”
Tristan glanced over at his assistant, but Jian had wandered into the back of the plane near the galley, his head still bent over his phone as his fingers flew over the screen.
Jian was still too close for them to talk. He’d overhear them.
Tristan glanced aside, looking behind himself to where Jian was sitting in the back of the plane. “Not now.”
“He won’t hear us if we whisper,” she said. “Besides, aren’t you rich people supposed to not notice that servants exist?”
Tristan frowned at her. “I wasn’t born rich. I notice when people are around me.” He turned his hand so that his palm was up on the table between them. “We’ll talk later.”
“I’ve heard that before,” she grumbled.
“As soon as we get someplace private, like the hotel. You’ve already gotten most of it out of me.”
She snickered.
Tristan leaned back and chuckled. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
She settled her fingers in his hand, and Tristan closed his fingers over hers. “Am I going to have to coerce you to tell me again?”
“I won’t talk you out of it.”
Colleen rolled her eyes at him. “Okay, fine. Tell me what it’s like to grow up in a fancy boarding school.”
“Well, it’s probably like going to a party school like Southwestern State.” He gestured vaguely toward her and outside the plane’s window. “Except stupider, because everyone is several years younger. And meaner, because most people there are wealthy and don’t care about normal people or the poors.”