When the car pulled up, Sierra grabbed her bags and stormed to the hotel reception to check in.
They were leaving, and she didn’t have proof Ranielle killed Alicia. The cops wouldn’t keep looking—according to them, they’d closed a murder case. The chief of police had given a press conference that afternoon after releasing Louis’s suicide note and confession. To listen to her answering the media’s questions, you’d think she’d closed the crime of the century. Alicia Angelos was no longer an unsolved mystery. Why would they want to poke holes?
Sierra wanted to poke holes. Sierra wantedjustice.
She was given two rooms next to each other.
“You head up,” she said, passing around the key cards. “I might stay down here a bit longer.” The thought of having to spend a single second more with Adi, especially in an elevator, was making her stomach churn.
Beck and Carter hesitated.
Adi sighed. “It’s fine. I’ll go up by myself.”
Sierra waited until the elevator doors had closed before she said, “What an asshole.”
“I don’t understand why he did it,” Carter said.
“Or why Ranielle offered him cheats in the first place,” Beck said.
Sierra shrugged. “People like to look at him. She wanted to keep him on the screen for as long as possible. Forviewership.” She practically spat the word.
“Adi doesn’t strike me as the type to take cheats,” Carter said. “He likes to show off what he can do.”
“Maybe he didn’t trust us to pull our weight,” Sierra said. “He only cares about himself.”
She rolled her battered suitcase to the elevators. The others followed reluctantly.
“Do you think . . . maybe . . . we should talk to him?” Carter said as the doors opened.
“Screw that.”
“I’ll talk to him,” Beck said. When Sierra glared at him, he added, “You’re not my boss anymore. I can talk to him if I want.”
“I’ll talk to him, too,” Carter said.
Sierra tightened her grip on her suitcase handle. “Fine, I’ll come. At least I’ll get to yell at him some more.”
When they reached Adi’s room, Beck knocked. It took some time for Adi to open the door. W hen he saw them together, he said, “We’ll talk, but I wanted to wait until you’d cooled down first.”
“Cooled down?” Sierra pushed past him into the room. “Cooled down?There is no cooling down!”
Beck and Carter followed in her wake. Beck closed the door.
“Do you know what you’ve done?” Sierra demanded. “We have no access to the studio anymore. No access to the complex, no access to Ranielle. We’re never going to find proof she killed my sister.”
“Look, maybe there is proof. I need to find out where Jarius got that recording—”
“What’s the matter with you? Who cares where he got the recording? It’s over. You’ve ruined everything. The only reason you got onto the show in the first place was because your mom bribed the producers, and then you went and accepted cheats, because the only person you care about is yourself !”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Oh right, my mistake. You also care about impressing your greedy-ass father. But news flash. He doesn’t want you!”
Adi’s face reddened. “You don’t get to psychoanalyze me when everything has been about you from day one.”
“Wow, good call. I guess I should justget overbeing accused of my sister’s murder.”
“Of course not! But that’s all you are, Sierra! The sister slayer, the bringer of justice, the villain—you let these roles define you. If you didn’t need to solve Alicia’s murder, you would have nothing.”
