Page 35 of The Honeymoon Hack
“Not as productive as yours.” She rolled her eyes dramatically and closed her laptop. “I’m locked out of almost everything. Unless Fenix calls in for supportandI get assigned the call, I won’t be legitimately able to find their server.”
“Here’s to luck finding us, then?” I left my comfortable seat near her to finish my bedtime routine. As I changed into my sleep shorts, she looked away.
“We may need it.”
“Perhaps,” I said, slipping under the covers beside her. The king-size bed suddenly seemed smaller than it had this morning. “Between your hacking skills and my new friend in hardware, we’ll find a way in.”
She set her laptop on the bedside table and turned off both the lamp and the window display, plunging the room into darkness.
I stared up toward the ceiling, a surprising peace settling over me. “You know, working with Ronnie was the perfect distraction. I barely thought about my mother the whole time I was in there.”
Brie made a little noise in the dark, part happy, part tired. “I heard you get up in the middle of the night at the hotel in Freeport. Were you checking on her?”
Last night’s guilt crept into my brain again. Other than during our mission in Monaco two months ago, I’d been by my mother’s side every moment since my father passed. I was the one who’d learned the subtle tells of when she was present or when she was drifting through the past. The one who’d helped her dress when she needed it, helped her with groceries on good days, and encouraged her to rest during the bad ones.
And I’d left her with a group of strangers.
“Will,” Brie prompted gently, “if you need someone to talk to, you know I’m always here. We can talk about anything.”
No, we can’t, Brie.I can’t tell you how I’ve felt about you for years. Or about how seeing you again after my year away made those feelings stronger than ever.
And I certainly couldn’t tell her how much I wanted to drag her across the bed, into my arms, and forget all about the tightrope we were walking in Mnemis.
“She had a minor fall,” I finally said. “Nothing serious. A nurse called to inform me, as they’re required to do, but she’s fine. Just a few bruises.”
The sheets rustled as Brie moved. Her hand found mine. “It’s going to be all right.”
I squeezed her hand, wishing I could believe her. But they were empty words, meant only to make me feel better. No matter how skilled I was with electronics, I couldn’t fix my mother.
“What about your family?” Changing the subject was my best course of action. “You said Evelyn told you, Scar, and Em that your father was framed. But you wouldn’t give me the details. If we can really talk about anything, tell me what happened. Why are we here?”
Brie was quiet for so long. Her fingers rested on mine, unmoving, as though she’d fallen asleep until she took a shaky breath.
“After Monaco, when we learned Enzo was involved in framing Dad, Scarlett confronted Mum.” Her voice floated to me in the darkness, smaller than usual. “Mum said he was framed because he was investigating an art smuggling ring with terrorist connections. I guess that organization evolved into Fenix.”
“But why would he plead guilty if he was framed?” I curled my fingers more securely around hers, in case she needed the support.
“There was a day, just before his trial, when I was—” Her breath caught slightly, and she let out a slow breath. “Will, I didn’t remember it until Mum told us. A man who claimed to be from the RCMP picked me up at school. Bought me ice cream.”
“Claimed to be?” My stomach clenched. “Bloody hell, Brie.”
“It was a threat—showing they could reach all of us anytime.” Her voice trembled. “Dad’s lawyer had a solid case. The evidence was circumstantial. But he…” She sniffled. “He put us first.”
A surge of anger burned through me. My father’s heart attack last year had been sudden. We’d had no warning signs at all. The pain was still raw, the absence still jarring. A different kind of loss, but it tied us together in some way. “That’s why your mother moved you to Halifax? To keep you safe?”
“Yeah. Scarlett told me that she and Emmett had also been harassed a lot at school and in our neighborhood, but I don’t remember any of it.” She drew a ragged breath. “We visited Dad last month, like we always do in September. Mum told us to pretend we didn’t know the truth, because Dad never wanted us to know.”
Her voice faded to a whisper. “When we arrived at the prison, and I saw the guards at the door, I had this flashback to the fake RCMP officer, and part of me wanted to run away.”
Her breath hitched, the way it did when she was fighting tears. The same woman who could crack any system couldn’t find words for her own pain—not unless it became too much to hold back.
Until tonight. Why tonight? Was it the chaos of the past two days? Lying next to me? Or had she simply reached her breaking point?
“The worst part is having to reframe everything I thought I knew. I’d spent my whole life reconciling who my father was, what he did. It didn’t make it okay, but I’d accepted that he wasa traitor. But now? I have to build a whole new understanding of him, of us, of everything.”
I inched closer. I needed to do something about this. “That’s a lot to process.”
“Now that we know what really happened,” she continued, voice quavering, “we have to destroy Fenix. If we do that, Dad doesn’t have to keep sacrificing to keep us safe anymore.”
