Blood Price (The Blankenships Book 5)

This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Blood Price copyright @ 2015 by Evelyn Glass. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Book 5 of
The Blankenships
series

CHAPTER ONE

The words Luke had said didn’t quite register in Alex’s brain. One of his best friends was standing in his den, late at night
, and had tossed an evidence bag at his girlfriend. Zoey sat on the couch, still as a deer that has heard a sound in the woods, staring at the bag like it was going to bite her.

“What’s going on here?” Alex asked. Luke didn’t turn his angry eyes away from Zoey, and she didn’t look up.

Alex leaned over to pick up the bag, and Luke snapped at him. “Don’t touch it.” Alex gave him an annoyed look, but when he glanced down again, he saw that the bag had not been filled out yet. Something in his chest that had been winding tighter and tighter loosened. This wasn’t officially evidence. Not yet. He turned a long look at his friend.

Luke shook his head. “I’m not interested in getting either of you involved in something that you shouldn’t be involved in, but this is too much. Your girlfriend is at the house of a woman she has no reason to know when the woman is murdered by someone who manages to leave no trace evidence that connects him, and then we find a flash drive, which her coworkers identify as belonging to the victim, is full of information about you and your father. So I need you to bring me in on whatever the hell is happening, Alex, because there’s something going on.”

Alex was silent for a moment, trying to find the right words to begin, when Zoey gave a snort. Luke raised his dark eyebrows, and she shook her head. “No, really,” Luke said, his tone dry and brittle. “Go on and tell me what’s so damn funny.”

“Just wondering if we’d be having this same conversation in this same place if you two hadn’t been buddy buddy in prep school.”

Luke’s eyes flared with anger for a moment, and Alex resisted the urge to snap a response back at her. No matter how much Luke might not want to admit it, the truth was that he was here because Alex was a friend and Alex had money. Otherwise? The color of his skin, or even Zoey’s self-described poverty, would have meant that the conversation happened at 1PP at least. Having high powered lawyers did a lot to change how the police spoke to you, after all.

Luke seemed to fight down his temper, and he gave a slight nod of acknowledgment to Zoey. Whatever it was he wanted to acknowledge, he didn’t say. “Can you tell me about the information on the drive?”

“Not without knowing what’s on there,” Alex said. “And I’m pretty sure that my lawyers would kill me for having any conversation without them present.”

That dark look surfaced in Luke’s eyes again. “Alex,” he said, “It’s me.”

“And I appreciate that,” Alex said. “But a woman was killed. And you and I both know how this game works. It’s not about proof. It’s about reasonable doubt.”

“I won’t let anything bad happen to either of you.”

“You don’t control the DA,” Alex said, “And you don’t owe her anything. I’m sorry, Luke, but I need to make a phone call.” He leaned over, took Zoey’s hand, and pressed a light kiss to her knuckles. “I’ll be right back. Don’t talk to him about anything relating to the drive, or Cindy Walden, or what happened that night.”

She gave him a cold look, but he had the sense that it was more from fear than anger. “I’m not an idiot.”

Alex settled on a sheepish smile in reply and stepped out of the room. He had to dig into his contacts on his phone to find the phone number for Alonso Martin. He hadn’t had the man on speed dial since he had graduated college. Recent events made it increasingly possible that was going to change.

Alonso answered on the second ring, his voice just as calm and awake as it would have been at noon. “Martin,” he said.

“It’s Alex,” he said. Adding his last name wasn’t necessary. “I have a situation.”

There was a quick muffling of sound. Alex could picture the tall, narrow, Latino man pressing the phone against his chest and speaking quietly to whoever was in the room with him. After a moment, his voice came back. “I’m ready,” he said. He would be bent over a pad of paper with one of the fountain pens he’d inherited from his grandfather—Alex spared a thought for the gorgeous jade green Wahl pen that Alonso carried in his pocket and used daily—because he liked to say that while nothing deleted from a computer was ever actually destroyed, fire took care of paper very nicely. Alex began to talk.

***

Zoey tried not to let her awkwardness show as she and the police commissioner waited for Alex to return. Her mother would have had some kind of casual conversation ready and waiting, even for a situation like this, but Zoey herself—well, she
’d been out of Louisiana for too long, apparently. She folded her hands, pressed her knees together, and hoped her dress wasn’t all together too rumpled.

Commissioner Pyramus dropped himself into one of the arm chairs near the sofa and waited, his fingers tapping rapidly at the arm of the chair. He pulled out his phone once, glanced at it, made an irritated huffing sound, and then returned to his tapping.

The urge to reach over and smash his fingers down and make the tapping stop was huge and overwhelming. She amused herself by daydreaming about it until Alex walked back into the room, carrying his phone. He set it down on the coffee table between them, and then said “Alonso?”

“Yes,” said a male voice, somewhat higher pitched than Zoey had been expecting. The man—Alonso Martin, she assumed—spoke quickly, and to Zoey’s ears, sounded like he was working to take control of the conversation immediately. “Commissioner Pyramus, I’m surprised you would visit my clients in the middle of the night without speaking to me first.”

Luke shot Alex a look of pure rage, and then said in a voice full of forced cheer, “I’d hope that we could do this off the books, Al. We’ve all been friends for a long time.”

Alonso’s voice sharpened. “When you visit my client with an unmarked evidence bag, that’s not friendship, that’s a veiled threat, and don’t think for a second I won’t remember it. Now, have you advised my clients of their rights?”

Luke took a deep breath. “No, because they haven’t been charged with anything. I’m just trying to gather information on the flash drive. I would rather ask my friend than ask my tech guys to take it apart and find out what’s going on. I know that the Blankenship family likes to avoid scandal.”

Alex had settled down beside her, and at those words, Zoey saw his lips tighten, his hands clench, but before he got out a word, the voice on the phone said “Shut up, Alex. Commissioner, if you can’t avoid baiting my client, then the interview is concluded. Clear?”

Luke’s eyes narrowed. “Fine,” he said through a tight jaw. “Have either of you ever seen this drive before?”

Alex shook his head, seemed to realize that Alonso wouldn’t be able to see it, and then said “No.”

Zoey closed her eyes for just a second, prayed she wasn’t about to make things harder for herself, and then said a quiet “Yes.” She opened her eyes and found Luke watching her without surprise, and Alex staring at her.

“What happened,” Luke asked, at the same time that Alonso barked out that they would not be discussing this any further until he had a chance to discuss what had happened with her. Zoey clenched her fingers and her eyes tightly closed. There was too much noise, all of a sudden, and her mind cycled back, back to Cindy whispering that someone was coming, to the two of them running, to Cindy falling. To the man standing over her, hiss pop. To Cindy’s hands clawing at the air before they fell down.

When she came back to herself, Alex was kneeling in front of her, clutching her hands, murmuring quiet words she couldn’t even entirely understand. The commissioner had backed away slightly, his hands up in a gesture of surrender. Her cheeks were wet. She’d been crying.

Alonso’s voice, quietly measured and careful, came over the phone, breaking the silence. “I’m going to suggest that we meet at Commissioner Pyramus’s office in the morning and discuss this there, in a more formal setting. Mr. Blankenship, if I may treat you and Zoey to breakfast?”

There was some discussion, but Zoey tuned it out to focus on her breathing, on her heart beat, on the light film of stinking sweat that had broken out on her skin. She heard Alex escort the commissioner out again, and then he came back, holding the phone between them. “Zoey?” Alonso said quietly.

“Yes,” she said. Her voice was steady and calm. That was nice, at least. “Sorry for my panic there.”

“Not to worry,” he said. “Alex tells me that you’re very disturbed to see the flash drive. Are its contents why you were at Ms. Walden’s residence the night of the murder?”

Zoey took a deep breath and focused. “Yes,” she said. “Although I didn’t know that at the time.” At his gentle, kind, but businesslike prompting, she told him the whole story. How she’d gotten Cindy’s call, gone to the house, had the drive pressed upon her, and then Cindy had been killed.

Alonso was silent for a moment. “All right,” he said. “I’ll contact the DA in the morning, see if we can get around all of this with having you just write up a signed witness statement. They’re not charging you, so they have something that indicates that you’re not a reasonable suspect. I don’t think we have to worry—but Alex, I don’t care how many years you and Luke were in Phi Beta Awesome together, don’t trust him when he’s talking about shit like this.”

“Don’t be jealous just because you pledged at Phi Alpha Delta,” Alex said, chuckling. “We still loved you, you were just in the wrong frat.”

Alonso chuckled. “Get some sleep, you two. I’ll call you in the morning if I actually need you, but we should be fine.”

The call disconnected, and Alex made a move to gather her close, but paused before he did it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You might not want me close right now.”

His eyes didn’t quite meet hers, so she took it upon herself to pull closer, press her lips against his, and murmur into his mouth. “If you don’t give me something to do with all this energy, I will fly apart,” she said.

He chuckled, pulling her into his lap. “Isn’t that what I did earlier?”

“I want more,” she said, grinding roughly against him to the tune of his happy sighs.

“I love that you always want more,” he said, his hands finding her hips through her dress, splaying over the top of her ass and gripping her just on the edge of gently.

She paused, leaning back so that she could stare deeply into his dark eyes. “Truly?” She asked. Her voice trembled just a little, and that more than anything seemed to cue him to slow down and really look at her.

“Not been your experience so far?”

She shook her head. If her hair was down, she would have ducked her head and tried to hide the sparkling in her eyes behind a curtain of hair. With it up, there was no hiding. Just blinking fast to try and banish the wetness to where it’d come from.

He watched her, never wavering, though she could feel him carefully considering his next words.

“Then let me say this now. I’ve spent a long time trying to find a woman who was as voracious, as delighted by sensuality as I am.

"I understand why you feel like it’s too soon to just move in, but I also know that I feel more for you than I’ve ever felt for another person. Maybe it’ll just be lust, in the long run, there’s no way to know right now, but—” He grinned, considered, and then he nodded. “Zoey Gardener, I love you. Right now, in this moment, in this heartbeat, I love you. I want you, and I want to do anything I can to show you how very much I feel.”

The tempest of emotions was too overwhelming to pick one thread out from the swirl. She reached out and traced her hand over his cheek. He leaned into her caress like a cat, murmuring a small sound that went straight to her heart, and then redirected itself much lower. “Take me to bed,” she whispered.

“As my lady commands,” he intoned, and lifted her off the couch without any real show of effort. She squeaked and flung her arms around his neck, laughing as he adjusted her into his arms.

The procession through the apartment—there was something to it. She wondered if this was how it felt, to have a husband carry his wife over the threshold for the first time. She’d grown up in such a strange time, when romanticism was prized in the media and shunned by girls she actually knew—except for when it wasn’t. Part of her wanted to insist that she would walk to a bedroom on her own steam, thank you very much—but a not insignificant part of her liked the way this felt. To be held, carefully contained and controlled. Made safe.