Page 38 of Hard Heart

“She called Ruby rather than asking in person? Was that normal?”

Levi nodded. Alexa Stone hadn’t been a fan of exercise, and she wasn’t going to walk up three flights of stairs to ask about dietary requests.

“More or less. She called or emailed. Person A only spoke to people when there was no way around it.”

“She was an introvert?”

“Yes. Ruby also believed she had high-functioning autism. When it came to computers, Person A’s abilities were off the charts, and if she’d ever been willing to take an IQ test, I believe she would have landed in the genius range.”

Plus Alexa was stubborn, blunt, and grouchy, but Levi cut her slack because often she only said what he was thinking. When he was a child being dragged from appointment to appointment, a doctor had proclaimed him autistic with a side of ADHD, and those were the only two of his many, many diagnoses that he thought might have been accurate. But he’d learned to mask a hell of a lot better than Alexa did.

“That’s… I mean, that isn’t in any of the notes.”

“She was young. We were all very protective of her.”

“Where is she now?”

“Who knows? They tried putting her in a foster home, and she lasted less than a day there. But she’s a survivor, and she probably had a nice little nest egg by then. Wherever she went, she burrowed in deep, and she never surfaced during the trial.”

“A nest egg from moderating chat rooms?”

“She developed a sideline in bug hunting.”

“Bug hunting? Like…spiders?”

Levi chuckled, not only due to Serafina’s incorrect assumption but because Alexa had taken great joy in rounding up all the spiders in the house and depositing them in Brax’s bedroom when he got a new girlfriend nobody much liked.

“Software bugs. Various companies would pay a bounty if a hacker found a vulnerability in their product and gave them a heads-up.”

“I never realised that was a thing.”

“Neither did I until we had an awkward conversation about the amount she was spending on groceries for everyone.”

“For everyone? That seems awfully generous.”

“Although she could be a pain in the ass, tightfistedness wasn’t one of her faults. She bought the ingredients, Nolan cooked, and the rest of us cleaned up the kitchen. We weren’t just ten people living separate lives; we were a team.”

And Levi missed that more than anything. For the first time in his life, he’d known how it felt to have a real family. Something good to come home to at the end of the day.

Serafina scribbled another sentence. Her writing was barely legible, and Levi found himself watching her hands. The long, elegant fingers with bare, neatly filed nails. The pale skin that suggested she didn’t spend much time outside. And the baser part of his brain wondered what those fingers would look like wrapped around his cock.

Fuck.

Not going there, asshole.

“So that’s the start of the time window,” she said. “The end was… Jerry Knight knocking on Ruby’s door?”

“Brax had just opened a bottle of wine, and since none of us had seen Ruby leave, Jerry went upstairs to see if she wanted a glass. But Ruby’s bedroom door was locked, and when Jerry knocked, she didn’t answer.”

“You said you were a team? But she locked her bedroom door?”

Which implied a lack of trust. Nice catch.

“When we first moved in and nobody really knew each other, we used to lock the doors. Ruby’s room had a night latch. Do you know what one of those is?”

Serafina shook her head.

“It locks automatically when the door closes, but you can hold the latch open with a button. The button on Ruby’s door didn’t always hold.”