Hard Code (Blackstone House #6)

Chapter 1

ALEXA

“That’s enough; you can go now.”

“Mais mademoiselle, il nous reste encore trente minutes.”

“I’m done.”

I hadn’t wanted a massage in the first place, but Chase—my companion, Man Friday, assistant, bestie, whatever you wanted to call him—had insisted. “You’re stressed,” he told me. “You need to learn to relax.”

As if relaxation were something to be studied like French or coding. Not that I’d ever really needed to study coding—I spoke programming languages better than I spoke human ones.

“Hey, wait. Wipe the oil off before you leave, okay?” I gritted my teeth. “S’il vous pla?t?”

Politeness didn’t come naturally to me. Peopling in general didn’t come naturally.

Apart from Chase and two sets of colleagues, I avoided company as much as possible.

Why sit in a restaurant when I could get food delivered and spend the evening with me, myself, and I?

Restaurants were full of micro dangers—drunk people, weird men hitting on you, questionable bathrooms, cutlery that didn’t feel right in your hands…

As of today, I’d been hopping around the world for six weeks straight.

From Austria to Poland to Japan to Argentina to Jamaica to France, never staying in the same place for long.

Why was I hopping all over the world? Because I’d hooked my bestie up with a hot guy, and now she was mad at me.

Sounds crazy, huh? I mean, she should have been thrilled.

But no, she was more focused on the fact that I’d tricked her onto an airplane with him when they were on a break than on the happy ending I’d gifted them, so now I was waiting for her anger to simmer down.

Jerry Knight didn’t like being tricked. She didn’t much like anything, if her resting bitch face was any indicator, but now I was hanging out far, far away until she accepted that I had, in fact, done her a favour.

Oh, did I mention she was an assassin? Yeah, she killed people for a living.

Okay, I killed people too sometimes, but not with guns and blood and stuff.

That was gross. No, I merely finagled them into situations where they stopped breathing.

The masseuse wiped gloop off my back and then scuttled out of the room without another word.

Was I mean to her? Chase said I should be nicer, and I tried occasionally, but I wasn’t always sure it worked.

It was easier to stay away from people. They gave me the ick anyway.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t avoid human interaction completely—I had a business to run, plus hotel staff had an annoying habit of buzzing around me like pesky mosquitoes.

Is everything okay with your room? Our concierge is here to help you with whatever you want, ma’am.

Do you have enough towels? Maybe I should have rented actual houses instead of penthouses, but when Chase went out, the houses felt empty and weird and a little scary.

Having no people around was worse. They just needed to stay on the periphery of my world, that was all.

I shrugged into a fluffy white robe and tied it securely.

Only a shower would get the rest of that oil off, but first, I needed to check my email.

My company more or less ran itself, but I still liked to stay in the loop, plus I was messaging back and forth with a romance scammer who thought I was a lonely middle-aged nurse from Wisconsin, and I was so freaking close to turning the tables.

I already had his real name, his address, and his banking information, but I was almost certain he had a brokerage account, and I wanted that too.

Not for me, you understand. I gave away as much cash as I could, but I was still stuck with a lot of recovered funds, especially in crypto.

Do you know how hard it is to give away a million bucks?

Folks asked awkward questions, like “Where did this money come from?” And I wasn’t going to answer those.

Anyhow, I figured it was better squirrelled away in my offshore accounts than funding a shitbag’s luxury lifestyle, so I carried on.

Where was Chase? I checked my watch. Why wasn’t he back yet?

He’d gone out to pick up a late breakfast half an hour ago, and the boulangerie was only two streets away.

Yes, the hotel offered a serviceable breakfast, but I liked my pain au chocolat from Le Plaisir.

Not only did they sell the best macarons in Paris, but their pain au chocolat was excellent too—not too flaky, and you could really taste the butter.

I glanced down and poked my stomach. Dammit, I’d have to do more exercise.

And I hated exercise. Yoga was okay, a walking desk was fine, but running?

No, thanks. Once, I’d burned off the calories through nervous energy, always looking over my shoulder, but my life had gradually settled down over the past few years, and now—

Wait.

Why was there a package of crackers on my desk?

They weren’t even French crackers, they were graham crackers, a snack so tasteless they were barely edible even with chocolate and marshmallow sandwiched between them. Chase would never soil my palate that way, which meant…

No.

Oh, no.

I clutched the robe tighter around me as Jez stepped off the balcony.

“Nice view,” she said. “Being a conniving little bitch does have its perks.”

I groaned as I remembered the message she’d sent me last month, right after I routed her through secondary screening at Miami International in order to delay her boarding until the last possible second.

Jez

I will hunt you down. I will hunt you down and force-feed you dry crackers until you choke on the soggy crumbs.

And my reply?

Me

Gotta catch me first. Enjoy San Gallicano.

Now she was here.

Fuck.

“Congratulations on not totally screwing up your relationship with Cole. I take it you’ve come to thank me?”

“Thank you for engineering me into a position where I had to talk to a man I’d been avoiding?”

“Exactly.”

“Even when it was clear I didn’t want to go?”

“It worked out okay, right? You like Cole, and he likes you back. The weirdo,” I added under my breath.

“So you think it’s okay to push an unwilling woman into a man’s arms just as long as she secretly likes him?”

“Absolutely.” I glanced at the crackers. “Those are a joke, right?”

“Yes, they’re a joke.”

Phew. “Well, Chase will be back with breakfast soon.”

“You don’t have time to eat breakfast.”

“Sure I do. I cancelled the second half of my massage.”

How did people find massages relaxing? Having someone’s hands all over you, poking and prodding… Okay, so the kinks in my shoulders felt better for a day or two, but any benefit was outweighed by the yuck factor.

“You’ll be using that time to pack.”

“Pack? What for? I’m staying here for another week unless—” Unless Jez found me, which was an irrelevant issue now. “Never mind.”

“We’re going to California.”

“What? No. I’m going to Napoli next.”

As a teenager, I’d spent months wondering where my next meal was coming from, so was it really a surprise that I made food a priority now that I had the means to do so? No one made pizza like the Italians.

“Guess again.”

“I don’t have to guess again. All I have to do is call the charter company and tell them I need a jet to Italy.”

Yes, I freelanced for Jez’s team of psycho-bitches, but I was perfectly capable of working remotely, and they were based in Nevada anyway.

And I hated California. My parents lived there, and in a state of forty million people, I still dreaded the thought of accidentally running into my plastic-fantastic mom.

Although time had helped to ease that fear.

Would Eliana Rockwell even recognise me these days? I hadn’t seen her since I was thirteen.

Jez made a noise like a game show buzzer. “Nah-ah.”

“Yeah-ah.”

That grin made me twitchy. Jez was one of my oldest friends, and I knew what her cunning smirk meant. It meant she was about to fuck somebody over, and I was the only person in the room. Uh-oh.

“Nolan’s laptop broke, and I volunteered your services to fix it.” Jez glanced at her watch. “He’s expecting you for breakfast, which means you need to pack and get to the airport.”

“What?”

“The airport. It’s the place where airplanes take off. Unless you’re planning to swim across the Atlantic, but you don’t like getting your face wet, so…”

Yes, whatever. I was still hung up on the “Nolan” part.

Nolan.

There was only one Nolan in my life, or rather, out of my life. Nolan de Luca, our former roommate, my teenage crush, and the man I’d never be able to face again without dying of embarrassment. Or reliving the past I’d rather forget.

Ruby’s broken body lying in the tower.

A killer walking among us.

The authorities realising that Alexa Stone and Alexandria Rockwell were one and the same person.

The day before Child Protective Services came to take me away, I broke down in his arms, a first for me.

Not the breaking-down part—I’d done that plenty of times before, always alone, and always quietly.

But he’d never hugged me that way, and I’d never kissed him.

Oh, I’d thought about doing it. Dreamed about it.

But not once had those dreams ended with him pushing me away and telling me it couldn’t possibly work.