Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
Kira
For all my sister’s dramatics, she sure doesn’t care that she’s pushing my limits.
“Does your phone have to be that loud?” I snap at her.
She doesn’t even flinch. She’s kicked back in a chair by the window, one black-booted foot bobbing in time with whatever stupid video she’s doom-scrolling.
The sun is just setting, and while it’s a beautiful rouge with golds, she’s been scrolling for the past hour, the tinny sounds coming out of her phone grating on my last nerve when I’m trying not to picture something worming its way up through my groin to my heart.
“My earbuds broke.” She doesn’t look up.
“Wouldn’t that be your third pair that broke?” I rub at my temple. The procedure is first thing in the morning, but I don’t know how I’m going to get any sleep with a blooming headache.
“Yep,” she chirps.
“How do you keep breaking them? You need to be more careful.” I’m aware that bitching about earbuds right now is trivial, but I need something safe to complain about, something that doesn’t get me worked up.
I’m one bad thought away from spiraling.
Celeste said it’s very important that I try to stay calm—that my heart doesn’t like stress—but I don’t know how to be calm when my sister just killed a cop and my train is hitched to a man who carries a gun in his waistband.
So yeah, I’m going to use the earbuds as an excuse to vent.
She looks up at me with a raised brow. “They cost ten bucks from the gas station. They break on their own.”
“Ugh!” I flap my hands at her logic. “Well, shouldn’t you be going home anyway? You have school in the morning.”
“Ha.” She goes back to scrolling.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She sighs like I’m the one with a developing frontal lobe. “Uh, you being in the hospital is totally a get out of jail free card.”
“No, it’s not!” I balk so hard I feel my pulse jump, the heart monitor responding with an offended little beep.
“Yes, it is.”
“No,” I draw out the word. “It’s your senior year. You need to—”
Voices outside the door stop me. One of them is distinct enough to make the words in my mouth cease.
It’s a professional tone, dry and unaffected, nothing like the friendly and soft voices of the nurses and doctors on this level.
One of the voices is polite, and most likely Celeste, but it has an irritated edge to it that says the other voice isn’t welcome.
Unease grows in my stomach as the muffled conversation continues. Nix must feel it too because she pauses her scrolling, thin brows coming together. But we don’t even get a second to share a look before the door handle turns.
Celeste appears, hands clasped and lips pursed. She frowns at me in apology.
“I tried to say you are resting…” she trails off, but I don’t need her to continue to know that it wouldn’t matter what she tried.
Because Detective Layton is the one who steps in behind her.
My throat closes around a fist. Even Nix sits forward, not needing a formal introduction to see the badge on his hip and know what this could mean.
He nods at Celeste in a way that signals dismissal, and she takes a sharp intake of air to show her annoyance.
“I’ll be right outside if you need me.” Her eyes find mine with a meaningful gaze.
The inclination is nice, and I almost want to beg her to stay, but I don’t think she can stop either of us from being arrested, and I instead choose to nod as if everything is okay.
When the door has clicked shut behind her, Layton stuffs his hands into his pockets and looks up at the ceiling like he’s admiring the architecture.
Then he scans the room slowly, taking his time and making a show of it.
Nix and I take the chance to share a look in the awkward silence, and I’m surprised to see that she isn’t on the cusp of panic like I am.
She looks… haughty. Meanwhile, I’m sure this is where one of us is arrested.
When Layton’s eyes finally land on me, he smiles, but it’s a smarmy kind of smile that says I definitely shouldn’t be in a hospital gown for whatever this is. There’s something about being half-naked in a one-ply sheet that really wallops the ability to hold your chin high.
“Ms. Noland,” he says, stepping closer, and then pauses. “Or should I say… Mrs. Landon?”
I’m confused for a second and then remember that I’m admitted under Jax’s name. I wiggle uncomfortably. “That’s an error,” I mutter under my breath.
“Is it…” He muses, looking around the room again as if I’m a liar.
“Yes,” I say a little more firmly.
“Well, that’s a little odd… because you and Mr. Landon seemed pretty involved the last time we spoke.”
My brows draw together. How does he know it was Jax who played drunken boyfriend? And why does him knowing who Jax is make the back of my neck prickle? Nix looks at me in confusion, probably wondering when we’ve spoken.
“Might I ask how long you’ve known Jax Landon?”
“What… what does that matter?” I feel like I’m being set up for a punchline, but I have no idea what it could be. I glance at Nix, hoping she doesn’t blurt something out, but she seems too busy looking Layton up and down in disdain.
He shrugs. “I’m just wondering how well you know him.”
“I…” Jesus, I wasn’t expecting this. It’s kind of hard to say I don’t know him that well when I’m set up here on his dime, and it’s also kind of hard to say I do know him when the ways I know him are not exactly things I can divulge. “He’s…” I flail.
“Right,” Layton says too quickly, as if my hesitation is all the answer he needed. His attention slides off me and lands on Nix. “Nicole Noland, I presume?”
My sister narrows her eyes, tilts her head, but says nothing.
Layton doesn’t seem bothered by the silence. “Where were you on the night of October fourteenth?” he asks.
Oh, God. My stomach turns. Why her? Why is he even looking at her? Nix isn’t supposed to be on his radar. If this all explodes, it’s supposed to fall on me. The machine hooked up to my chest starts to beep faster.
“Don’t… don’t you need her to have a guardian present?” I ask as if I haven’t been her unofficial guardian her whole life.
“That’s only for minors,” Layton says without missing a beat, and the words feel like a slap to the face. He’s dug into us. He knows she’s eighteen. He knows I’m not her legal guardian. He came in here prepared.
My mouth goes dry. “Well, she was with me,” I say quickly. Too quickly.
“I think I’d like to hear it from her.” He doesn’t even look at me, studying Nix too keenly for comfort.
But she holds his gaze just as determinedly and doesn’t say a word. What the fuck is she doing?!
“Nix,” I grit, silently begging her to just answer, to give him something boring, something normal, something that doesn’t make us look like we have anything to hide.
“Cat got your tongue?” Layton challenges.
She raises an uninterested brow at that and folds her arms, still not answering.
What in the world?! She’s making us look guilty by not speaking. “I…” I try to convey the most scathing and scolding look at her that I can. “I’m sorry. She—she was dropped on her head as a baby,” I hiss between my teeth.
“If I was dropped on my head,” she says, twisting to look at me, “you would have been the one to do it.”
“Yeah,” I snap, losing my cool because my nerves are raw and my heart is a ticking bomb, and she’s choosing now to be a menace. “And I should’ve done it more often.”
Turning to Layton, I straighten the best I can with the adhesive patches on my chest and take a shaky breath. “I’m sorry. She’s a moody teenager. I—I barely get her to talk to me. But she was with me. Or I was with her. On the fourteenth. At night.”
Oh my God. I sound like a fucking idiot. What is wrong with me?! Why can’t I get it together? It’s Nix. She’s messing me up. This is her fault. Why is she acting suspicious?
Layton’s gaze returns to me, sharpening. “Are you sure that’s the story you want to go with?”
“It’s not a story,” I say quickly, even though some part of me knows I’m walking into a trap. “We were together. All night.” Doubling down is wrong, I know it, but I can’t help it. I’ve already said it. I have to stick with it.
Layton nods, but it’s more in disappointment than agreement, and my stomach sinks.
“You see, I find that kind of odd, too,” he finally says.
“Oh?” I blink. “Why’s that?” My voice is embarrassingly high-pitched, and I clear my throat.
“Well,” he says casually, almost bored, “unless Bell’s Bar and Grill is in the habit of allowing underage patrons, your sister wasn’t with you.”
My blood runs cold, my breath stilling at the mention of Bell’s. Oh, fuck.
“You were working at Bell’s on the night of the fourteenth, weren’t you, Ms. Noland?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
“Until four a.m.,” he continues, “isn’t that right? And while I don’t have kids myself, wouldn’t that have been a school night for your sister here? I would assume she was tucked in bed at home. Right where Marshal Wayne was headed.”
I want to argue. I want to point out that CCTV has him at Grendel and Marquist, that it doesn’t prove he was coming to our house, that people walk all kinds of places at night.
But there’s nothing else around that intersection.
No stores. No late-night diner. No reason for a cop to be on foot that close to our street unless he was headed to the one place he went regularly.
I have nothing. And I’m already caught in the lie that Nix was with me.
I snap my mouth shut, my heart beating faster as the monitor gives me away. Jesus, I just made Nix all the more guilty with my fuck-up.
And Layton gets a front-row seat to see me realize this. Try as might to seem calm, he’s too perceptive, eyes flicking to the way I’m white-knuckling the hospital blanket before I can release it, and zeroing in on the sound my throat makes as I gulp. I’m a dead giveaway, and we both know it.