Graham
I’ve known most of Brice’s militia for a while now, some longer than others. Some I only see when they need help. I would sometimes give them tech support from across the country, maybe help them out in the field from time to time when they were in the area. You might even say we were almost friends. Friends that I only see once every two to eight months, but still friends. We all mostly know each other, and it’s been long enough where we’re all pretty comfortable with each other’s existence and whatnot. But Karan? The guy who shook me awake after I nearly got a concussion from an explosion less than ten feet away from me and then dragged me out of the room while I was panicked and in a state of emotional shock so he could make me help him guide other panicked people to safety while the building was on fire just below us? No, I don’t think I like that guy anymore.
I mean, that isn’t to say it wasn’t loads of fun running up and down flights of stairs, and trying very hard not to breathe in the smoke cloud that engulfed the entire stairwell, and trying to scream loud enough for the hundreds of people already screaming to hear me, and nearly getting trampled by people trying to flood into the elevator that I was supposed to block them from entering, and nearly getting trampled by people trying to run down the stairs that I was supposed to keep them from going down, and nearly getting trampled by people trying to run up the stairs that I was supposed to keep them from going up, and then afterwards sitting in a bright weapons room filled with explosives for ten minutes while waiting for an update from Brice, who I thought was dead upon seeing him after the explosion. That was all very enjoyable.
It was almost as enjoyable as waiting for our turn in the elevator for another ten minutes, then standing in the elevator for at least three minutes while it took us to the garage, then waiting five minutes before Karan could find a car in said garage that was old enough to be hotwired, then waiting another five minutes for him to actually succeed in hotwiring it, and then waiting an hour and 45 minutes to drive back to Columbus.
Today has been an absolute dream, but not like one of those dreams that you have and then forget about the moment you wake up. No, this is more like one of those dreams where two of your friends are kidnapped by terrorists, five people get killed trying to rescue them, and you almost die in an explosion and a fire in the process, and the ramifications of all said events are going to follow you around for probably the rest of your life. It’s one of those kinds of dreams.
Part of me almost wishes that I died in that fire.
It was just past 9:00 when we finally arrived in Columbus. Brice’s bank sits on just short of an acre of land outside the inner city, with a private parking garage connected to the main building. The bank itself is a legitimate business without any shady weird shit like with Solaris (aside from laundering our money), but what the city isn’t aware of is what lies underneath it. I’ve never actually seen much of the militia’s underground base; all I know about it is that it’s generator-powered so no city official can see how much electricity is begin used at some small local bank. I always assumed there was some hidden entrance inside the bank, but now that I think about it, that seems pretty inconvenient when trying to maintain secrecy.
Also, if you had fallen asleep at the parking garage in Eclipse and then woke up at the garage in Columbus, you would have sworn the car hadn’t moved at all. The two places were almost creepily identical, although I may sound stupid saying that out loud given that I can’t recall a single time before today that I have ever been inside a parking garage. This garage goes up about eight stories, but we took the ramp down to the lower levels. We went down two floors and saw the other 14 cars parked or parking at the far end of the lot. There were only a handful of budget lights across the ceiling that made everything only a little bit discernable; if the garage was any darker, I would be getting severely claustrophobic.
Finn and Adrian were standing against the wall ahead next to two elevator doors with Percy several feet to the side of them. I almost chuckled at the sight of them, but not entirely out of joy or relief. I hopped out of the car as it was turning left and strolled towards them. “Well, well, look who the fuck it is!” I shouted at Finn. “You, you just had to be a dramatic bitch, didn’t you? You just fucking had to hang up that goddamn call the moment when it actually mattered, didn’t you?”
Adrian’s head creaked towards Finn. Percy sighed and rubbed her eyes.
“Okay,” he said nervously. “That was a bad judgment call. I’ll admit that. But in my defense, you still found out about the situation anyway, and I stalled them long enough for you all to show up.”
Percy, who had been looking half-asleep, suddenly shot awake. “Stalled them? Is that what you call that fucking scene in the lobby?”
“Yes, that’s what I call it. They almost certainly would have killed us if we told them the truth, so I kept them from asking us for it.”
“If they knew the truth, they would have seen we weren’t a threat and let us fucking go! But you decided to act like a sarcastic smartass the entire time and pissed them off even more!”
“Okay, even if that were true—which is a huge stretch of the imagination—we still escaped, didn’t we? Isn’t that what matters?”
“Leaving in peace knowing not to mess with them again is a lot fucking different than leaving with a shitload of collateral damage and five dead bodies!”
“Hey!” Brice yelled from across the parking lot. He was wearing only a blank T-shirt and jeans now and was limping on his right leg. “You all can settle this later. Right now, we need to meet in the conference room to discuss what we’re going to do about this. We were supposed to leave that building without any fuss or hard feelings, but that’s not what happened.” He faced the people standing by the parked cars. “All of you who drove here, take the cars to the junkyard. We don’t need the police tracking us here.”
Roman and some other guy walked up to the elevator doors, somehow slid them open like they were glass doors, and herded all 39 of us inside.
The elevators seemed more like lifts from a Halo game than actual elevators. They had to be over 200 square feet at the least, and the 20 people that I was with all fit in with plenty of legroom. It made me even more pissed off at Eclipse for not thinking of this too, because over 20 minutes of our valuable time was wasted sitting at their single shitbox elevator.
The elevator went down probably two stories and then opened up to a big white hallway, only looking slightly less ominous than the security floor from Eclipse. Between the ceiling tiles and carpeting, the area was nearly indistinguishable from the inside of a random office building in Pennsylvania. I only got a brief glimpse at what it looked like before 38 people poured out of the floodgates and blocked all view of it. Everyone either broke off left or right at the end of the hall or went through the door straight ahead. All the important people were at the door, so once there was room for me to get out of the damn elevator, I followed them inside.
I was the last one in. All 12 seats at the oval-shaped conference table were taken. Adrian, Finn, Percy, and Skyler were all sitting right in front of the entrance and stared at me as I stood in place, darting my eyes around the room, trying to find something to sit on. Nobody was giving me any suggestions for what the hell to do. I took one awkward step forward before audibly saying, “Fuck it,” and jumped onto the table, planting my ass down in front of Finn.
I looked around at the rest of the table. All the usual suspects were present, like Brice, Jae, Eliza, and Robyn. I assume that Karan, Kacey, and Sinclair were supposed to be here too, but they must be busy taking their cars to the special junkyard. Lennox nearly died a couple of hours ago, so I guess he isn’t showing up either. Four empty seats perfectly suited for the Lakewood Bros to fill in. The other four people at the table I don’t recognize.
“So,” I shouted to the 12 people staring at me. “What is all this shit supposed to be? When the hell are we going home?”
Brice was sat at the end of the table, twirling around a pen in his fingers. “You’re not going home. I’ve already explained this.”
“Bullshit. With all due respect to the rest of you folks, we’re not fucking bunking with you. Our place is more than secure enough on its own, and we don’t need you all looking over our shoulders 24/7.”
“Graham,” Skyler mumbled. “We have to. We don’t have any other options right now.”
“Oh, please. Get the fuck out of here with that ‘no other options’ bullshit. There is always another option. We have everything that we need back in Lakewood, plus, what the hell do you plan on doing about King?”
She frowned, and her face sunk even lower than it was before.
“Who is King?” Brice asked.
“Skyler’s bird,” Finn replied.
Brice almost said something before cutting himself off and sighing with a tinge of disappointment. “Alright. You have a bird now.” He started clicking his pen on the table.
“That’s not important right now,” I cut in. “How in the fucking world is holding us as foster children going to solve jack shit?”
“Bloody fucking hell, they are going to come after you! Did you miss the part about five of them getting killed and the building being set on bloody fire?”
“You really think they would be stupid enough to make an attempt at revenge after we just pulled something like that?”
“Is that a risk you’re willing to bet on?”
“It’s not even a risk! They can’t fucking find us!”
“They found out about Solaris, didn’t they?”
“What exactly is your goal here, Graham?” Percy interrupted. “Are we just gonna leave a giant mess in our wake and expect the militia to clean it up? We started this, we dragged them into this, we should be helping them see it to its end.”
“Its end? You just saw its end two fucking hours ago! There’s nowhere else for this to go! If they do try to fuck with us again, we can just put them right back in their place! We have no reason to go after them again, and they know that, so what threat could we possibly pose to whatever else they’re doing? Why would they feel any need to hunt us down?”
Jae chimed in, albeit with her head down. “Um… I was up there in the lobby when everything went down.” Finn snorted. “That guy that I shot? He… he had a gun, and he was ready to kill Lennox. He was railing on about how ‘I was going to lead this organization,’ and ‘All of you are going to die for this.’ He was… really pissed off about what was happening. And if I didn’t… if I didn’t shoot him first….”
I slumped down on the table. “Alright. So that guy was shot. He was shot and fell out of the window. That means there was a man who got shot in the head, fell out of a window 35 stories high, and hit the ground while the building was surrounded by journalists and emergency services. That, along with two explosions, a fire breakout, and four dead security, means that Eclipse will have a major fucking problem shaking off the press and explaining what just happened because literally all signs point to a full-blown attack on the HQ. Whatever reputation they had before this will dissipate into a tiny mushroom cloud. Journalists will quickly call bullshit on whatever their response is, their stock prices will nosedive into the eighth circle of hell, and the whole operation will implode in a firestorm of scandals and investigations. Because as history keeps proving, when a shadowy organization with billions of dollars tries to take on the bureaucracy, the bureaucracy always fucking wins.”
Brice dropped his pen on the table. “And if it doesn’t?”
“Then they know to leave us the fuck alone.”
“No. No, no.” Brice stood up forcefully. “I’ll tell you what the hell is going to happen. They’ll fend off any press that tries to come their way, they’ll pressure or sue news outlets to shut down any article about the dead or the cause of the damage from being released, and soon enough, the whole story will disappear from the headlines. They’ll realize how poor their previous strategy was and will finally get their shit together, and however they figured out Finn and Percy were coming, they’ll use that method again to track you down to your home in Lakewood. And if they find your home with all you inside of it, you’re done for.”
“I think they already have,” Percy whispered. “Jax called us ‘suburbanites’ shortly after Finn arrived in the lobby. I don’t know if he was guessing.”
Brice fell back in his chair.
“Come on,” I retorted. “The whole area outside of Cleveland is suburbs, including the math tutors place we worked with. It’s not a difficult leap.”
“But they still know we’re outside of Cleveland. It wouldn’t take them long to figure us out.”
“You know,” Finn suddenly shouted while standing up. “All of that business of them knowing everything that we were doing sure does get under my skin, yes, but I feel like there’s something else, some other little minuscule detail, that we might be, I don’t know, glossing over right now. I mean, wouldn’t you agree, Adrian?”
Adrian perked up. “Excuse me?”
“I’m just saying, isn’t it just a little bit strange and convenient that right after we tell you what we’re doing with Solaris, suddenly you come out of the blue with this strange brand new company for us to surveil? And isn't it even stranger how we suddenly figure out, seemingly out of nowhere, that the same company you brought to us was also the puppetmaster of Solaris? Because I don’t know about you, but that seems like a hell of a fucking coincidence.”
“Are you accusing me of something?”
“Are you saying that it’s completely coincidental that you sent us after the puppetmaster of Solaris?”
“I didn’t send you after anything! I suggested it, and you all agreed to it! Jesus, you have been on my fucking case since the day that I arrived here; at what goddamn point will I finally be seen as a human being to you?”
This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
“When you stop acting like a fucking machine!”
Whoa. I guess I wasn’t the only one who noticed that.
Brice quickly cut off the argument. “Aiden, where are we with setting the rooms up?”
Aiden checked his phone. “Both rooms are set in the A-wing, two beds in each. One of them will have to share a room with Ahmad, though.”
“Good. We’re done here.” Brice pulled himself off his chair and headed towards the door.
I stood up on the table. “Whoa, hold the fuck up, Aiden, we aren’t finished discussing this!”
“There was never a discussion,” Finn muttered.
“I’m bunking with Adrian,” Percy said as she stood up.
“I’ll go with Finn then,” Skyler added, following Percy out. Within seconds, everybody was standing up and heading for the door.
“Hold the fuck up!” I yelled, to no avail. “We’re not fucking done here! This is not fucking happening!” Nobody even bothered acknowledging my existence. They just kept going towards the exit, soon leaving me alone in the conference room, standing on a table shouting at nobody. “I am not sharing a fucking room with Ahmad! Assholes!”
---
I guess that even when I’m locked out of my own home and stuck in some basement 150 miles away, home still seems to follow me. By that, I’m of course referring to the fact that I still can’t get a fucking room to myself and have to bunk with somebody else. As for everything else that I own, I was smart enough to bring absolutely none of it with me to Cincinnati and now have to survive indefinitely with whatever I find in my fucking dorm room.
The other four’s rooms were in the A-wing, so I assumed my room with Ahmad was there too. There was no map to be found anywhere, so I just followed the signs on the wall towards it. The halls were at least 10 feet wide, and there was no noticeable pattern to how anything was organized, so I was essentially running blind around a maze like some lab rat, not keeping track of any rooms that I saw or the path I was taking. The floor occasionally alternated between stiff carpeting and tiling, and the tiling doesn’t look or feel like it’s been mopped or vacuumed at all in the past month.
The color scheme of everything suddenly changed to a deep red as I reached the end of one of the hallways. The letter “A” was painted in white on the wall next to me. A door was sitting directly ahead with a tag reading “Percy Newman, Adrian Irvine” sitting next to the door handle. Irvine. What a shitty last name.
The room directly to its right was labeled “Skyler Haley, Finn Walker.” Of course. The same people that I’ve been telling “Get a room” to for months have now actually gotten a room. My entire existence is a fucking joke. I kicked Percy and Adrian’s door and kept moving down the hallway.
I didn’t recognize over half of the names by each door that I passed. I had become pretty familiar with most of the militia since I’ve been their main point of contact for as far back as I’ve known them, and yet almost none of their names rang a single bell for me. But more importantly to the circumstances, none of those names included the word “Ahmad” on them, another guy who I’ve never met before.
I passed probably eight rooms before reaching the end of the hall, where the color scheme suddenly went back to “bland eggshell” plus ”vomit-colored carpeting.” Alright. Maybe my room is in the B-wing.
I turned and ran back down the A-wing and continued my journey of following small signs screwed into the wall to the wing that I wanted. The wings oddly were the only things on those signs with actual names. Everything else was an acronym or some obscure shortened term with no vowels that looked straight off of a license plate and was impossible to understand without any prior context.
Finally, after almost five minutes, I made one last turn to find the B-wing and its obviously-blue color scheme. I recognized most of the names to those rooms, mainly because they’re the same people from that bullshit conference. But once more, after another eight rooms had passed by, zero of them had the fucking name “Ahmad.” I would have punched the wall if there weren’t 16 people sleeping by the same hallway that would hear it. Alright. Let’s try the C-wing this time.
The signs led me right back around once again, and I began another long-ass journey through the base. Traveling around the halls was becoming increasingly difficult given that I’ve been jogging or speed-walking for almost ten minutes straight, and my legs were about ready to buckle and collapse. I just started sprinting to minimize the pain in my feet.
After another three minutes of running down halls and ricocheting off walls, I finally found the goddamn C painted on the intersection ahead. I approached that intersection to find the base’s entrance hall again. Fuck you.
At that point, I had to collapse on the ground to keep myself from having a heart attack. About a minute passed of me hitting my head against the wall while trying to catch my breath. Then my quiet peace was shattered upon hearing somebody storming out of the elevator. The entrance hallway was to my left, so I couldn’t see anything going on.
“What the hell do you want?” the guy whisper-yelled to someone, stopping right next to the intersection I was sitting by. “What’s your game here?”
He sounded like that Aiden character from the conference.
There was another voice, only I think it was coming from a walkie-talkie. “I don’t have any game. I want to end this before it becomes something bigger, and I think you do too.”
That voice… what the fuck? That’s the guy Brice talked to that we followed into the elevator back at Eclipse. What does Aiden have Brice’s walkie-talkie for?
“We have no quarrel with you. We want nothing to do with you. If anybody is pushing for conflict here, it’s you.”
“The rest of the Council isn’t as convinced of that.”
“Then fucking convince them. You’re the one with the power to end this here, so do it.”
“It’s not that simple. They won’t agree to an unconditional ceasefire after you just killed five of our men.”
“And you kidnapped three of ours. I would say there isn’t much room for you to justify revenge.”
“Again, this is about what the leadership wants, not me. They don’t listen to anything I tell them.”
Aiden sighed. “Alright. Then what will they agree to?”
“I can’t go over the specifics right now. But if you meet me at The Woodbury downtown at 8:00 tomorrow morning, I’ll explain everything.”
“Wait, hold on, you want me to meet you at a restaurant to discuss this?”
“Yes. It’ll be much easier that way. Also, be sure to take Finn with you as well.”
“Hold on a minute, I never agreed to this. And what the hell do you need Finn for?” There was no response. “Orion! God fucking dammit!” He punched the wall and walked out of the hallway, right in front of me. He stopped dead in his tracks and stared directly at me, still lying against the wall.
I blankly stared back. “Uh… should we tell somebody about that?”
“No! Do not tell anybody about that, especially not Brice!”
“Why not? Isn’t an end to the conflict what we want?”
“This isn’t about that. Just… forget that this ever happened. And tell absolutely nobody that I spoke to him.” He sprinted past me and almost immediately turned out of view.
…What the fuck?
---
Apparently, according to the half-hour I spent looking for my goddamn room, the base is split into six different wings. C was for the entrance and whatever other bureaucratic garbage they have, A and E are the residential-ish areas on the left side while B and F are on the right, and the D-wing is for all the semi-recreational shit in the middle. I know this not because of a map I found, but because I searched every single one of them, hoping that the goddamn wing with my roommate was going to appear. As it turns out, Ahmad was situated in the middle of the E-wing, which, of course, was the last fucking wing that I checked.
“Ahmad Hafeez, Kane Weaver.” I guess I’m filling in for someone else. I hope.
I opened the door half-expecting to walk in on Ahmad and Kane playing spin-the-bottle with a bunch of stuffed animals, but I managed to get lucky this one time.
“Ah! Haha! There’s the bitch!” Ahmad yelled from his bed the second I came into view. “I was wondering when your ass would find this place. It’s a fucking corn maze, I know.”
The room looked like a college dorm inside of a prison cell. The whole thing was just a giant box with no windows, two beds in each corner, and a small door to a bathroom in the corner that was probably pulled out of an RV. And yet, both the floor and the walls were carpeted, there was an eight-drawer dresser, two nightstands, a computer desk, a small kitchen space with a dining table, fridge, and oven, plus twin XL beds that actually looked comfortable. And above all else, there was fucking air conditioning.
“Yeah,” I sighed. “The design of this place is almost as bad as Eclipse.”
Ahmad burst out laughing. “Oh, man. Come, sit your tired ass down, get yourself settled in. Most of Kane’s shit is still lying around, but at least your space won’t be totally baren.”
My bed was on the left side. The sheets still looked recently used, and a stack of five giant books was sitting on the nightstand next to a slew of black and white charging chords. Two notebooks were lying on the ground halfway under the bed, and the wall paint had tape marks and thumb-tack holes all over it.
“I take it Kane wasn’t the most fun guy to share a room with?” I said while plopping onto the bed.
“Eh, he was certainly one of the more interesting characters here, that’s for sure.”
“That sounds like a nice way of saying he was a dick.”
“Ha! When he wanted to be, yeah. He and the four people whose rooms your friends took over are staying in the extra rooms in the F-wing right now.”
“You have extra rooms? Why couldn’t we stay in those?”
“Because there’s only, like, four people who stay in the F-wing, and we figured you all would do better sticking around us.”
I laid back on my pillow. “I hope so.”
It was almost 10:00 at night, I had been wandering around the base for half an hour, and my body was ready to shut off, but for some reason, I wanted to keep talking to Ahmad.
“Been a pretty messed up day, huh?”
“Oh, yes. Especially for you guys. I mean, you all started today like it was any other day and any other job, and now it’s ending with you guys being relocated to some apocalypse bunker sitting under a bank after fucking up the HQ of a bunch of secret terrorists. Sounds pretty messed up if I didn’t know any better.”
“And I hate to take Finn’s side in any of this, but it can’t be just a coincidence that the two companies we’ve gone after this past month were run by the same people. Nothing about that shit makes any sense to me. It seems extremely unlikely that Adrian somehow set us up, but… there has to be some other force at play here.”
“I don’t really know what you’re talking about, but I think you could be right. That fire didn’t start itself, and neither did that second bomb. And that whole ‘two companies run by the same people’ thing is pretty questionable too. Some weird shit is going down in the state of Ohio.”
“Huh. You’re telling me. Y’know, that reminds me, I thought I knew most of the militia pretty well, but I was wandering around all the other wings trying to find you, and I didn’t recognize most of the names that I saw by the rooms. Did you guys go on some new recruitment spree or something, or am I just going insane?”
“Hm. Well, there’s been no recruitment spree. The earliest seniority for anyone here is at least five years. But there are 48 of us, so you probably remember the faces better than the names. I think you’re just more familiar with the big players you usually deal with rather than all us little guys who do most of the heavy lifting around here. We mainly exist to keep the business running smoothly behind the scenes and whatnot. A lot of what we do nowadays is in Ohio’s inner cities where the police are less than reliable, particularly East Cleveland. It’s a lot of gang-meddling and actual charity work with occasional bursts of action to keep shit interesting. There’s rarely been a case where all 48 of us have been needed at once, though.”
“Well, I am glad you all showed up. If it had just been me and Skyler facing off against them… I don’t even wanna imagine how chaotic that would have been. I mean, I’m sure we would have figured something out, but I feel like what did happen was the better ending.”
“Was it?”
“I mean, the fire and the explosion that made everything go haywire was out of our control. If it hadn’t been for all that, the others and I would probably be back in Lakewood right now shoveling ice cream into our faces making sure to never touch another secretive multibillion-dollar organization again.”
“A-fucking-men. I’m tired of assholes like Eclipse. Rich people in general just really get on my nerves. They can wiggle their way around the law all they want and shut down anyone who challenges them, and nobody will hold them to it. I mean, millionaires I have a little bit of patience for since most of them actually had to work to get where they are, but billionaires? Fuck them. They didn’t earn shit. Their money was either inherited or stolen. They just make the world worse.”
“I guess that’s why we do what we do, though. It’s all about putting rich assholes in their place. But then again, how can we continue doing that after today? We’ve been doing this for years, but this is the first time where our collective lives have actually been in serious danger. They tried to fucking kill us—all of us—and it almost worked. I can’t shake that off. And they might not even be the last people to pose this kind of threat.”
“Well, the one thing I like to tell myself is that while there are consequences for us brawling with dangerous people, there are greater consequences for the people affected by them. The cost of fighting may be great, but the cost of inaction is far greater.”
“Yeah. I guess you’re right.” I was going to get ready to finally sleep, but one more thing popped into my head. “Hey, on an unrelated note: does the militia or anybody in it have some kind of… like… history with Eclipse or something?”
“Huh?”
“Like, did any of you know about Jax or Orion beforehand? Before the whole… hostage situation?”
“Man, what are you talking about? Who’s Jax and Orion?”
“It’s—” I cut myself off before saying anything else. Bringing it up was pointless anyway. “Nothing. Doesn’t matter now.”
Ahmad wasn’t convinced. “No, no, where did you hear those names? Are they the people you had to deal with back at the HQ? Are they the ones who died?”
“No, they didn’t die. They just… I don’t know. Jax was… like… the president of the whole organization or something. I’m sure he’s fine.”
“What about Orion? Who was that guy?”
“I’m not sure. It’s some dude that Aiden mentioned earli—” Shit. I shouldn’t have said that.
“Aiden? You think that he has some connection to Eclipse?”
“I was told not to talk about it. It doesn’t matter.” I shouldn’t have said that either. I’m on a fucking roll right now.
Ahmad sat up off his bed. “No, I think it does matter. If you think he knows something and doesn’t want you talking about it, that sounds pretty damn important.”
The door suddenly opened. Coincidentally, it was Finn. “Okay, good. You’re here. I guess nobody bothered to make a nametag for you so people know who the fuck they’re walking in on. Anyways, Graham: Skyler and I had an idea earlier that Skyler wanted you to know about, at least if nothing else… important… is going on right now.”
I glanced at Ahmad, who was lying back in his bed. “Uh, sure. Shoot.”
“So, since it doesn’t appear that we’re leaving any time soon, we figured that there could be one last quick supply run to Lakewood tomorrow morning so we can bring whatever we need from the house to this… place. Skyler will take King if he’s still alive, you can bring all your tech garbage—actually, don’t bring your tech garbage, they probably tracked you with that. But still, it’ll be great. We’re still awaiting approval from Brice and company, but if we have an escort from some of you guys,” he pointed at Ahmad, “then we’ll be all set for however long this shit takes to blow over.”
“Tomorrow… morning?”
Shit. If Aiden takes up the meeting offer with Orion, Finn would have to go along too. But if he’s trying to keep it a secret, then how the hell is that going to work? And why the fuck is it even a secret at all? Jesus Christ, round of applause for Aiden for making everything that much more fucking complicated.
“Yes, tomorrow morning. Is there a problem with that? Do you need Adrian to come wake you up?”
You know what, Aiden? Fuck your secrets. You should have known not to trust me. “It’s just… you may have a little something else to deal with by then.”
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