Chapter 15
ALEX
With his muscles still in a tight knot, Alex left his room behind in search of the two Harringtons he was tasked with monitoring. He wanted to talk to Ava, but perhaps it was best that he didn’t.
His failure with tracking Raven still burned him, and he wasn’t ready to admit it to his wife yet. He didn’t want to hear the note of disappointment in her voice.
He mulled over the words, the weight of each potential confession pressing down. Every scenario painted the same bleak picture—an understanding nod from Ava that masked her disappointment. He wasn’t ready to face that yet.
At a time when his skills mattered the most, when it was vital that he impress her, he was screwing up at every turn.
First, he’d left her alone only days into their blossoming relationship, and now he’d managed to have gotten caught trying to track a man who was a major threat to their relationship.
The mansion’s sprawling hallways seemed to stretch endlessly, each corner and shadow imbued with the kind of silence that amplifies solitude. As he wandered through, the lavish decor felt more like a gilded cage than a refuge.
As he snaked through the halls of the oversized mansion, berating himself for not being smarter until the strains of what sounded like a heated argument reached his ears.
Alex's steps faltered as the echoes of his failures haunted him, each misstep with Ava casting a longer shadow than the last. It wasn't just about failing to track Raven—it was the gnawing fear that he wasn't enough when she needed him most.
Following it, he found Grant’s two adult children, Kyle and Sierra, at each other’s throats over the results of a card game.
Alex knocked on the door jamb, clearing his throat.
“What?” Sierra snapped before her features softened when she looked at him. “Oh, oops, sorry. Did you need something?”
“Uh, actually, there has been an…incident…”
“Incident?” Sierra asked, her eyebrows shooting up and her voice turning sharp. “What do you mean, incident?”
“Yeah, what happened? An incident around here usually means bad things. Mainly because something bad is always happening here,” Kyle said, still laid up from the injuries he sustained when he’d gone missing.
“Well,” Alex answered as he rubbed the back of his neck, “thing is…Sunshine, your stepmother, Julia was involved in a little…skirmish with the Iron Lady.”
“Okay,” Sierra said, slicing a hand through the air, “you need to speak regular English. I can’t understand your weird metaphors.”
“Julia was in a fire,” he burst, dropping the playful facade he hid behind.
“What? Oh my goodness. Is she okay? Where is she? Is she in the hospital?” Sierra leapt from the bed, her voice shrill.
Kyle snatched his cell phone from the bedside table. “I’m calling the ER. I’ll find out.”
“She’s fine,” Alex answered. “She’s totally fine. She…Ava talked her out of the building. She’s out, she’s fine. Everything is fine. She asked me to come update you since she wasn’t sure if your dad told you where he was going.”
Sierra crossed her arms, her features turning stony. “Was Lydia involved?”
“The Iron Lady?” Alex asked, shoving his hands into the pockets of his pajama pants. “Uh…pretty certain, yeah.”
“That does it.” Sierra paced the floor at the end of Kyle’s bed. “We have to do something about this.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, sis. I’ve been on board with doing something about Lydia since before she nearly killed me.”
“What’s the list of ideas you had so far again?”
Alex wrinkled his nose as the siblings chattered back and forth.
Kyle grabbed a notepad from the desk along with his pen, tapping the end against the paper. “Uh, poison her makeup.”
Alex screwed up his face. “Is this some sort of joke?”
Both siblings set their icy blue eyes on him. “No. Why would you think that?” Sierra asked.
“It’s a ridiculous plan,” he answered.
“It’s not,” she argued. “First, that woman wears enough makeup for three people. If we poison it, she’d die almost instantly.”
Alex shifted his weight as the ridiculous idea bumped around in his brain. Maybe inviting the Harringtons to the Hamptons was a terrible idea. With the way they played things, they’d slash Raven’s tires before they did any real damage.
“Okay, fine, Brainy doesn’t love this plan,” Sierra said with a dismissive wave. “Go next.”
“Umm,” Kyle said as he glanced down at his list again, “dump her in a foreign prison, forget she exists.”
Sierra raised her eyebrows, shooting Alex an expectant glance. His lower lip bobbed up and down as he tried to formulate an answer. “I mean…that’s not…I don’t understand the game. Is it to come up with ridiculous ideas or ideas that will actually work?”
“Ideas that will actually work,” Kyle said as Sierra said, “Ridiculous ideas.”
The pair switched, each saying the opposite answer before Kyle answered, “Ridiculous ideas that will actually work. The normal ones don’t work.”
“How do the normal ones not work?” Alex asked.
“Lydia is somehow incredibly lucky or something. I mean, she’s slipped under the radar for how long now wreaking havoc and every time we try to stop her, she just gets away with even more. It’s insane,” Sierra answered as she plopped on the bed.
“Well, you know, sometimes physical plans aren’t the best.”
“What?” Sierra retorted.
“I mean…hit her digitally. There are plenty of things we can do from the comfort of this overly large mansion.”
“Uh, maybe you can, but I can’t,” Sierra said as Kyle tossed his notebook aside.
“I can’t even concentrate without knowing how Julia is.”
“Of course, because you’re a creep with a thing for his stepmom,” Sierra shot back.
Kyle shook his head. “I’m calling the hospital.”
He pressed his phone to his ear before he sighed with disgust. “I’m on hold.”
“I could easily get their status,” Alex said with a shrug.
“How? Even Kyle can’t get through, and he works there.”
“I’ll just peruse the hospital records. Mind if I borrow a laptop?”
Kyle poked a finger at the model laying on his bed, and Alex crossed to it. In a matter of minutes, he’d pulled up the records.
“Let’s see…Julia Harrington, admitted with some smoke inhalation, but seems to check out. Grant Harrington…same. They’re fine.”
Relieved by the news, they spent another two hours discussing potential plans to ruin Lydia before Grant and Julia returned.
Alex said his good nights to them, retreated to his room and allowed his melancholy about his own situation to flood over him.
He plopped in front of his laptop, toggling into the screen that monitored Ava’s location through her cell phone. His lips curled slightly as he spotted it at their beachside home.
The grin didn’t last long as he realized he’d have to tell her about the faux pas with the Raven tracker.
He typed out a message, his shaky thumb hovering over the send button until he finally tapped it.
His phone rang almost immediately after he sent it.
He swiped to accept Ava’s call. “Hey, you.”
“Hey, yourself. How’d the kids take the news?”
“Uh, well…they were upset but fine. They’re…weird.”
“What happened?” she asked.
He closed the lid of his laptop, wandering to his bed and climbing between the sheets. “They have this weird obsession with destroying Lydia in the oddest ways possible. Avs, I’m a little concerned about asking Team Harrington for help based on this.”
“What were the ideas?”
“Poison her makeup was the top one.” He screwed up his face again at the ridiculous notion.
She hesitated a moment before she finally responded, “Oh, okay, well…well, let’s hope their help with our situation is better because I think we’re going to need it.”
He sighed, wondering if Raven had already tipped her off about his failure. No wonder she sought the help of her sorority sister and her high-powered husband.
“Yeah, I’m afraid so,” he answered, his lips tugging into a frown as he traced the outline of a lobster on his pajamas.
“Everything okay?”
“Ummm…” His features twisted. He hated to tell her what happened.
“Ace?” Ava prompted on the other end of the line.
“So, the Raven tracker didn’t quite do its job.”
She clicked her tongue and sighed. “Ah, you’re kidding. Blocked?”
“Yeah,” he answered. “Raven saw it coming from a mile away. Sent me a snarky little message back with a picture of me and a raven…never mind.”
“Aw, babe, I’m sorry.”
He detected a note of pity in her voice. How long before that turned into disappointment, and she left him? “Me too. I feel like a failure.”
She chuckled a little, the sound bringing some levity to the conversation. “That is one thing you are definitely not, Alex.”
“So, do you hate me because I messed up?” Alex asked, hope filling him as he clung to her words.
“No, I don’t hate you, and you didn’t mess up. Raven is…savvier than we expected.”
“No kidding.” He shook his head, his nostrils flaring with frustration.
“Things aren’t much better on this end,” she answered, sending his heart pounding faster.
“What do you mean? What happened?”
“Well, I had a little…run-in with Raven.”
“What?” His voice went hoarse as panic filled him.
“He showed at the StoneCorp’s headquarters for a conversation. He preferred it to be private, but I didn’t. Guess who won.”
“Ava!” Alex shouted, his stomach tied into a tight knot. “Are you okay? Did he hurt you?”
“He didn’t hurt me. He just…knocked me out and handcuffed me, said his piece then tossed me the key. He’s a jerk.”
“He’s dangerous. That’s it…you aren’t leaving that house until I get back.”
“Ace, relax, I’m fine, and I’m all the wiser for next time.”
“There had better not be a next time, Ava.”
She heaved another sigh, shifting the conversation slightly. “Well, on top of that, we have another situation.”
His head smacked against the headboard as he let it loll backward. “Are you kidding me? What else?”
“Raven warned me about a friend who would betray us. And magically tonight, Chris turned up on our doorstep.”
Alex’s heart skipped a beat. “What? Are you joking?”
“I wish I was.”
“What did he want?”
“Me back.”