Chapter 48 Zane
Zane
“Zane?” Les’ sweet voice whispers.
I rub shaky hands across her tear-stained cheeks again. “Yeah, Beautiful. It’s me. I need you to take several deep breaths with me, okay?”
When I saw her drop to the floor of the garage, I almost forgot to put my car in park in my rush to get to her.
I helped lean her back against the side of her Ferrari, yelling her name.
Her mind was a million miles away, locked in memories I have seen so many times.
I knew she was having a panic attack, but I couldn’t get her to listen to me.
Hearing her yell for her dad almost ripped my heart out.
She takes a shuddering breath; her eyes still locked on mine. Ryder is seething over my shoulder, but even he sees how important it is not to upset her after he first saw me kneeling over her in the garage.
“That’s my girl,” I praise. “A few more times.” I imitate what I want her to do, taking exaggerated breaths. “One more time, Beautiful.”
She takes a breath like someone that has been drowning and finally breached the surface; I see her eyes start to clear. I breathe with her until her breathing starts returning to normal.
I glance down at her poor knees tucked against her chest; they’re cut and bleeding from where she hit the concrete. “I need a first aid kit and some water,” I tell Ryder without turning around. He growls under his breath but surprisingly disappears into the house.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, voice hoarse from screaming. Her screams ripped through the garage, echoing all over the walls.
“You told me to come over,” I remind her, and I can see the confusion all over her face. “I needed to talk to you.”
She shakes her head, and I know she doesn’t remember.
Ryder steps up beside me. “You can fucking go now.”
Instead of arguing like I want to, I go to stand up because I don’t want to upset her. She latches onto my arms before I can get to my feet. I glance at Ryder out of the corner of my eye. His eyes narrow, but he thrusts the things I asked for at me.
I crack open the water bottle and hand it to her. “Take a few sips.” She stares at it like she doesn’t know what to do with it. I tip it up to her pouty lips. “Open.” She opens, and I tip it further. “Swallow.”
When she had them before, it took her a little bit to become fully functional. The first time she had one in front of me, it was one of the nights she actually stayed the night at my apartment in the city. She woke up from a nightmare screaming, scaring the shit out of me.
“You drink. I’m going to clean up your knees,” I tell her once she remembers how to take a drink.
She nods, and I smile at her, stretching her legs out between mine.
I gently take her water bottle and pour some over the cuts to wash them out before handing it back to her.
I take a gauze pad and swipe around the cuts, wiping up the blood.
“Ryder?” I hear someone say quietly.
“She’s okay, Holden,” Ryder says so gently it surprises the shit out of me.
I start patching up her knees with her eyes locked on my face the whole time. I can feel her staring without even looking up. I know she’ll be kicking my ass out once she’s with it. And I’m just enough of an asshole to soak in whatever she’ll give me.
I place the last piece of tape. “That should hold. They aren’t too bad.” I finally look up at her face, and some of her color is coming back.
“What happened?” Ryder asks, looking between Les and me.
Les finally looks up at him, and you can see her mind struggling to catch up with the fact that she knows him.
He squats beside her, realizing he looks intimidating as hell, standing over her.
“Hey, Il mio sole,” he says softly, and I have to keep from grinding my teeth.
“I don’t know. When I got here, she was collapsing in the garage,” I answer when I can tell she has no idea what happened.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Ryder asks between clenched teeth.
“She asked me to come,” I tell him, taking great pleasure out of the shock all over his face. I look back at her. “We need to get you off of this hard floor. Can you stand?”
“I don’t know,” she says without an ounce of her usual bravado, so I know she still isn’t entirely with me.
“Let’s try it, okay?” I ask, grabbing her hands in mine. I stand and gently pull her to her feet in front of me. Her hands latch onto my arms when she wobbles, and I control the small shudder just from that slight touch. “You good, Beautiful?”
“Zane,” Ryder growls, “I only have so much fucking patience for this shit. Don’t fucking call her that.”
Les shuts her eyes tight, and I can see her bottom lip quiver. Fuck. As much as I don’t want to, we need to find that ice queen buried in there. It’s better than this version that’s making my heart bleed.
“Shit,” Ryder cusses, “I’m sorry, Il mio sole.”
She opens her eyes and smiles, but it’s wobbly. “It’s okay.”
Her voice is so quiet, not the usual whipcrack I’m used to hearing. I don’t like this at all. Even if the other version hates my ass.
“You know you’re making it a habit for me to have to rescue you,” I joke, and she frowns, some of her usual self showing in her eyes. She looks into my eyes for so long I start to get nervous, then she takes a step back, letting her arms drop.
“No one asked you to rescue me.”
There she is.
“You need to go,” Ryder says, pointing to my car.
Les frowns again and shakes her head. “No. He needed to talk to me.”
Now is definitely not the time for me to drop the bomb I have. “It can wait,” I tell her, but it can’t. I can’t risk upsetting her; this would, without a doubt, do just that.
“Obviously, it can’t, or your messages wouldn’t have been so urgent.” She rakes her hand through her hair. “Ryder, take him to the office. Just give me a minute.”
She walks toward the door, and Holden wraps his arms around her shoulders, kissing the top of her head. She slides an arm around his waist, leaning into his embrace.
“This better be fucking good,” Ryder says.
“I wouldn’t classify what I have to say as good,” I say dryly, walking towards my car. I jerk open the door and pull out two folders, slamming the door shut.
Ryder eyes them suspiciously, then jerks his head for me to follow him into the house. He leads me to her office and points towards one of the chairs before leaning against the table behind her desk, crossing his arms over his chest.
After five minutes of Ryder and I glaring at each other, Les finally breezes into the room, looking slightly refreshed. She lowers herself into the chair and folds her arms on the desk in front of her. She looks so much like her dad when she does that.
“What’s so important?” she asks, and I slide the two folders to her, knowing that when she opens those, our whole dynamic changes.
I lay my hand on it before she can grab it. “Just know I had nothing to do with this.” I move my hand, and she slides it over, opening the top one first. I don’t want to upset her after what I saw outside, but she needs to know this. She needs to be prepared for what is about to happen.
She flips through hundreds of pictures with Ryder looking over her shoulder.
They’re pictures of her anytime she went out with or without any of the guys.
There are also pictures of her with me when we met at the docks.
They all have two things in common. She’s in all of them, and they were taken from a long-distance telescope camera lens.
She flips to the last one, and I wait for her face to change, but it doesn’t.
It’s two people dressed head to toe in black with a black mask concealing their features.
The only thing you can tell about it is one of them is a female by the build and height, Alessa’s size, and the other one is male, a very tall, well-built male.
She closes that one without comment and opens the next one. It’s a case file on her, but it isn’t the one the department is running; this one is personal. It’s all her movements, the buildings she owns, and her known associates. Anything you want to know about her is in those files.
She looks up at me when she gets an idea of what she’s looking at. “Where did these come from?”
“They were on the windshield of my truck.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “When?”
“The first day I told you I needed to meet you.”
“You expect us to believe you just fucking stumbled on these files?” Ryder scoffs, and Les holds up a hand to cut him off before he says anything else. She starts massaging her temples, and I know that panic attack took everything out of her.
“Why give them to me?” she asks, looking back up. Anytime she even so much as looks into my eyes, my heart starts beating out of control. I’m pathetic.
Here’s to hoping neither one of them is armed. “The department has been investigating you.”
She raises an eyebrow. “They’re always investigating”
I shake my head. “No. Serious investigation. They have evidence piling up. That,” I say, pointing to the folder, “isn’t a department investigation. That’s personal.” Ryder and Les share a look like they know something. “What am I missing?”
“Go get those other files, please,” Les says to Ryder. You can tell he wants to argue, but whatever is on her face right now, he thinks better of it.
He gives me one last scathing look before storming from the room.
“What happened outside, Les?” I ask gently when we’re alone.
“Nothing,” she replies too fast, then sighs. “Look, I appreciate everything you’ve done with the shooting and now this, but this doesn’t change anything, Zane.”
“Why not?” I demand.
“Because,” she says harshly, “you lied to me, and you became the enemy. I moved on.”
“Did you?” I challenge, sitting up in my chair. “Why are you lying to yourself that what we had wasn’t fucking real?”
“Because if it were real, you wouldn’t have lied to me the whole fucking time we were together,” she grits out. “You wouldn’t have betrayed me. Or your dad.”