This is Book #2 of
the Scholarship Mafia: Tristan Duet.
If you haven’t read TWISTED yet,
The restaurant’s sprinkler system hosed water over everything, spraying sheets through the air and sluicing off the tables.
Panicking people careened through the deluge, screaming, “Fire!” and racing to find an exit.
Colleen Frost’s long silk dress shrink-wrapped her legs as she tried to run. She clung to Tristan King’s side. He flipped his suit jacket around her and held her up as they tried to push through the crowd to get out of the restaurant. Heads bobbled between them and the doors. Running bodies blocked their path and tangled with their feet with every step.
The heat from Tristan’s skin seeped through his clothes and warmed her, but Colleen still shivered from the cold water soaking her dress.
Gunshots banged over the frantic crowd darting between the restaurant tables.
People screamed and reversed the direction they’d been running.
Counterclockwise chaos.
The carpeting squelched under Colleen’s high-heeled sandals, and cold water squished between her bare toes as Tristan hurried her toward the front where they’d entered a lifetime ago.
Tristan asked her, “Are you sure Svetlana got away?”
“Her rideshare should be twenty miles away by now,” Colleen said, trying to kick the wet silk away from her ankles. The thin fabric was plastered to her bare ass, too. “I watched her get in the car after I pushed her out the window. He bought her, Tristan. He’s been raping her and burning her with cigarettes and other terrible things. You should have seen the way she sobbed and the way she thanked me so desperately, over and over, for just doing what a barely halfway decent human being would do. She’s only sixteen! I couldn’t leave her with him.”
“You did the right thing.” He held her up as they hurried around the edge of the crowd, shoving panicking people out of their way.
“But we might have gotten out if I’d have left her,” Colleen worried.
“I’ll get us out. Good girl.”
Colleen almost hopped sideways with the shock of Tristan’s deep voice, at the nearly British intonations in how he said that, at the familiar feel of his body against her side from the previous night and two days before.
Holy shit. No way.
He couldn’t be—
Gunshots blasted in the air. Plaster chipped off the wall beside her.
Colleen ran with the crowd and Tristan, trying to get the hell out of the building.
With his enormous form nearly wrapped around her, Tristan half-hurried, half-carried Colleen through the crowd with his other hand stretched in front of him to stiff-arm people out of the way.
She shoved and kicked fallen chairs out of their path.
A fire exit appeared through the spraying water, and he jammed the safety bar to open it to a short hallway that led to another door.
Within seconds, they emerged into the dimming daylight outside the restaurant.
Tristan was shouting into his phone, “Micah, if you’re going to pull a rabbit out of your hat, do it now!”
Thunder filled the air around them, battering her eardrums.
A helicopter with only a few dim running lights screamed through the darkening air and landed in an empty field just outside the parking lot, skidding as it touched down.
Tristan pulled her along by her hand, crouching as they ran toward the aircraft.
Its side door slid open.
A blond man stood in the helicopter doorway, holding out his hand and yelling over the roar of the engines and blades chopping the air over their heads, “Come on, Twist! Get in the goddamn helicopter!”
Colleen stumbled on the gravel of the parking lot, but Tristan held her up by her waist.
Twist. The new guy had called Tristan Twist.
She hadn’t needed any more proof, not after that throaty growl of good girl and the way his body moved with such power and authority while they’d been escaping.
But there it was.
And all her other rationalizing about how Tristan couldn’t be TwistyTrader collapsed into ash.
Tristan shoved her onto a seat, yelling, “Seatbelt!” as he reached past her to slam the door shut.
Colleen grabbed the woven strap and latched it around her middle as the helicopter tilted under her legs and butt, lifting off with a roar so loud that it felt like the rotors were bashing her on both sides of her head.
Tristan stumbled, windmilling his arms as the aircraft spun and pitched, but the new guy wrapped an arm around him and hauled him onto the bench seat. They buckled in while holding onto each other and the backs of the pilot’s seat and the other front chair.
The new guy handed out headphones with mics.
When Colleen jammed hers on, the terrible noise from the helicopter blades abated and was replaced by the new guy’s voice yelling, “Strap in and hang on!”
The helicopter rose nose-first higher into the air and then tipped the other way, flying low over the buildings with its rotors biting the air and nose pointing toward the ground.
Colleen grabbed the harness flopping over her shoulders but missed because she was dangling from the seatbelt around her waist.
Water droplets fell from her soaked hair, splattering the seatback in front of her and the wall of the helicopter as it banked into a tight turn. The direction of down changed.
The two guys braced their long legs on the front seats as the sunset outside the front window tilted precariously.
Her seatbelt buckle had been stiff, and it sat at an odd angle like she’d jammed it while trying to make it latch.
It wasn’t going to hold.
Colleen flailed, scrambling to find something to hang onto, because if her lap belt failed, she was going to pitch straight through the front windshield and plummet to the rapidly retreating ground.
Tristan’s arm shot out, and he grabbed a handle on the cabin wall beside her head and caged her body, pressing her back against the seat with his elbow.
Beside her shoulder, Tristan’s shirt sleeve had ridden up over his wrist.
Blue and green tattoo tendrils vined over his skin.
They were exactly like the tattoos she’d seen on Twist’s muscular arms in the video chat and when he’d rolled up his sleeves in the Devilhouse.
The night before, when she’d sneaked into his penthouse suite and bedroom, she hadn’t seen his arms. She’d insisted on turning the lights off because she didn’t want him to see her thigh hickey.
Oh God, she’d sent Twist a picture of her—
The horizon flopped in the other direction. Colleen grabbed the seat and Tristan’s muscular arm.
Outside the window beside her head, the buildings shrank on the ground. People spilled out of the square restaurant from all sides.
The new guy asked, “Are you two all right? Jesus, Twist, the situations you get yourself into. You’re worse than Maxence.”
Tristan’s voice spoke in her ears as he turned toward her. “Are you all right, Colleen? Those gormless cockwombles didn’t shoot you, did they?”
Yep, Tristan King had suddenly acquired a starched British accent.
Super tall, muscular and fit, educated and wealthy, tattooed and well-dressed, Tristan King was hotter than a black car in the summer in Phoenix, but he had also lied his shapely ass off ever since he’d walked into her GameShack store.
She turned her head to look into Tristan’s brilliantly blue eyes. “You’re Twist. I mean, you’re Twist the TwistyTrader from the Sherwood Forest forums. And . . . that other place.” She didn’t want to name the Devilhouse because the new guy was listening through the headphones, too.
Tristan King was looking over his shoulder at her, still holding her in place with his arm. His expression went from a wince to a smirk in an instant. “Yes, and you’re QueenMod, aren’t you, princess?”
She nodded, pissed at how he’d somehow made her feel ashamed of it. “You know I am.”
Colleen Frost was drenched with fire sprinkler water and yet was somehow still slimy with stinky fear-sweat from being kidnapped and then chased by that asshole Sergey of the Russian Butorin bratva.
Which meant mafia. Bratva meant mafia. That was another thing Colleen had learned in the last few days that she desperately wished she hadn’t.
At least they’d escaped.
Probably.
And yet, even with all that, the raging fire in her brain was that she was pissed off as all hell at Tristan King, the tall, gorgeous, ripped, handsome jackass with the brilliant blue eyes who sat beside her in the helicopter.
Tristan was somehow—oh sweet baby Jesus, she did not know how the hell this had all come together, but God knew she hated it—he was also somehow the person known as TwistyTrader on the stock market internet forum that she moderated.
The TwistyTrader she’d gotten sexty with online.
The TwistyTrader she’d met at a place called The Devilhouse for a night she’d never forget, but oh, how she wished she could take it back just then.
The TwistyTrader she hadn’t been able to stop naughty-texting until right before she’d sneaked into Tristan King’s bedroom and boinked him.
Tristan King and TwistyTrader were both the same guy.
And she was going to freakin’ kill him.
“I can’t believe that we called TwistyTrader the ‘King of the Killer Whales,’ and you’re Tristan King.”
“Heh, yeah, that was quite a coincidence, wasn’t it?”
“Why are you faking a British accent?” she demanded.
Tristan was looking at her out of the corners of his eyes, the blueness of his irises barely visible in the low lights of the helicopter cabin and fading sunset as they flew over the California desert hills. “I’m not faking it. This is how I speak. Micah can tell you.” He held out his hand as he made the introductions. “Micah, this is Colleen Frost, my impromptu computer science consultant whom I seem to have put in deadly danger. Colleen, this is Micah Shine, an old friend from boarding school in Switzerland, where we met at the impressionable age of thirteen.”
Micah Shine, the new guy, leaned out and looked in her eyes, and she got a good look at his eyes for the first time. They were light gray and shimmery with aqua and green flecks like nothing she’d ever seen before.
Tristan continued, “Our English rhetoric instructor insisted the Americans learn how to speak ‘properly, without an accent,’ according to his standards. It stuck with some of us more than others. According to actual Brits, I have a light American accent. It now takes effort for me to speak like a Midwestern farm boy.”
“It’s true,” Micah said, leaning to look around Tristan at her, but he spoke with a neutral American nothing-accent. “Master Hamilton would fail you if you spoke with, and I quote, ‘an abominable native accent.’ Some friends of ours can’t move their jaws when they speak English at all.” He elbowed Tristan. “Remember when Hamilton used to tell Arthur Finch-Hatten he didn’t sound British enough? I think it scarred him for life.”
Colleen asked, “If you two went to a Swiss boarding school together, why doesn’t he talk like that?”
“Oh, I certainly can,” Micah said with a cut-glass British drawl. “I just don’t. Keeping it neutral American is enough of a chore for me without adding that on top.”
“Why is he calling you Twist?” she demanded. “Is Micah on the Sherwood Forest forums, too?” She leaned out, her cheek resting on Tristan’s arm. “You, Micah! Are you one of the Killer Whales? You’re the one we call Orca Asshole, aren’t you?”
Micah laughed. “No, but thanks for that.”
Tristan shook his head. “He’s not. We gave each other stupid nicknames in upper school that many of us carry to this day to personify the trauma of that place.”
The blond guy, Micah, cracked a smile and glanced down at his lap. “He’s not wrong. Le Rosey was an excellent opportunity to get away from problems at home, but a boarding school stocked with some of the wealthiest, most entitled teenagers in the world is not a utopia. It’s more of a training ground for future financial fraud defendants and supervillains.”
“What’s your nickname, then?” she demanded.
One side of Micah’s mouth lifted. “Just my last name, Shine. And I am turning my headphones off now. You two have something to talk about, and I am not at all needed.”
Click.
Colleen stared at Tristan over his arm that was still protecting her, trying to murder him with just the anger in her eyes.