Page 93 of The Misfit

The one thing Lee deserves to be.

The one thing standing between us.

I could start over somewhere new. Somewhere I wouldn’t have to pretend to be suitable. Somewhere I wouldn’t have to watch Lee slowly absorb all my broken patterns.

“He deserves better,” she presses. “Deserves a chance at normalcy. At a life without counting and constantly checking on you.”

My gloved fingers trace the edge of the check, measuring its perfect angles. One corner is slightly bent—ninety-three degrees instead of ninety. The imperfection makes me stick to my stomach.

“Salem, he loves you,” Katherine whispers, and the words hurt worse than any cruelty could. “Which is why he’ll never leave on his own. Never stop trying to understand your world. Never stop adapting to your needs.”

A tear splashes onto the check, smudging one of those impossible zeros.

“The question isn’t whether you love him,” she continues gently. “It’s whether you love him enough to let him go. To let him become the man he could be without your influence.”

I spread the check out flat to look at it fully.

Katherine’s smile widens slightly.

And somewhere in my head, I start counting.

One reason to stay.

Two reasons to go.

One million reasons to change the rest of our lives.

I meet her gaze. It’s a shame. A complete shame. I grip the check in the middle and rip it in two, letting the pieces fall to the table between us like a grenade.

“Money might be able to buy you whatever you want, but there’s one thing it will never buy you, and that’s me.”

TWENTY-TWO

lee

Most people would never guessthat Lee Sterling, campus bad boy and professional dealer-in-disappointment, knows his way around cybersecurity. When they look at me, they see the trust fund, the fighting, the drinking—exactly what I want them to see.

Instead of the three monitors running code, the specially built rig under my desk, or the fact that I’ve been monitoring my family’s accounts since I was fifteen. Some kids rebel with drugs, which I’ve done my fair share of, but I rebelled with Python scripts and SQL injections.

It would take nothing more than a few strokes of the keyboard to destroy my entire family’s empire. I should do it, and I’m not really sure why I haven’t yet, probably because it wouldn’t solve anything. It wouldn’t make me feel better. Ignoring the impulsive thought before I can go through with it, I change gears.

“Time to check on the family fortune,” I mutter, fingers flying across keyboards.

The familiar rhythm of coding calms me like counting tiles calms Salem. It’s my own kind of pattern, my own kind of control.

The Sterling Banking & Trust firewall is a joke—I should know, I helped design it during myreformedphase last year. Three keystrokes and I’m in, scanning recent transactions like I’m reading a bedtime story.

It isn’t often that I find something that makes me pause, but when I see something out of place, I do.

“What the fuck?”

A transfer from my mother’s personal account to Henderson Industries: five million dollars. Recent. Authorized with her private codes.

Maybe it’s a business deal? That wouldn’t be surprising. Then again, something feels off. Especially when I realize the routing shows it went to a private account—Charlotte Henderson’s private account, specifically.

“Really, Mother?” I lean in closer to the screen, tracking the digital breadcrumbs. “Buying off the competition?”

I shake my head in disappointment. She can do better than that. The transfer was hidden and routed through three separate shells before landing in Charlotte’s account.Amateur hour. Like I haven’t been tracking my mother’s financial manipulations since before I could drive. My mother is many things, but she’s never sloppy with money. Every dollar serves a purpose. Every transaction advances her agenda.

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