A few days later, I’m back home, going through some of Dad’s old code. I figure if I’m going to take over his company, I should get familiar with his old stuff along with whatever Oscar has them doing now.
The phone rings next to me, shattering my concentration. It takes me a moment to pull myself out of my father’s code and back into the real world. By the time I do, I almost miss the call, which is from Raven.
“Hey,” I say softly. She’s been having issues with Bishop, so I’m trying to be the kind, gentle one in our relationship. Raven’s done it enough for me, especially when Axel left, so I’m more than ready to do it for her.
“Hey, yourself,” a deep male voice rumbles.
I snap up so fast my head hits the back of my chair. “Tynan? But the phone says—”
“Spoofed. I wanted to make sure you would answer.”
I force my breath to slow and smooth out. “I don’t like this. You shouldn’t lie to me—I haven’t lied to you.”
Whatever sins he thinks have been committed against him, I wasn’t part of them.
“I needed to talk to you. Not through a text.”
His voice might have changed some through the years, but its effect on me hasn’t. His low notes rumble at the same frequency as my bones, setting all of me to quaking. It’s hard to concentrate on keeping my shields up with him when he can make me quiver with a word.
At least he’s not in the room with me. “Where are you?” I ask. No one’s figured out where he’s hiding yet, although Gage has been working nonstop on it.
“Around,” he says vaguely. I can tell he’s amused at our futile efforts to find him. “Don’t worry, I won’t disappear again.”
“Don’t joke about that,” I hiss. “When you died—when I thought you died…”
I can’t finish that—it’ll be too revealing. But maybe I’ve already revealed too much.
There’s a long pause. His breathing deepens over the phone.
“I’m sorry,” he says finally, “that I hurt you. I never meant to do that.”
The Tynan I used to know would have apologized without hesitation. But this new Tynan is so hard, so suspicious, I’m taken by surprise.
I don’t know what to say. I can’t say that it’s fine because it isn’t. Dad’s still gone; Tynan still let me think he was dead.
Raven would have the perfect thing to say, but I’m the emotionally dumb sister. Nothing even halfway decent is coming to mind.
“Okay,” I say finally. “What were you calling about that couldn’t wait for a text?”
“We should meet. You, me, Raven, just the three of us. We’ll decide together what to do with Ira’s last project. No outside interference. I won’t steamroll you or steal anything—that isn’t what Ira would have wanted.”
That sends a shudder through me. Alone with Tynan again—although Raven would be there too, I guess—sounds way too risky. His expression was so cold, so hard…
“I’ll have to discuss it with Raven. I can’t give you an answer now.” I’m pleased with how brisk I sound. “Was there anything else?”
“I did call about one other thing.”
“Oh?”
“It’s about Axel.”
My heart does a stutter step. We mutually agreed it was time to end things, but… I still don’t know how to feel about it. Axel walked away from everything—his position as CEO, me, his whole life in San Francisco. Tech lords talk about going off to the mountains to find themselves, but they don’t actually do it.
For some reason, Axel did.
“What about him?” I say carefully. Although there’s plenty of public evidence Axel and I were together—there must be thousands of pictures of us on his Instagram alone—it’s not something I’ve ever discussed with Tynan. Social media made us look like a glamorous power couple, but we really did have a connection.
“Did I ever tell you how I survived when I was gone?” he asks casually.
I don’t understand what that has to do with Axel, but I suppose I have to get used to Tynan jerking me around. He didn’t use to be like this, and it upsets me. “No, you didn’t tell anyone anything,” I say pointedly.
“Hmm, remind me to go into detail sometime.”
“You could do it now.”
“And ruin the anticipation? I’m good at waiting, you know.”
He’s terrifyingly good at it. “Clearly you’ve done something that’s earned you a ton of money. The kind of secrecy you live in isn’t cheap.”
“You’d be surprised,” he says softly. “Did Camber tell you about our childhood?”
My breath catches in my lungs. Tynan never talked about his childhood before, and I never wanted to pry. But I was deeply curious. “You could tell me,” I say carefully. I’d rather hear about it from you.
There’s a beat of consideration on the other end. I can’t see him, but I imagine his expression looks like it used to when he was thinking hard—eyes narrowed in a sexy squint, those full lips pursed, his jaw set hard. He made deep concentration look like foreplay honestly.
I hope he still looks like that when he ponders things. It’d be a terrible loss if he didn’t. To the world in general, not me personally of course.
“First,” he says finally, “about Axel: you need to ask him about the Sulci project.”
That gets my attention. I grip the phone tighter to my ear. “How do you know about that?”
The Sulci project is our internal code name at Inspiron for our ongoing AI project. It’s not a name that someone outside the company should know. Just knowing the name doesn’t mean that Tynan’s discovered Inspiron’s deepest corporate secrets, but it’s a bad sign in general.
I’m the lead on Sulci. It’s my baby, although Axel was the one who started it back when he founded Inspiron. I had to work my way up to the lead on that, and it’s almost like… It’s almost like Tynan is threatening it.
“Ask him about it.” His calmness is maddening. “It should come from him, not me.”
My heart is pounding. I hate this, the way Tynan is overturning everything while being so… so… asshole-ish about all of it. “Or you could tell me now,” I say coldly. “Look, this coy bullshit is—”
“I’ll tell you about my childhood.”
That stops me dead, like I’ve run right to the edge of a cliff and I have to pinwheel to pull back. “What?”
“I probably should have told you before. But it was a habit too deep to break then.”
Gage has passed on bits and pieces from what Camber’s told him, but I know it’s not the whole story. The parts I have heard are bad enough.
I’m sure there’s worse though.
“You guys were isolated.”
He makes a noise that’s had all the humor flattened from it. “Our dad was crazy. Camber would argue about that, but she always had a soft spot for him.”
I shift on the couch, curling around my phone as if I can hold his voice closer. “You don’t.” It’s there in the flinty, chipped-off quality of his words. He spoke the same way to Bishop.
“He fucked up our childhood. Maybe he should have dealt with his own shit instead of foisting it on us.”
The image of my own dad flashes through my mind. I wouldn’t put him on the same level as Tynan’s dad—we weren’t locked away from the rest of the world—but everything he’s left us in those notebooks could be characterized as foisting shit on us. From the grave, no less.
“What shit?” I ask. Because I’m heartily sick of my own dad’s crap and I desperately want Tynan to keep talking. To keep opening up like he’s still got a heart.
“He thought the entire outside world was out to get us,” Tynan says. “All the time, he’d say, you can only trust each other. But we couldn’t trust him, see? He left us to fend for ourselves constantly. If we were hungry, hurt, tired, it was entirely on ourselves to fix it.”
My heart feels bruised. I can imagine a passel of kids, hungry, dirty, looking for an adult to keep them safe and loved but finding nothing.
“But you helped Camber.” I know that much of the story—Tynan left a map for her when he escaped their home.
“We helped each other,” he says. “Because our dad wouldn’t. The thing is, he wanted us to be together, on the farm, forever, and here we are, scattered everywhere. He’s still there, alone. Never wants to leave. Hates us for leaving. Hell, I don’t even know where some of them are.”
I can hardly breathe. He sounds so much like he did before, when we were young and shared our thoughts and feelings. Face-to-face, not over the phone, and not as deep as this… but the echoing memories are thick.
“I’m sorry,” I say quietly. “If I didn’t know where Raven was…” I can’t even finish the thought.
“I know.” Some of the anger leaves him. “When Ira took me in and I saw how you all were together, it was like discovering a whole new world.”
The wonder in his voice touches me. I never thought of us as particularly special—I love my sister dearly, but we fight too. And my dad… Yeah there’s a whole mess of issues there. But the love I have for them is so constant, so true, it’s the foundation of my entire self. I don’t even have to think about it, it runs so deep.
I suppose if you grew up like Tynan did, we might seem magical.
“Like something on the TV?” I ask, trying to lighten things. He shouldn’t idolize us that much.
“We didn’t have TV. The first time I watched a TV was in the hotel I stayed in a week after I left.”
“A week after? What did you do before that?”
“Slept outside.” There’s amused casualness there. “We did it a lot as kids. Just went out into the woods as long as we wanted, carried our own food and slept under the stars.”
To the kid still inside me, it sounds amazing. To the adult I’ve become, it sounds incredibly neglectful. “You weren’t scared? You didn’t get hurt? What about…” No animal big and frightening enough comes immediately to mind. “…bears?” I finish.
“I saw a bear once,” he says. “It didn’t eat me.”
I snort, then bust out laughing. “Clearly not. Unless you have scars I haven’t seen.”
Even though we’re separated by who knows how many miles, the air between us shifts, takes on a dark weight.
“I should show you my scars,” Tynan murmurs.
My mouth goes dry. When I was young and half in a crush on him, I did imagine it. His hands coming to the hem of his shirt, tossing it over his head. His muscles slim but strong, his skin warm and tan. The way he’d take my hand and run it over his body, telling me how good it felt.
I only let myself imagine that in the place between waking and sleeping, where I could write off the sensations it created as only a dream. Made it easier to face him the next day.
“I thought the bear didn’t get you?” A silly response, but my brain is spinning.
“Not the bear. There was other stuff that happened. At least I never needed stitches as a kid.”
I blink hard. “Wait, someone else needed stitches?” And I’d bet a ton of money they never went to the doctor.
“Oren did and so did Elara. I learned to suture on the fly when the fence rail went through Elara’s leg.”
“If I ever had to sew up Raven…” I put my hand to my mouth. It isn’t even the worst thing from his childhood, but it’s getting to me.
“Elara thought the scar looked cool.”
“Do your scars look cool?” That pops out before I can think. At least it comes out more teasing than sultry, but it still sounds not great. I mean, yes, I want to see his scars, but I don’t want to sound like I want to lick them or anything.
Although… I do kind of want to do that too.
“You’ll have to tell me when you see,” he says lazily.
That’s my cue to ask when that will be. To ask where he is now. To draw him out so that we can pinpoint where exactly he is. I need to remember he’s not on my side here. He’s only on his own.
Instead, I ask, “What was the very first TV show you watched? In that hotel room.” Finding out where he is can happen later, but if I don’t ask this now, I may never know.
“The Price is Right.”
Somehow that completely delights me. Tynan leaning on the edge of a thin mattress, eyes wide, his face bathed in the glow of the TV, watching as contestants dance up the aisle, spin the ridiculously large prize wheel. “What an introduction to modern society.”
“I was so confused! I mean, I understood money and prices, kind of, but guessing prices for fun? It was crazy. But it was fun.”
I can see it in my mind, first his bafflement, then his slow, growing smile as he’s caught up in the excitement on the screen.
The Tynan who walked into my living room unannounced the other night though… I can’t imagine that Tynan smiling at something so silly. But somehow those two are supposed to be the same man.
And the pivot point between them was my father’s death.
“I know you can’t talk about it.” My voice is weak, but I push on. “But someday can you tell me…?” Again my voice fails. “You’re the only one who knows.”
It’s awful, begging him again to tell me about Dad’s last moments. But he’s the last person to see Dad. He heard what Dad said, knows if he suffered.
Oh God, if Dad suffered…
“I will.” His voice drops a register. It vibrates even harder through me. “I promise I will. But not like this. Not over the phone.”
“Thank you.” The relief in me comes from his promise… and that he won’t do it right now. That I can hold off, even though I want to know. “Thank you.”
“Morgan.” He makes my name into a sharp warning. “When the crash happened and I thought the guys had done it… I learned my dad was right. You can’t trust anyone.”
His tone says he still believes it. And despite our cozy conversation, I’m reminded that he hasn’t come back for a lovely reunion no matter what he says about it being for me.
He still can’t trust anyone. And just like he never forgave his dad, he’s not going to be forgiving anyone else.