“When was the last time you sat and focused on your own lunch?”
“Don’t use my own words against me.”
“Of course,” Lila said, brushing her finger across the countertop. “Look, Chef, in a few minutes a blackcoat named Sergeant Tripp will attend to his new post here in the kitchens. He’ll be looking after Ms. Wilson for the next couple of days. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Looking a
fter her? Is she in danger?”
“It’s just a precaution. I’ll feel better if someone is watching out for her and those around her. She’s agreed to that much, at least, but I’d rather not have Sergeant Tripp tromping all around the great house. It’ll be harder for him to do his job.”
“I’ll inform Ms. O’Malley about Ms. Wilson’s amended duties,” Chef said, unpausing her music. “Isabel will be along shortly with your lunch, madam.”
Lila nodded her thanks, then climbed upstairs to her room and woke her computer. As she typed in her ID, her mind strayed to the question of Dixon’s identity once again. It had stuck with her all night, all morning, and all afternoon, like an intense craving she couldn’t get rid of no matter how much she ate. It would be easy to spend a few minutes recalibrating her search parameters. It could run in the background and wouldn’t even take up that much of her computing power.
But she had promised.
Besides, she had other work to do.
Isabel roused her from her trance with a knock on the door, bringing her lunch.
Nibbling on Chef’s curried chicken salad, Lila checked her palm. Sutton had sent a message, informing her that the militia patrols had been doubled, just as Lila had asked. Sutton had sent another confirming that the Masson militia would pull Simon from the vineyard immediately, excusing him by illness, and place him under guard. Since Commander Sutton’s sister-in-law was the commander at the vineyard, Lila had faith that the job would be taken care of discreetly, with no word leaking to either the Massons or the Wilsons.
Lila’s luck had run out by the third message. Sutton insisted that unless Lila gave her an explanation for the orders, she’d request a protective guard for her, too. Lila typed out a reply, assuring the commander that she had no intentions of leaving the compound that afternoon.
But Lila knew Sutton. The woman was no fool, and Lila had exhausted her patience. Her commander knew something was going on, something that had spooked her chief. She’d start demanding answers the moment Lila returned to the security office.
So would her mother.
Lila wasn’t even sure if she was overreacting or not. Every scrap of information she found on Zephyr said that he was just a hacker. Bribery was recent, something he had branched into during the last couple of years. He’d never featured in any reports of physical violence, at least none that she had heard about. His attack, if one came, would come from online.
But she wasn’t about to take any chances with her friends.
She added a thank you to Commander Sutton and skimmed the auto-transcription file from Wilson’s bug. Nothing more had been captured by it.
With security in place and no new information, Lila turned her attentions to Valandra Schreiber. Finding the forger meant trapping Chairwoman Wilson, which meant capturing Zephyr. Then, and only then, would the threat looming over her father’s head, Shaw’s head, and her own be lifted. Only then would Tristan be ejected from her life. Dixon might have been right: perhaps she did like looking at Tristan. She liked looking at a lot of men, but that didn’t mean anything. Highborn casualness wouldn’t suit a former slave.
After she wrapped up the Wilson situation, they could both go on with their lives. She was just hungry. She’d take a short vacation. Perhaps she’d even let Dubois pair her up with one of his cousins this season, if he was so keen to play matchmaker.
Lila slipped a few grapes into her mouth, thinking of the Closing Ball, and set her programs to search for Ms. Schreiber. She even tried a few manual searches, all longshots but valid nonetheless.
But after an hour, she’d still found nothing.
She didn’t have time to continue searching on her own. The forger had always been good at erasing all traces of herself on the net. Or, at least, paying the right sort to do it for her.
She bit into a chocolate chip cookie and typed a familiar name into her palm.
Max Earlwell.
Named John Poole by birth, Max had a modest start to life. His mother had been a slave, caught stealing corporate data from the Salazars, an old highborn family based in La Verde. Trudy Poole might have dodged the loss of her mark if she had been highborn, but with no family to pay her lawyer’s fees, she had been sold at auction. More correctly, she had been given away. Even a steep discount had not been enough to tempt any of the highborn families into allowing a corporate thief onto their property. Wolf Industries had been the only family to acquiesce, for Beatrice Randolph had understood Ms. Poole’s unique worth.
She also knew she wouldn’t have to pay for it.
Lila had not understood as a child that every rule, every barrier preventing her from visiting Ms. Poole had been carefully constructed by her mother to entice her. Ms. Poole had been Lila’s cookie jar, set up on the highest shelf in the kitchen. Always there, always ready to teach Lila something new. A new way to infiltrate a family’s network, a new way to sneak into locked buildings, a new way to disengage security systems, a new way to divert an alarm. Visiting her father and Shiloh at Bullstow had been test runs for Lila’s future mischief. How far could she take Ms. Poole’s lessons? Could she go one step further?
Could she go one step after that?
Lila wondered if her mother had ever intended for her education to go so far. Instead of her daughter learning corporate defense, Lila had reveled in its offense.