“Call it my top-tier survival instinct, then.”
Cole smirked. “Like a cockroach?”
“Say what you like about ‘em, but there’s a reason them and me will be the ones living our best lives in post-apocalyptic bunkers while people like you work yourselves into a heart attack because your cat-shit coffee isn’t available anymore.”
That got him a deliciously scandalized look. “Excuse me?”
“Wait, they’re not cats, are they?” He pretended to think about it. “Sorry, palm civet-shit coffee.”
“I don’t drink kopi luwak.”
“The point stands,” Will insisted. “You’re a rich boy with rich boy tastes. I’m sure your family has a very nice end-of-the-world bunker out there somewhere”— most of the billionaires did, after all— “but even caviar is going to start tasting like shit after a while when you’re used to being able to buy anything and everything. Whereas I will be perfectly happy spearing rats and roasting them over an open fire.”
Cole looked as close to dumbfounded as Will had ever seen him. It was a delicious expression to see on his face. “How did we even get on this subject?”
“You were importuning my character.”
“Oh, excuse me,Mr. Darcy,” Cole snarked as he checked the altitude gauge. “I didn’t realize that pointing out my superior skill at landing a plane was the equivalent of a personal attack.”
The funny thing was that Will could almost believe that. People who had been given the world often didn’t realize how hard it could be to actually live in it.
He could almost hear Ellie’s voice in his ear.You gotta play nice, Uncle Will. Picking a fight about privilege with the man he was trying to hunt down the Puffin with wasn’t the wisest course of action, and Will knew it. At this point, staying together might not be the wisest course of action either—it would be easier to just give the Puffin up for lost and drop off the grid for a while until things calmed down. And yet…
That was something Will could do. Not Cole. Nobody gave a damn about Will’s family or friends, not that they’d be able to find them. Cole’s were right out there in the open, and as antagonistic as his relationship with his parents seemed, that didn’t mean he wanted them in the line of fire. And Alders could bring a lot of firepower to bear in a situation like this, not to mention the damage that Marcus was doing to both their reputations by sending them on a wild goose chase and then miring them in the wrong kind of attention.
No, they needed to finish this in a way that sent a message to anyone who might start thinking they were easy marks. They needed the Puffin and Marcus needed to pay.
“Do you always get distracted so easily?”
Will was a little surprised at the huffy undertone in Cole’s voice. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, we were in the middle of a conversation and the next thing I know, you’re staring out the window like it’s answering the secrets of the universe.”
Will replayed their last exchange in his head—he might be distractable, but he had a damn good sense of recall. “The argument was over. You won,” he added generously.
“That wasn’t an argument, it was just a conversation.”
“Fine. Then you won the conversation.”
“You can’t win at conversations.”
Well, that was just a lie. “I know you’re fucking with me right now,” Will said. “Because I’ve seen you talk to people at parties like the one that kicked off this shitshow, and almost every single conversation you got into was a battle. Just because you’re not slapping somebody across the face by the end of it doesn’t mean you ain’t trying to win it. Hell, your mother bulldozed over a dozen people into listening to her talk about cubism for half an hour; that’s a win if ever I saw one.”
“Fine,” Cole snapped. “But that’s different.”
“How so?”
“Because those people aren’t like you.”
Will gave himself a second to parse out the meaning behind a statement that could very easily be taken as an insult. Once he got it, though, he grinned at Cole. “Aww, honeybee,” he cooed. “You can just say you like talkin’ to me, you know. You don’t have to hide your sweetness behind your stinger all the time.”
Was that an eye roll? It was hard to tell in the dark. “Can you stop it with the pet names already?”
“Mm, I’d rather not if it’s all the same to you,” Will replied honestly.
“Why?”
Because it’s one of the only ways I can tease you that doesn’t make you go on the offensive.
