“Oh, you mean the Christmas gift? That wasn’t a loan. You don’t need to pay it back.”
“Alexa, you stole that money from Linus Sykes.”
“Don’t think of it as stealing. If you’d sued for defamation, you’d definitely have won a hefty settlement, and that way, we cut out all the lawyer fees. He should actually have thanked me.”
Nolan muttered a curse and closed his eyes for a moment. “I’ve spent close to nine years looking over my shoulder, waiting for the cops to knock on my door. I almost gave the money back, and the only reason I didn’t was because I worried about getting you into trouble.”
Aw, that was sweet, but he needed to relax. Nolan always had been uptight. Levi used to give him anxiety pills from his stash, which helped some, but I’d always fretted about his blood pressure. Not Levi’s blood pressure, Nolan’s. Levi took pills for everything, morning, noon, and night. On several occasions, I’d googled the names—risperidone, lithium, fluoxetine, buspirone, methylphenidate… The guy was a walking pharmacy. And whenever he spent time with his mom, he came back with yet more drugs. Jez said it was unnatural, the way she still had such a hold over him, and who was I to argue? I had no idea how regular parents behaved. Both of mine had suffered from who-gives-a-shit syndrome.
Think I’m exaggerating? Then how about the time I began peeing blood and Mom just told me to drink more water? In the end, our housekeeper had snuck me out to see a physician, and he told me I’d caught chlamydia. Soon after, CPS showed up at the house, closely followed by my furious mother, Uncle Porter, and our family attorney. The housekeeper got fired, CPS went away, and my uncle kept playing “our special game” for another year before I finally escaped.
“Chill out. Linus couldn’t call the cops because if he had, they might have asked where the money came from—bribery and corruption, by the way—and also why he was keeping it hidden from the IRS in an offshore account. And I didn’t even take all of it, just the funds with dubious origins.”
“I heard the bank foreclosed on the Sykeses’ home.”
“Well, it wasn’t my fault they mortgaged it up to the hilt, was it? I needed to get them off your back. I mean, I wasn’t about to sit and watch while they dragged your name and everyone else’s through the mud.”
Nolan slumped into a chair opposite, shoulders drooped, the weight of the day and probably half a lifetime sitting heavy on his shoulders. The chair creaked ominously, as if it felt the burden too.
“He sent a private investigator after me,” Nolan confessed. “Everywhere I turned, the guy was there, and he told me it was only a matter of time before I traded places with Levi. That with you out of the picture, Dawson was my only alibi, and maybe Dawson was in on it too.”
And perhaps that would even have worked. The knife Levi used to carve a fucking pentagram into Ruby’s chest had belonged to Dawson, and he’d left it embedded in her heart after he killed her. The worst part? Okay, clearly the murder was the worst part, but the second-worst part was that none of us had seen it coming. Sure, Levi could be strange at times, but who wasn’t? Jez said she could understand the two of them playing a sex game that went badly wrong, and I could see him taking the wrong meds and losing control, but the satanic stuff? The cops said he had several books on the occult, but Levi had books on everything. Reading was his jam. His bedroom looked more like a library, and the overflow ended up on shelves in the living room.
But he had to have done it. Him or Justin, because everyone else except Jez had an alibi. And while Jez had switched career from bartender to pro assassin, she said she hadn’t done it, and I believed her. The cops and the medical examiner had been clear with the time window, plus it was Levi’s DNA inside Ruby.
“I knew about the PI, but I didn’t realise he’d spoken to you that way. I would’ve come back, I swear. Jez knew how to get in touch with me.”
Although Dawson had helped me to escape, it was Jez who’d broken into Blackstone House to retrieve a couple of spare passports I’d been unable to grab when the police forced us to leave. I’d traded her B&E skills for my hacking talents, and we’d wound up forming a mutually beneficial relationship that had stood the test of time. Even if the bitch had forced me to come here against my will.
“I didn’t realise that. The two of you just dropped off the grid.”
“I didn’t want to go into the foster system.”
“So where did you go?”
“Naples.”
“Florida?” Nolan’s brow furrowed, and understandably so. We’d had a running joke that it was our fifty-first favourite state. And okay, the reality wasn’t that bad, but it was still full of swamps, alligators, mosquitoes, bears, snakes, sharks, and terrible drivers.
“Naples, Italy.”
“How did you even get there?”
“On an airplane.”
“I was thinking more of the logistics. Didn’t they flag your passport?”
No, but I’d used a spare to cover my tracks in any case.
“I guess not.”
“And now you work with Jerry, huh? That’s something else I didn’t see coming.”
“Not full-time. It’s more of a freelance research gig.”
“Like a side hustle? For the first two years I lived here, I mowed lawns in Mason’s Hill over the summer. Man, I don’t know how I got any sleep in those days. So, what sort of research do you do?”
Oh, we were not going there.
