Tristan ran both his hands through his dark hair. “Micah, can we have a minute?”
He rolled his eyes. “Fine. Yous guys twalk it out. You should listen to reason, Colleen. You would be safer with this guy than out there alone.”
Twalk.
For just a moment, Micah’s carefully enunciated American accent had broken, and a hint of New Yorker had come through. Tristan hadn’t heard that from him for years. He must be perturbed.
Micah walked through the darkness toward an airplane hangar cowering over the small heliport.
Tristan unclenched his fists from his hair and angled his head to look down at Colleen. “Don’t go. It’s just a misunderstanding.”
“It seems like a lot more.”
“We can clear it up. We can talk it out.” Invested in. “I know that we only met a few days ago, but I feel like we could have something here if we want it, if we don’t just let it go so easily.”
She scowled at him with her jaw clenched as she ground her teeth. “We only met each other a few days ago. It isn’t like we’ve been married for twenty years. Our so-called relationship is way less than a week old. We don’t have to ‘fight for’ forty-eight hours of bumping uglies.”
“It’s been three glorious days, Sailor Moon, and this misunderstanding is something we can get over.”
“You act like banging is a big deal or something. Just let me go.”
Tristan shook his head. “I’ve dated a lot of women in my life. If you want full disclosure, six days before I met you at the Devilhouse, a friend of mine’s sister came into town, and we had a bit of how’s your father. Two days before that, I met another woman at a tourist trap bar where a friend of mine and I had gone for a drink, and we had a knee-trembler in an alley. The night before that, a college friend was in town and wanted to be shown around the Prince’s Palace of Monaco, and I showed her the crown jewels. A few days before that, a friend of mine from boarding school got me backstage tickets to a rock concert, and I went back to my hotel with one of the backup dancers. Shall I go on?”
Colleen clapped her hands over her ears. “I do not need to hear this.”
“Oh, but I’ve only told you about the last few weeks. If you need full disclosure, I’d need to consult my phone for dates prior to that. I think I have notes, or else I can use the map review function and figure out where I was.”
“Sliced Christ on a cracker, Twist, I do not need to know about your sexual history. And you lied. You are an easy lay.”
“Ouch, and touché. I admit, I was playing hard to get with you, but I was playing. And I like playing with you. I don’t want you to go, Colleen. I do think that you’d be safer with me than off on your own because Sergey—”
“His name isn’t Sergey. Svetlana told me his real name.”
“Whatever his name is, Sergey and his goons threatened you. They said they would track you down, and they can. They figured out your real name in that conference room in about two minutes. I want you to come with me so I can make sure you’re okay. And we can do it completely platonically if that’s what you want. I’ll keep my hands to myself until we’ve cleared the air.”
“Oh, I didn’t say you had to do that,” Colleen muttered.
Tristan paused, a smile lifting one side of his mouth and one eyebrow. “Oh?”
She heaved a huge sigh, and her shoulders drooped. When she crossed her arms over her chest, the laxness in her posture made her look like she was exhausted and cold. “We haven’t changed since we were Sailor Moon and TwistyTrader, versus being Tristan and Colleen. We’re not fundamentally different people. We just know a little more about each other, and after your sexual conquest diary, I know even more about you that I didn’t need to.”
Tristan chuckled.
“It’s not just that you’re TwistyTrader and I’m Sailor Moon. It’s not just that you’re Tristan King and I’m Colleen Frost. It’s that there are mafia guys chasing after you and trying to kill you. What worries me is that you didn’t tell me that you were in trouble with the Russian mafia or whoever these guys are. And I don’t think the guys shooting at us at the Phoenix airport were the same guys who tried to conscript us into their Russian mafia just now. Before I get on that plane, I need to know how many different criminal organizations you’re involved with.”
Tristan paused, grinding his teeth as the last horizontal sliver of the molten sun extinguished itself in the Pacific Ocean beyond the end of the airport.
Not telling Colleen about his occasional nickname, Twist, truly had been an oversight. The only people who used it were a few asshole friends from high school like Micah and that one stupid internet stock market forum.
But he and Colleen had just had a problem with a miscommunication, so he didn’t want to screw up again. “It’s going to take a while to explain, so let me lay it out while we’re on the plane,” Tristan said, pointing toward the gaping maw of the hangar. “Standing out here in the open is getting risky. My plane is in that hangar, right there, where Micah just walked off to. If we talk while we’re getting on the plane, we could do two things at once. Walk and talk?”
“Dude, I need to know.”
“It’s complicated. That question, the one you just asked, that question about how many criminal organizations are currently trying to kill me, could have a lot of answers. Many of them could be true and many of them could be false, and some would be both or neither. But I want to tell you everything.”
Everything except about the letter from the Malefactor’s estate and its contents.
Colleen’s jaw bulged near her ears on both sides of her sweet little face. She seemed to be working something out in her head, practically gnashing her teeth as she was doing it, and her brown eyes got wider and more furious at the same time. “Triple!”
“Triple what?” he asked her.
“My salary. How much you’re paying me to run around with you as your ‘coding consultant’ and get shot at. Triple!”
“Yes, triple. I’ll triple your salary. Fine. Done. Get on the plane before we both get shot.”
Fury shook her body. She gave a little meep of rage, but she stomped past him toward the hangar.
Tristan followed, wondering how the hell he was going to explain his entire life and the pickle he’d gotten himself into.
Inside the hangar, the California sun had heated the stagnant air all day, and the fetid warmth permeated Tristan’s wet clothes until he felt balls-deep in a steaming swamp.
Jian was leaning against the car they’d rented, a silver high-end BMW that Tristan hadn’t even gotten to drive, and he waved. “Your luggage is on the plane, including Ms. Frost’s laptop. I take it we’re leaving?”
“We are definitely leaving,” Tristan told him.
“Have you filed a flight plan yet?”
“No.”
“Do you have a destination in mind?”
“No.”
“Right. We’ll need to decide on those and soon. What are your options?”
Tristan’s shoulders cramped. “Chicago, I guess? I have a meeting there with some other business associates in two days, ones who probably won’t sell me out to an international crime syndicate.”
Colleen, ahead of him, turned back. “That’s where they’ll expect you to go.”
Tristan ran his hand through his wet hair. “What options do you recommend?”
“Back to Phoenix. It’s unexpected.”
“Last time we were there, we were shot at.”
“But those guys will have cleared out. They wouldn’t have left people there after you left the state. So it’ll take them a while to figure it out, and then they’ll have to ship new people in.”
Tristan turned back to Jian. “We’re going to Phoenix.”
Jian nodded. “Excellent. I’ll take care of it.”
Air rushed out of him. “Thanks, Jian.”
Jian bent a fraction from his hips. “My pleasure, Mr. King. Might I also recommend that this time, we hire a car service, and we book the hotel and car discreetly under pseudonyms because perhaps we do need it?”
They might have been standing in a dark, sweltering airplane hangar, but Jian Laio was throwing some serious shade. “Yes, Jian. Point noted. Perhaps I’m not quite as anonymous and inconsequential as I’d thought. For this week, anyway.”
“Yes, sir.” He strolled toward a small office door set into the aluminum wall in the rear of the hangar.
Colleen climbed the small staircase to the door of the private jet, and Tristan followed her up. The still-wet gold silk was practically painted on her form, and he took a second to admire the pert globes of her ass with absolutely no panty lines in the clinging fabric after he’d ripped that flimsy scrap of lace right off her before they’d gone to supper.
Her shapely body under that yellow fabric made him want to flip her upside down and peel her like a banana.
From behind him, Tristan heard a man’s voice shout, “Oy!”
Oops, Micah. Yeah. He turned around and trotted down the echoing stairs and over to where Micah was standing. “Mate, sorry about that. Thank you so damn much for the rescue.”
Micah winced, squeezing his opalescent eyes and then looking away. “I don’t like that you’re in trouble with the goddamn Butorins, Twist. We’re the same blood type, and I might need a kidney someday or something.”
“It’s just a misunderstanding. I’ll get it cleared up in a few days.”
“But it doesn’t seem like just a misunderstanding, Twist. The Butorins don’t kidnap people over misunderstandings. And you even said on the helicopter that you had something they wanted, a computer virus.”
“I’ll get it handled. I always get it handled. Whenever I’m in a scrape, I always handle it.”
“Yeah, and it’s just the Butorin bratva. These days, they’re small change after they turned on each other and split into factions. It’s not like you’re in trouble with the White Russian organized crime syndicate.”
When Micah said that, his steady gaze did not seem casual, which made his comment ominous.
Tristan kept his voice light and rocked on his toes a little bit, fidgeting as if nothing in the world could be wrong. “I haven’t heard of them. Sounds historical.”
“From what I’ve heard, they see themselves as the descendants of the Russian czar and aristocracy, as opposed to the Red Russians who became the Communists during their Revolution.”
He cracked a smile. “Has anyone mentioned to them how the other White Russians ended up?”
Micah rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but anyone who was on the losing side of history thinks they were right, and this time it will turn out differently.”
“Right. Is this a new name of Putin’s people?”
Micah winced and bobbled his head. “They’re allied with Putin, or else they wouldn’t be in business. They had a different starting point, though. They’re new, so their kids weren’t at Le Rosey with us. They came out of the gun runners supplying the Chechen rebels and other insurgencies. Their only motive was profit, not ideology, so they fit right in with Putin’s people. But I’ve heard their influence has grown exponentially over the past couple of years.” Micah paused like he was searching for the right words. “You haven’t had any dealings with them, have you?”