“Babes.” Jem snorts. “As if you can fool me!”
I’m too stunned to speak, only gaping at her. “How?”
“How? How what? How did I know?” Jem’s voice pitches.
“Jem,” Tristan says, his voice calm as he speaks over her budding triumph. “What’s happening?”
“Here!” One of the policemen comes out of the closet, white powder on his fingers. “I’ve also found this. There’s a whole secret workstation here.” He holds several memory banks in his hands. “We’ll find everything we want on these.”
Tristan drops his head with a frown, then he starts to chuckle. “Seriously?”
Jem steps closer. “Officer Odinga, what is that powder?”
Now Tristan looks at me, a brow cocked, that sparkle back in his eye. “This is a bit dramatic for a spot of cornstarch.”
Officer Odinga lifts his finger to his nose, smells, and then taps his finger on his tongue, tasting. “Hmm… I’m not sure, but this isn’t?—”
“Officer, you need to be one hundred percent sure,” Jem hisses. “Remember what happened last time.”
Last time? All those red flags wave at me, that whiff of something smelling off hitting me in the face, and then there was Matthias de Foch asking for thegood stuff.
Holy Mother of God—I thought he only wanted weed, butthis, this is a cocaine raid.
Officer Odinga takes a deep breath and gives Jem a resigned stare. “We’ll take this as evidence for the laboratory in Dar es Salaam.”
“Don’t get high now,” Tristan murmurs.
His little joke has no effect on the rest of the crowd, but I lose it, completely. How can Tristan be so blasé? We’re being raided by the police fordrugs! Here, as foreigners! Doesn’t he know what happens to drug smugglers in foreign countries? “For fuck’s sake, Jem. Honestly. You?—”
“Lexi.” Tristan’s tone is harsh. “Don’t.”
Don’t say a thing.The authority and threat in his voice cut sharply, and everybody jumps. We’re all looking at each other, waiting to see what happens next, and in those few seconds, the slow hum of the floatplane circles above.
“That would be the rest of the party,” Jem announces. The chill in her tone freezes me over.
I’m shivering. For the first time since arriving at Ne’emba, my fingers are white with cold. It’s the shock. First getting fired from St Chalamet. Then the Mia Reed disaster. Now my little stint with Tristan. Third time wasn’t the charm. And this is a million times worse than I ever imagined.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
TRISTAN
“Bring the evidence,” Jem says. “We’ll go to the office now. I have everything prepared.”
One half of me is shocked, but there’s that other half that’s been taking stock of all the signs, if subconsciously. Mike telling us the Pemba harbor isn’t a good place to hang out, Roger avoiding certain dhows on dives and being bitter about other people making a quick buck. Why did nobody mention this to us?
I watch in horror as the two officers stack my laptop and all my other electronics into one of my travel crates. “Be careful,” I hiss. “I have a lot of important—”irreplaceable“—data on there.”
“That’s what I thought.” Jem runs me down with her gaze, matriarch to the core.
I knew she was on to something, plotting, spying, but this is so out left field I want to laugh. Except it’s no laughing matter.
Lexi just stands there, looking like she’s seen a ghost. I bet this is a rerun of what happened when her dad got arrested all those years ago. It took three years of hanging out with Evanbefore he opened up to me about what had gone down in New Orleans, just a year after the family lost their home in the hurricane.
After that, I dug around. Who wouldn’t, once you realized your best friend’s dad was a convicted felon? Not only did Alexander O’Reilly steal from donors, he stole money allocated to the Hurricane Relief Fund. The vitriol was so toxic, Anita left New Orleans for a new life in Miami with the kids. But in the middle of all of it, there was little Lexi, soaking the anger and hatred towards her dad up like a sponge. The family used to call her Alexa, but her name was too close toAlexO’Reilly, which was plastered all over the news. So she started asking people to call her Lexi instead, burying Alexa and that past forever. I bet she would have changed her surname if she could.
Even more reason for this fake engagement to have her in a pretzel. For her, this has been fraud from day one. And now this.
“It’s going to be fine, Lexi,” I call to her, but she doesn’t even look in my direction.They’ve got nothing on us.I keep quiet. Saying that won’t help, not when we’ve been living a partial lie here from the beginning. Well, the truth’s going to come out now, whether we want it to or not.
