Chapter 2
Alex
I was already awakewhen I got the phone call. I was standing, fully dressed, at the window of my penthouse in Dallas, watching the sun come up at five o’clock in the morning. My suitcase was against the wall next to me, waiting.
The rosy red and gold of sunrise flushed the sky. In twenty minutes, I would pick up my suitcase and leave for vacation. Hawaii for four weeks. The first real vacation I’d ever taken, and it was overdue. I’d waited until I was thirty-five to take it.
I’d been working nonstop, every day of every week, since I was twenty-two. Thirteen years I’d spent as one of Tower Venture Capital’s executive partners, bagging deal after deal and getting richer and richer. I was the Dallas partner, while Aidan worked New York, Dane worked Chicago, and Noah worked L.A.
There had been no time to breathe, no time to stop making money. No desire to do either of those things. I hadn’t wanted to breathe, and I sure as hell hadn’t wanted to stop making money. Everything was easier when I kept myself to the grind.
Just keep going. Work and make money. Don’t think.
But lately, things had started to change. It began when Aidan married Samantha, formerly his executive assistant and now the head of one of our main projects. Then Dane had reconnected with Aidan’s sister, Ava, who he had apparently been hung up on since we were teenagers—which was news to me. Dane had gotten Ava pregnant and taken leave from the company. Now their daughter, Charlotte, was a month old, and Dane’s future with the company was uncertain. That left me, Aidan, and Noah.
Then Noah, of all people—the man who could have any gorgeous woman in L.A.—fell in love. With Samantha’s sister, Emma. He was still with the company, but now he was even more distracted than he usually was. The only two partners who lived and breathed Tower VC were Aidan and me.
And Aidan was married. He was still the same shark he’d always been, but when Samantha snapped her fingers, he did anything she wanted. And he loved it.
Aidan wanted to reorganize the company. He’d suggested closing the Dallas office and moving me to New York with him. Tower would have a New York office, Noah in L.A., and a satellite office in Chicago where we sometimes travelled. We’d do fewer deals, but bigger ones. It was a change in direction for the company the four of us had founded in our early twenties, when we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing. We were just four guys who had left home as teenagers, rented an apartment together, and hustled into millions of dollars to start a venture capital company.
I’d told Aidan I would think about it. The move didn’t bother me—even after all of these years in Dallas, I wasn’t attached to it. New York was fine. What was getting under my skin was that of the four partners, four friends—my brothers in all but blood—I was the only one left single. The lone wolf. I worked alone, I ate alone, I slept alone. When I got desperate enough, I occasionally found a woman for a few nights or a few weeks, but I broke up with any woman who wanted more. I’d been burned early. A woman wasn’t essential to my life.
There had only ever been one woman I’d considered essential to my life, and I’d been divorced from her for thirteen years.
For a long time, my setup had worked just fine. But lately, with all the changes my best friends had gone through, I felt more isolated than I’d ever been.
Hence the vacation.
I’d decided to take a break before giving Aidan my answer about New York. I’d booked a trip to Hawaii—alone—and I wasn’t taking work with me. I was going to swim, sleep, read a few books, see some sights, and maybe have a vacation fling. I was going to think about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. It was going to be perfect.
And at five o’clock in the morning, minutes before I was due to leave for the airport, I was dreading it.
I checked my watch in the silence of my solo apartment. I should go. Now.
My cell phone rang.
No one ever called me this early. I had cut my family from my life years ago—for good reason—and the partners always called at normal times. I looked at the name on the display and a sliver of ice went down my spine. The call was from Patrick O’Neal, the private detective I had on contract. Whatever this was, it was very, very bad.
I answered it as dawn bloomed across the Dallas skyline out my window. “Patrick, what is it?”
“It’s Kat.”
Those two words. I had dreaded them for years, had nightmares about hearing them. It’s Kat.
“What happened?” I barked.
“It came from one of my police sources. Someone attacked her when she left work a few hours ago. She fought, and they got into it on the street. Apparently two men were seen trying to put her into a car before a bystander called the police.”
I stood locked in place, processing this. “Was she hurt?”
“She’s in the hospital, but I don’t think she was seriously injured. Some cuts and scrapes and a broken finger from what I can gather. She still lives in Nashville.”
“I know she’s in Nashville.” Of course I fucking knew. I always knew where Kat Sloane, my ex-wife, was currently living. Keeping track of that knowledge was the reason I paid Patrick so much money. I paid him to know where Kat was, where she was working, what she was doing. Who she was doing, if he could find it. He didn’t follow her around or peek in her windows—his office was in Pittsburgh. The tracking he did on my ex-wife was online and through computer databases, and he’d been doing it for me for years. As far as I was aware, she had no idea.
I kept tabs on Kat because I was an asshole. I admitted that much. But I also kept tabs on her because she worked late nights alone in bars in strange cities. Because she’d put her family out of her life the same way I had with mine. Because she was alone, and I had nightmares about the day she would leave for work and simply vanish, never to be seen again.
We might hate each other, but I wasn’t going to let that happen to her. So I had Patrick. And now here I was, listening to him talk about someone trying to abduct Kat off the street at three o’clock in the morning.
Damn it, Kat.
“Who did it?” I asked Patrick.
“The cops don’t know yet. They’re still taking witness statements. Apparently, she bit one of them hard enough to make him bleed, so they took a sample to test for DNA. Their theory is it’s an ex-boyfriend or some guy she turned down.”
I closed my eyes. She’d bitten him hard enough to bleed. That sounded like Kat. “That’s a bullshit theory. She doesn’t have an ex-boyfriend in Nashville.”
“That I know of,” Patrick said carefully. “I don’t know everything she does, Alex.”
“She doesn’t have an ex-boyfriend in Nashville,” I repeated, colder this time. “Besides, two men pushing her into a car doesn’t say ex-boyfriend. Two men means something coordinated. Something planned.”
“I happen to agree. Nashville has its share of organized crime. My guess is she pissed off the wrong drug dealer and he made a play.”
My voice got even icier. Patrick was really trying to make me angry today. “Kat doesn’t do drugs, and she doesn’t deal them.”
“You’re right, she doesn’t. But the bar she works at isn’t in a good part of town. The owner has a record. I’m checking into his background and working on getting information on the other employees, but it’s going to take some time. If her boss is involved in something, maybe Kat saw or heard something she shouldn’t have. That’s my best guess.”
My mind ticked over. It was a good theory—the best one I had, considering how little I knew about Kat’s life. My investigations could only go so far, and the rest I had to guess. But there was one problem with that theory, and it was a huge one. “If that’s the case, then she’s still in danger,” I said.
“They were definitely interrupted,” Patrick agreed. “Whatever they were trying, they didn’t get to do. But they managed to scare her and threaten her, if their goal is to get her to keep quiet.”
“They tried to put her in a fucking car.” It was hard to force the words out, because the thought of what would have happened if Kat had gotten in that car was the only thing to scare me in thirteen years. “They weren’t trying to impress her. They were trying to make her disappear.”
Patrick didn’t disagree. “I’ve got a few things on my schedule, but I can clear them. Give me a couple of hours. I can get on a plane to Nashville.”
“No,” I said.
“Alex, this is important. She may be in danger. She may not know how much.”
“I know, which is why you’re not going to Nashville. I am.”
There was a beat of stunned silence. Then Patrick found his voice. “Alex, what are you talking about?”
“I’m going to Nashville. I’m going to help Kat.” I looked at my suitcase, still sitting against the wall. “I was about to go on vacation anyway.” I glanced at my watch. I was about to be too late to leave and catch my flight. Three, two, one.
Goodbye, Hawaii.
“That’s ridiculous,” Patrick was arguing. “This is what you pay me for. I’m a trained investigator. You’re a CEO.”
“I wasn’t always a CEO. I grew up street smart. I’m an ex-con, remember?”
“A long time ago. Besides, she’s your ex-wife. You hate her. You haven’t even spoken to her in all this time.”
Did I truly hate Kat? That was a very good question. She was the thorn in my side, the pain in my Achilles heel. She was the worst thing that had ever happened to me, for sure. But did I hate her?
I supposed I’d find out in a few hours, when I saw her for myself.
“Send me her hospital details,” I said to Patrick, ignoring his objections. “And send me any other information you think I might need. I’m going to the airport. I need to be in Nashville. Now.”