Chapter 14
ALEXA
Nolan’s laptop was a piece of crap. Old and slow with sticky keys and substandard resolution.
Swapping his data onto the new laptop was a much better long-term solution, even if it would take more time.
Plus I needed to update his website. He didn’t have even the most basic of firewalls, and I figured Marielle had helped to set it up because the homepage misspelled “quinntessential” with an extra n the same way hers did.
The Cloud Nine Interiors website was child’s play to hack, and so was Marielle’s email.
I toyed with the idea of sending Antonella Cranston a “Sorry, can’t make the cookout next week” apology, but Marielle would show up anyway and that would lead to a tricky conversation.
So I did the next best thing. I tracked down Antonella’s email address, read some of her social media posts to gauge her tone, then spoofed a message.
Hey, Marielle!
So great you can come next week! I hope you’ll join in with our fun theme—we’re styling the event on the Wild West. Jeans and plaid shirts for the menfolk, saloon girl dresses for the ladies. Show us your ruffles!
Look forward to seeing you both,
Antonella
Was I a bitch? Of course. It was practically a job requirement. But Marielle had escalated this feud by making my coffee with oat milk earlier, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she’d spit in the cup too.
I’d set up my stuff in the study again, and all the junk gave me the heebie-jeebies.
I wanted nothing more than to rent a dumpster, but if Marielle still had her sights set on cleaning out the room, then I’d have to live with it for a while longer.
Ugh. Barbie had fed the chickens and headed back to Vegas, while Chase had gotten a ride into Sacramento with one of Nolan’s vineyard crew to source a vehicle.
Finally, Nolan showed up. It was mid-afternoon by then, and he was scowling, so I was going to assume that the fermenting thing hadn’t gone well.
“How’s the wine?”
“We had to scrap the entire tank. Fifty thousand bucks in gross profit down the drain, quite literally, so I’ll be living on ramen this year.”
“No, you won’t. Chase is picking up Mexican food in Sacramento, and I asked him to bring enough for four.”
And I’d also told him to make sure Marielle’s burrito came with extra habaneros.
“Why did he go to Sacramento?”
“To rent a car.”
“There’s a rental place in Mason’s Hill.”
“And all it had left was three boring sedans and one of those electric cars that lock you in and then set fire to themselves.” They were worryingly hackable. “I prefer a vehicle with a good safety record and leather seats.”
“What’s wrong with fabric seats?”
“They’re hard to sanitise, and sometimes they smell weird.”
“Did you finally learn to drive?”
“Jez made me, but I hate it. There are so many morons on the road.”
Nolan smiled, the first time I’d seen him lighten up today. “That’s true. Someone reversed into Marielle’s car at the grocery store last week. The replacement tail light finally arrived today, so she’s gone over to the auto shop to swap out the cracked one.”
“She’s not coming back for dinner?”
“Nope. I’ll put her portion in the refrigerator and eat it for lunch tomorrow.”
“Uh, I don’t think it’ll keep well.”
Nolan blew out a long, huffy breath. “Alexa, what did you do?”
“How do you know I did anything?”
“Because I know you. Not as well as I once thought I did”—oh, he just had to get that dig in—“but nobody does petty the way you do. And I also know you’re not fond of Marielle.”
“Whatever gives you that idea?”
“The fact that her website keeps crashing?”
“Really? That’s a shame.”
“Enough with the bullshit. Please.”
Huh. He didn’t sound as mad as I thought he would be.
“Fine. I don’t like her, okay? And she should get a better firewall. I’m rebuilding your website, by the way, on a platform that has actual security.”
“Thanks, I think. Tell me you didn’t poison her dinner?”
“Of course not.” Should I confess? Might as well. “I just ordered her the extra spicy version, is all.”
“She hates spicy food. Half the time, I can’t even convince her to season her chicken.”
“What kind of philistine doesn’t season chicken? And don’t worry about the ramen—Chase can get the grocery store to deliver food for you each week.”
A sigh wasn’t the answer I’d been expecting.
“I don’t need your pity, Alexa.”
“Who said anything about pity? I just don’t want you to get scurvy.” No smile from Nolan. “Fine, I’ll lend you the fifty thousand bucks, and we can call it a long-term business loan.”
Still no smile, and worse, the scowl was back. Now what was his problem?
“Don’t you think you’ve done enough already with your ‘business loans’?” He used little air quotes around the words.
“Huh?”
“The million bucks and change?”
“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.
“This and that. I also have a corporate job.” A revelation that confused Nolan even more than the Florida thing, and again, I understood. “I started the company by accident, and it just snowballed.”
“How do you start a company by accident?”
“You remember how we had to leave Blackstone House in a hurry?”
“How could I forget?”
“Well, I had to basically rip all the hard drives out of my servers and replace them with dummies, which was a pain in the ass. Obviously, I wanted to avoid that ever happening again, so I looked into building my own data centre. I understood the technical specs, and I had the capital, but the business stuff…” I shook my head.
“I’m not good at talking with people, and everyone wanted a damn meeting. ”
“We’re talking now,” Nolan pointed out.
“That’s different. Anyhow, Chase ran into an old friend of his from high school, Janus, and Jay gets that side of things. So I offered him shares and a job if he helped me, and now I’m CTO of a web services company.”
In reality, it had actually been slightly more complicated.
Chase had seen Jay’s suicide note on social media and talked him down off a literal bridge, and then we’d made an emergency flight to Massachusetts to make sure he got the help he needed.
And it turned out the help he needed was for someone to listen as he got drunk and poured his heart out, plus a good health insurance package because he’d just been diagnosed with HIV, confessed he was (a) sick and (b) bi to his parents in a panic, and been ejected from the “family.” I’d always thought I had the worst parents in the world, but Jay’s ran a close second.
Chase swore Jay knew a share from a debenture and that he also sounded credible on the phone, so I’d hired him with an excellent benefits package that included medical coverage.
He’d helped me to jump-start my plans by finding a semi-built data centre owned by a company in financial trouble—we’d bought it, tweaked the specs a little, and opened within a year.
By then, we were already looking for a second location, and one thing led to another…
Now, his viral load was undetectable, and Astela had grown from one location in Boston to a full-fledged cloud computing powerhouse offering over a hundred services. Jay was a fucking magician. And also a close friend, one of the few men in this world that I trusted.
“What does that mean?”
“Web services? Well, basically we provide digital solutions that enable businesses to operate online and connect with customers through the internet. Website design and development, web hosting, domain registration, e-commerce solutions, maintenance. Plus all the backend infrastructure like cloud storage, APIs, database management, and integration with third-party platforms.”
“I meant the CTO part.”
“Oh. Chief Technical Officer.”
Nolan gave a low whistle. “Sounds impressive.”
“I have a really good team.”
“Of all the things I imagined you doing, working as part of a team wasn’t one of them, especially at some big corporation.”
Yeah, same, but sometimes we surprised ourselves.
“Most of the time, I work remotely, although I do have to go to Oregon next week.”
“That’s where your office is?”
“Headquarters is in Boston. The Oregon trip is to assess a site for a new data centre.”
I always made the final decision on those kinds of things because I was too much of a control freak to let anyone else do it, although Jay wouldn’t be dragging me out to Portland if he wasn’t pretty sure I’d say yes.
“When do you leave?”
“Sunday night.”
“And will you come back?”
I studied Nolan carefully, my chin resting on my hands, but his expression was impassive.
“Do you want me to?”
As soon as the words left my mouth, I regretted them. I wasn’t prepared for the way my pulse sped up, for the way my heart hammered against my rib cage.
I was terrified he might say no.
But he didn’t say no. Instead, he pushed back his chair and headed for the kitchen.
“Come and have a glass of wine,” he said over his shoulder. “You are old enough now, right?”
Ooh, nice jab.
“Wait, you’re just going to ignore my question?”
This time, he didn’t break stride.
“Ask me again on Sunday evening.”