Chapter 33
NOLAN
“Morning, baby,” Nolan mumbled.
Alexa was the little spoon to his big one, her hair spread across the pillow, her ass pressed against his cock. The moment should have been perfect, but he couldn’t shake the niggling feeling that something was wrong.
His hand.
It had crept under her pyjama top to cup her breast.
Shit.
He quickly moved it down to her stomach, but no, he still felt uncomfortable. Was it the erection? Maybe it was the erection. Why were his thoughts so fuzzy?
Nolan tucked Alexa’s hair behind her ear and trailed his lips along her neck, but her skin tasted strange. Sort of…chemically? And there was a weird seam running along her jaw. Where had that come— Suddenly, the memories flooded back, not a movie reel but a series of gruesome, blurry snapshots.
Marielle choking Alexa.
The glint of light on scissors.
Alexa still and streaked with scarlet.
Juno’s focus as she tried to pull the bitch away.
The paper knife in his hand.
Marielle on the floor and blood, blood everywhere.
He sat up, breathing hard. “Alexa?”
She stirred lazily, stretching her arms out. “What time is it?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know! You’re hurt. So much blood, and…and…” He shook his head, trying to clear it, and instead woke a pounding headache. “She cut you.”
“The doctor patched me back together. He doesn’t even think it’ll scar.”
“But Marielle—”
“She’s gone.”
“There’s a body in the study. A body! I don’t— How did I get upstairs?”
“Jez and Barbie carried you.”
“Jez and Barbie are here?”
“Only Jez now, and Storm, and Marcel, who’s kind of an assistant-slash-pain-in-the-ass. Barbie’s driving to Mexico.”
“Mexico? Why would she go to Mexico?”
“In Marielle’s car. You want some breakfast?”
Nolan groaned. How could Alexa even think about food at a time like this? “No, I don’t want breakfast. I want you to start from the beginning and tell me what happened yesterday.”
He’d killed a woman, hadn’t he? Fuck, he was turning into Eddie Calder, mark two. His father’s son. Was this how it started? An accidental slipup, and then he developed a taste for the unconscionable?
“I’ll tell you everything—well, almost everything—but I need coffee first.” Alexa felt for her phone on the nightstand and checked the screen. “I’ve only had two hours’ sleep. You want coffee?”
“I want Xanax.”
“Okay, so the doctor gave you something even better than Xanax last night. I’ll have to check whether it’s safe to mix the two.”
“Alexa, what the hell happened?”
She was serious about the coffee. Nolan had to wait for a full five minutes before she came back with two cappuccinos and no Xanax.
“You need to wait another couple of hours before you take more meds. The doctor suggested breathing exercises.”
“Are you kidding me?”
At least it wasn’t an outright no. Ruby had hated his drug habit, as she’d called it, and she’d kept trying to convince him that meditation was the answer. After her death, he’d doubled the dose.
“I told him you’d say that.”
“Look, just tell me where the body is. Are the cops involved?”
“I actually did consider calling them because it was a clear-cut case of self-defence, but I don’t like answering questions.
And your name would have gotten raked over the coals too.
This isn’t New York or LA—a dead body is a big deal in a small town, especially one where a serial killer spent his childhood—and the media would have dredged up all the Blackstone House drama too.
Picture it: your name splashed across the papers with your dad’s, I’d be outed as the ‘unidentified minor’…
No, it was easier to keep things quiet.”
“What did you do? Bury Marielle in the forest?”
“Of course not; we’re not amateurs. The cleanup team took her with them when they left.”
“The cleanup team? Damn, Alexa, how many people are involved?”
“The Choir, the Cleaners, obviously Chase knows…”
“You know what one of my dad’s convictions was for? Tampering with a corpse. They’ll bring cadaver dogs to the house, spray that luminous stuff everywhere… Haven’t you ever watched CSI?”
“You should try the breathing exercises.”
“What are the symptoms of a heart attack?”
Nolan’s chest was tight, and when he tried to suck in air, his lungs wouldn’t cooperate. Blood whooshed in his ears, and if he hadn’t been sitting already, he’d probably have fallen down.
“The body’s gone; I told you that. The house has been deep-cleaned. I have a replacement interior designer arriving tomorrow, and it turns out that Marielle wasn’t actually Marielle, so what would the cops even do? Accuse us of killing a ghost?”
“What are you talking about?”
Alexa detailed her call with a friend, the confusion over a photograph, and her sudden realisation that the woman they knew as Marielle Marten was in fact her old friend Rayna Bishop.
“So you think she tried to kill you to keep her stolen identity a secret?”
“Yup. I’m telling you, she was crazy. Not just mad that she got fired, but heading straight for the asylum, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred bucks. She hid it behind a layer of bitchiness for ages, but when she snapped… Whoa. She saw my notes in the kitchen and came right for me.”
“But…but where’s the real Marielle?”
“An excellent question. Ari—you know, Zach’s girlfriend?—is a PI, and she’s going to take a look at the case.”
“People will start asking questions. It’s not too late to report this.”
“On a scale of one to ten, how favourable toward the Calder family is Sheriff Daniels? He made ‘clamping down on heinous criminals like Eddie Calder’ a key promise in his election campaign, and he wasn’t even involved in your dad’s case.”
“They went to school together,” Nolan admitted. “I think there was some bad blood. But the state police…”
“Sure, yes, let’s call them. I’ll have the Cleaners fish the body out of the morgue, and the cops can tear the house apart. I’ll skate on any charges, seeing as I was unconscious when she died, and you can spend the rest of the year being investigated. What a fantastic idea.”
“Alexa…”
“We both know you acted out of necessity, but cops are both dumb and corrupt, if my Uncle Porter is anything to go by, so there’s a fifty percent chance they’ll fuck everything up.
Hey, maybe the California AG could do a deal with Washington and you could share a cell with your dad? A big old family reunion?”
“I’m gonna puke.”
“You already did that last night, so I doubt there’s much left to come up.
Look, we took care of everything—all you have to do is stick to the story that Marielle swung by yesterday to pick up the last of her stuff, and she said she was planning to take a trip.
We’re laying a trail from here to Mexico, and the authorities will assume she disappeared across the border. ”
“You almost sound as if you’ve done this before.”
“I’ll neither confirm nor deny.”
Nolan didn’t like the idea of a cover-up, but what choice did he have?
Alexa was right; Sheriff Daniels was a jackass, and he was also friendly with Roy Leland.
The media circus surrounding his dad tore Nolan’s life apart and drove his mom to suicide.
And later, the Blackstone House investigation had been a hellish mix of sleepless nights, prying reporters, legal threats, and hoping he didn’t get arrested even though he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong.
More than once, he’d counted out pills, wondering if it would be easier to just swallow them and get the whole thing over with.
Ruby was dead, Alexa had disappeared, his boss let him go because he didn’t “want all that negative publicity,” and the cops had taken half of his belongings into evidence.
Picking himself up was hard. Thanks to the Sykes family, half the world thought he was a murderer, and he was shuffling debt on credit cards to eat.
He’d been teetering on the edge of a dark, dark pit when Grandpa Calder’s attorney called to say he’d inherited the estate that had been in the family for generations.
He wasn’t sure he could go through that for a third time.
The intrusion.
The anxiety.
People glancing sideways at him in the street.
But he did feel the darkness again.
Only now, it was more like a warm embrace, a comfort, and he knew why.
The darkness was coming from Alexa.
She’d always been morally grey, but today there was a murkiness about her, a nebulous energy he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Even as her blue eyes shone, the inky pupils hid her secrets.
And still he loved her.
He stood on the edge of that caliginous pit, heart racing, and he jumped.
“When I picked up that knife, I turned into my father,” he whispered.
A monster. A genetic aberration.
“No, you didn’t. You acted out of fear, and he hunted women for fun.” Alexa brushed her lips across Nolan’s. “One of us was going to die last night, and I’m just glad it was her and not you or me.”
“So am I.”
As bad as seeing Marielle’s river of blood had been, watching the life drain from Alexa would have been a thousand times worse.
“We’ll take the secret to the grave,” she promised. “You just have to hold yourself together.”
He leaned his forehead against hers and took a cleansing breath. Tried to release the ghosts of his father’s victims and of the woman he knew as Marielle. Alexa was everything to him. Everything.
“Tell me what to do.”