No Returns (The Blankenships Book 6)
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Authors: Evelyn Glass
No Returns 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 6 of
The Blankenships
series
CHAPTER ONE
Time dilated in a way that made Zoey feel dizzy and nauseated. She knew she fumbled for her phone, and she knew she dialed 911, but it seemed like an eternity passed before the first ring on the line. As she spat out a garbled version of what had happened to the 911 operator, Alex gasped his way back to consciousness. She begged him not to move as he crawled into the backseat with her, clutching his sister’s suddenly tiny body to his chest as he cried out.
When the paramedics arrived, they had to pry Claire’s body out of his arms.
They took her first, a thousand small medical devices in place as they tried to coerce her body back into working order.
It didn’t do anything. Nothing at all.
They put her in the ambulance while Alex screamed. A second ambulance came for the two of them. Only then did he seem to notice Zoey. She tried not to let it hurt when he pushed her away.
He endured the attention of the EMTs as they peered in his eyes and cleaned the wounds on his head and hands from broken glass.
At the hospital, the police came. They didn’t recognize Alex, and they questioned why he had blood on his hands and clothes a thousand times until Zoey took a turn with the screaming.
Through it all, Alex sat there, the life drained from his eyes.
It fell to Zoey to answer the questions.
“No, I didn’t recognize the shooter.”
“No, I didn’t get a good look at his face.”
“No, I don’t know why we were targeted.” That one came after a glance at Alex, a glance that she was quite sure that the police noticed, but she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know what was safe anymore.
Alex finally stirred. “I want Luke Pyramus here,” he said. “And I want my lawyers. Now.”
Something in his tone made the cops take another look at their notes. They finally seemed to put two and two together and realize that they were dealing with one of the more powerful men in New York City, and that getting their commissioner might be the right call, if only because it might take a little bit of the heat off their necks.
Alex and Zoey were alone in the room with the body of his little sister. They were both covered in blood, and both of them were shaky; she knew that much at least. “Alex,” she said, her voice quiet. “It’s time that we let them take a look at us.”
He shrugged her hand off his shoulder without saying a word. The EMTs had given each of them a cursory examination and said that, outside of concussions, they were both reasonably okay, but the ER doctors wanted to have a look as well, but once they’d stopped attempting to resuscitate Claire, Alex hadn’t managed to let go of his sister’s hand.
“When I go,” he said, his voice cracked and ragged, “when I leave, it will be true. They will have won.” As Zoey looked on, something deep inside of him shattered, and he crumbled down, his forehead resting on his hand, joined with Claire’s. She touched his shoulders lightly again, and he didn’t brush her off this time. She deepened her touch, kneading into his shoulders with the tips of her fingers. His body didn’t move, but he made a sound like glass grinding over sand.
“There’s the twins,” she said, her voice very quiet. “We can help them. We can make sure it doesn’t happen to anyone else.
His head snapped up, and his eyes were very cold as they stared into hers, cold enough that she had to fight to keep from pulling away from him. This wasn’t just his CEO stare; that was positively tropical compared to the arctic currents in his gaze right now. “I don’t give a
fuck,
” he said, spitting the curse with the kind of venom that would impress a cobra, “what happens to anyone else. Do you understand me? None of it matters now. None of it.”
Zoey was at an utter loss. She had to be truthful; losing her grandmother in her teens didn’t compare to this. Claire had been barely a woman, murdered on the cusp of her entire life, by forces that they hadn’t been able to understand yet. Oh, sure, they had theories, and they had guesses, but they didn’t know. She felt powerless in the extreme, and as close as she and Claire had gotten in the past few days, it had only been days. The way Alex had talked about her, it often sounded as though he had done as much, if not more, to raise the girl than his parents had.
Alex’s head dropped down again, but Zoey found herself believing that he wore a different sort of posture now. His shoulders were crushed under the weight of something too heavy to be born, but he stopped gazing at her chest as if sheer force of will could make her heart start to beat again. He was finding some kind of peace now, and maybe it would be better if she stepped out of the room for a moment, got them both some coffee, and used that to draw him out.
“I’ll be right back,” she said, leaning over and pressing her lips against the back of his neck. He made a soft sound, for one brief moment he leaned into her presence, and then he returned to his vigil.
She stepped into the hallway of the emergency room, focusing on keeping herself calm and steady. The nurses’ station was deserted, and Zoey could feel shock taking a deeper hold in her bones. Never mind coffee; she needed to pull out her phone and figure out how to get Luke Pyramus on the phone. Maybe Alex’s friend Leo, too. It was okay for her to not be able to be his support right now. He needed friends, close friends who’d known him for years and could hold him up while this awful truth sank into him.
Down the hallway, she heard a voice. It was a hospital; one single voice shouldn’t have stood out, but there was something in the strident tone that told her everything she needed to know. She was running before she realized she was in motion. She turned the corner, and Olivia stood there, completely incongruous in her expensive clothes and perfect manicure. She was just as shattered as Alex was.
“No,” she cried, her head snapping back and forth almost viciously as a doctor placed a hand on her arm. “No,” she said again, yanking her arm back and almost overbalancing herself.
Zoey moved forward, catching the woman as she shook. She was surprisingly light; she seemed such a presence it was easy to miss that she was mostly whipcord and anger until your fingers closed on her arm; Zoey was suddenly afraid that she would leave a bruise on the other woman’s dark skin.
“I can take you to her,” Zoey said to Olivia, pitching her voice low and as compassionate as she could. “Alex is there. Let’s go. Let’s go, so you can say goodbye.”
Zoey didn’t really know what reaction her words would provoke. She thought the woman might push her away, grab hold of her, or let herself be steered down the hall while the doctors gratefully watched her go.
She didn’t expect Olivia’s body to galvanize, her eyes flashing with electric anger. She brushed Zoey and the doctor both off with a vicious strength that Zoey never would have expected from her. “I will thank you,” she said, her voice strong and clear, “to let me walk under my own power. I’m not quite dead yet, thank you.”
She took two steps, brushing past Zoey, and then froze.
Alex stood in the hallway before her. If Olivia had a presence, he had an aura. A frozen aura that seemed to spike out from him in odd directions, freezing the world around him into tiny chunks of sounds and visions that cracked on the floor around him. No one spoke. No one made a sound.
Alex stood still for a long time, crackling with icy anger and cold fury, and Olivia stepped toward him. “Is she—was she alone?”
The voice she directed towards her son was completely different from the one that had stung Zoey’s skin. For a moment, Zoey thought she saw Alex slip a little, saw him weaken slightly, but then his hand cracked across Olivia’s face, a brutal slap that echoed. Olivia’s hand came to her cheek for a moment, and then she collected herself, straightened, and stared at her son.
“Well,” she said, her voice thin, weak, and broken. “I suppose you always did look like your father.”
She swept past him then, and everyone was staring at Alex, anger and fear in their eyes. He’d just crossed the line, Zoey realized, from billionaire to scary black man, and now they were afraid, frightened, of what he would do. She wanted to shake people, shove their faces into their prejudices, and show them a family that was tearing itself inside out, but no. There was no way she could do it. They wouldn’t understand her fury any more than they understood his pain.
It was Luke Pyramus who saved her, saved Alex, saved them both. He came out of nowhere and took Alex’s elbow, gently leading him back and away from the hallway into an empty office. He pushed Alex down into a chair, and when Alex started to stand and fight back, Luke pushed him down roughly, and Alex gave this time. Zoey sat down as well, as Luke closed the door behind them.
“We need to talk,” Luke said. There was a coiled sound in his voice, a twisted, roughened sound. His eyes rimmed with red. Zoey found herself wondering if he’d cried on the way to the hospital, knowing what had happened to his friend’s sister, or if it was just that it was late in the night, and he had been woken up. “Why did you ask me to sweep your penthouse for bugs, Alex? What in the hell is going on?”
Zoey’s gaze turned to the man she had come to love. She expected to see him break down again, to see him collapse inside of himself, but his shoulders stayed back, his eyes cold and calm. “A momentary lapse in judgment,” Alex said, his tone no more excited than it would have been if he’d been facing a boardroom full of angry stock holders. Everything about him oozed confidence, but not the kind that made Zoey’s heart flutter. No, this was everything she’d been afraid of since the beginning.
Luke scoffed, and she could feel the situation falling apart. It only took her one angry moment to decide what to do. She pulled the USB drive out of her purse and slapped it down on the desk in front of Luke. She felt Alex’s fingers close over her arm, much as her arm had closed over Olivia’s; just as easily, she shook him loose. She pulled the papers she’d printed out of her bag and dropped those down next to the drive.
Luke was staring at her, his eyes wide as dinner plates, and his complexion washed out under his tan. “What is this?”
“The information that was on the USB drive you showed me the last time we spoke,” she said. “Don’t ask me how I got it, because I will lie to you. There’s something going on. We didn’t know what it was, and we didn’t know who to trust, so we were keeping information to ourselves, but that time has passed.” She swallowed hard. “The consequences are too great. You need to take this away from him,” she said. She didn’t look at Alex or point at him, but she knew that Luke understood what she was saying. “He can’t handle this now. We never could, but we thought we could find a more complete picture, show you that we weren’t involved, and show you who was.” She shook her head.
She could feel the air tighten. Alex’s anger was icy cold and washed over her in frigid waves of fury; Luke was carefully avoiding looking at either of them. He picked up the papers and began to flip through them. “Is this everything on the drive?” He asked in a flawlessly neutral tone.
“No,” Zoey said. “But that version of the drive is unencrypted. Be careful with it. I was warned that it could be used to track me.”
Luke’s eyes turned to Alex’s, and Zoey saw so much pain on the man’s face. “Why didn’t you bring me in on this,” he asked Alex. “Why didn’t you trust me?”
Alex stared back, so much hurt and pain in his own expression. “Would you have trusted yourself? Knowing what was at stake if you were wrong, would you have trusted anyone?”
Anger rose on Luke’s face, but it was carefully controlled. “I count four bodies, Alex. It seems like the stakes already got way too high for one man to try and handle on his own.”
Zoey shrank into her seat as the two men tried furiously to glare each other to death. There was a part of her that wanted to jump in between them and wave her hands around, demanding that they pay attention to her and not each other. They looked like they might leap at each other in any moment. She should stop them; she should try and divert the attention away from the anger and the bitterness.
She stayed exactly where she was.
“Did this have anything to do with your mother?” Luke asked. “I assume that’s who you were trying to protect.”
Alex’s jaw worked, and after a moment, he stood. “Zoey, it’s time for us to go. Luke, feel free to contact my lawyers, and we’ll arrange a meeting. We will, of course, cooperate fully with any investigation into—” his voice hitched, “my sister’s death. As for what we know about the others,” he gestured at the pile of paperwork that graced the anonymous desk. “You know everything we do.”