CHAPTER 7 JUSTIN
JUSTIN
“Are you cold?” Amie asked. “Should I turn up the heating?”
Unlike Grey, Justin hired staff he actually liked. Amie had worked for Norquist Construction for almost seven years, first as an intern, then as a purchase ledger clerk, and now as Justin’s PA. She managed his schedule and his life in general, and boy, he could have used her assistance last night.
Fucking Ava.
She’d invited the two blondes from the bar over to the table, and it turned out they were physiotherapists in town for a conference on sports medicine.
Three bottles of wine turned into six, and Justin had snuck out of a hotel room in the early hours, tired and slightly queasy, then taken a cab back home.
Now? Now, his head ached, his muscles ached, his cock was throbbing because the woman had used her damn teeth, and he only had one and a half eyebrows.
The blonde hadn’t been responsible for the eyebrow thing—that had been entirely his own fault—but he was also sure it wouldn’t have happened if he’d gone to bed early with a book last night as he’d planned.
“The temperature’s fine,” he told Amie.
She scrunched her lips to one side. “Are you sure? It’s just that you don’t normally wear a hat in the office.”
The dark-blue beanie hat was pulled low over his forehead, a quick fix he’d implemented before his site visit this morning. He’d fit right in with the construction workers, but with the admin team? Not so much.
“I shaved off half an eyebrow,” he muttered.
“Uh, what? Like, on purpose?”
“Of course not on purpose.”
He pulled off the hat, and Amie gasped. Then she covered her mouth with her hands as she tried not to laugh.
“I had the five-mil comb attached to trim my beard, but then I took it off to straighten my moustache. And afterward I brushed my teeth and got dressed, but when I walked past the mirror on my way out of the bedroom, I realised my eyebrows were getting bushy, so I picked up the trimmer and…”
“…and you forgot to put the comb back on?” She peered closer. “It’s more like three-quarters.”
Justin slumped into his swivel chair. “What should I do? Should I shave it off completely? How about the other one?”
“Don’t shave it off. That would look…”
“Weird?”
“Worse. I wonder if we could draw the missing part back in?”
“With what?” Justin glanced at the old coffee can full of pens on his desk. “A Sharpie?”
“Don’t go anywhere.”
“Where would I go?” he called as she hurried out of his office.
Justin took stock of his day. He had a meeting with an environmental inspector at twelve, a call with his lawyer at one thirty, and then he wanted to spend some time in the workshop.
In recent years, Norquist Construction had diversified, and now the company had two divisions—the old development arm, which bought land and built houses the old-fashioned way, and the new workshop, where they were designing a line of tiny homes. They’d produced the prototypes already.
Justin had always liked to build things, ever since a neighbour gave him his first Lego set when he was seven years old.
Blackstone House had given him his first real taste of rehabbing a home, and while he was living there, he also studied carpentry at community college and apprenticed with a building firm.
Then Ruby died.
No.
No, Ruby hadn’t just died. She’d been murdered, murdered by a man everyone thought they could trust, including Justin. Levi Sykes had always been odd, a strange mix of nerd and hippie with a side of drugs. Prescription drugs, not coke or heroin or anything like that. He didn’t even touch alcohol.
But one evening, he’d snapped. Snapped and killed Ruby in her bed, in the house they all shared.
Justin had long wondered if Levi made the switch from legal drugs to something darker because some weird shit had gone down that night.
He’d carved a fucking pentagram into her chest. The cops said he’d raped her too, which didn’t make sense because Justin had a sneaking suspicion they’d been friends with benefits for months.
And Ruby would have probably indulged in a little role-play if he’d asked—she’d been that kind of girl.
But the medical examiner said the degree of bruising strongly suggested the act wasn’t consensual, and the lead detective thought they’d had a disagreement that escalated and led Levi to do what he did.
Which still didn’t make much sense because while Levi acted antisocial at times, he’d never been violent.
During the trial, a lot of information had come to light, including medical records that showed Levi suffered from a smorgasbord of mental health conditions.
Depression, bipolar disorder, insomnia, generalised anxiety, epilepsy…
And he’d been a sickly child, with gastrointestinal problems so bad he was hospitalised on several occasions, food allergies, asthma, recurrent UTIs, and a blood-clotting issue.
He’d never mentioned any of that to his housemates, just kept taking his pills and quietly going about his business.
And the bipolar disorder the prosecution homed in on had been diagnosed in his early teens, long before he’d ever set foot in Blackstone House.
The cops said he must have stopped taking his medication, but that was another contradiction.
Levi’s mom called him every night to make sure he’d remembered his pills, and that was a real strange relationship right there.
Levi was a smart guy working on his PhD, yet still under his mother’s thumb.
He couldn’t so much as cough without Mary Sykes insisting he visit the doctor.
Justin had asked him about it once and gotten a shrug in response, followed by, “I don’t have a choice, not at the moment. Do you know how much grad school costs?”
“As long as you play the dutiful son, your parents keep funding your passion project?”
“Something like that.”
While most parents rejoiced when their adult children flew the nest—Justin’s father had kicked him out the day after his eighteenth birthday—the Sykeses hadn’t wanted Levi to leave at all.
He was expected home for dinner at least twice a week, and the only reason he owned Blackstone House was that he’d won it in a poker game.
So Levi got the dump of a house, but with no funds available for the refurbishment, he’d begun renting out rooms for fifty bucks a week on the condition that his housemates chipped in for utilities and helped with repairs.
It wasn’t actually a bad deal. Levi made sure to pick a group that got along well, and the one time he made a mistake, the guy had been kicked to the kerb pretty damn quick.
Friendships were formed, life skills were learned.
The house itself was huge, a rambling Queen Anne spread over four floors, if you included the tower-slash-attic where Ruby and Grey slept and Alexa’s basement domain.
She hid out in a cave-like storage room along with a bunch of servers and her online pals.
There was enough shared space that they didn’t trip over each other, and the acre lot was home to Ruby’s vegetable garden and an above-ground pool they’d installed in their second year.
Justin had converted a bay in an old three-car garage into a wood shop, and Shadow, Ruby’s adopted cat, used to sneak out of the house to watch him work.
The neighbourhood was quiet unless you counted Bryan, the asshole next door.
Bryan had a hearing problem and terrible taste in music, a combination that led to heavy metal blaring out at strange hours of the day and night.
Despite the sizes of the lots, the two houses were relatively close together, separated by a wall of conifers that did little to drown out the noise.
The night Ruby died, the bass was thumping through brand-new speakers, almost certainly as revenge on Jerry and Alexa, who’d sabotaged the old ones.
Justin had resorted to earplugs. The cops said Ruby struggled, that she’d tried to scream around the sock shoved in her mouth, and he hadn’t heard a thing from his second-floor bedroom.
That was perhaps his biggest regret, bigger even than proposing to Rebecca and then to Melanie.
If he’d heard Ruby fighting, he could have stepped in.
Levi wasn’t a big guy. Okay, he was tall, six feet, but skinny rather than strong.
A lab rat, a bookworm, a painter, and a poet.
Justin would have tackled him in a heartbeat, yelled for Dawson and Brax and Nolan and Zach to come help. Jerry would have waded in too. She might have been a woman, but she didn’t shy away from getting physical.
But Justin hadn’t heard a thing, not since late afternoon when Ruby walked past in the hallway outside with Levi, giggling, not arguing.
Then light footsteps going the other way, Ruby heading back toward the stairs.
Three people had been left on the second floor that evening. None of them had a solid alibi.
As a woman, Jerry—whose sleep schedule resembled a vampire’s vacation itinerary—had been ruled out right away, which left Justin and Levi.
And Justin had a partial alibi, thank fuck.
In the middle of the three-hour window when the cops said Ruby had been killed, he’d spent a half hour on the phone to his then fiancée, and Eliza vouched for the fact that he’d sounded totally normal, not out of breath, not angry, not like he’d just strangled a woman, stabbed her through the heart, and then mutilated her naked body with a satanic symbol.
Which left Levi.
Then the semen found inside Ruby’s body came back as a match for him, and Justin had never been so horrified and relieved simultaneously.
Of course, Levi had tried to explain it away.
He’d claimed the two of them had enjoyed consensual sex earlier in the afternoon, which Justin could actually believe, but at the same time, he knew he hadn’t killed Ruby.
And who would that leave? Jerry in the tower with a stone dildo?