Chapter 44
Noah
I don’t see it coming.
I step onto our floor with a hanging head, busted plan, and fresh list of mea culpas loaded.
Only to find the chair by her desk turned a perfect forty-five degrees, the plant freshly watered and angled to the light, the pen cup filled with the blue ones (I pretend I don’t have a favorite, but she knows I do), and all her personal belongings gone.
Her monitors are dark.
For a heartbeat, none of it computes. Then Martin materializes out of nowhere, clutching his fist to his chest.
“Before you combust,” he says, bringing his hands up in the air, “breathe.”
“Where is she?” My voice comes out wrong, scraping my throat raw.
He winces and tilts his head toward the hallway behind him. “Esther has a package for you.”
A package. At HR. This isn’t good.
I walk to my own execution, and Esther—silently—slides me a thick folder with a letter on top.
I read it once. Twice. The words don’t change the second time, unfortunately, but my brain starts processing the information.
Under it is a fifteen-page document titled “How to Survive Noah King.” There’s a note on the first page saying, ‘To the next guinea pig in the Tyrant’s office.’
My laugh sounds like a choke. I flip through it—contacts, contingencies, all my pressure points annotated with her favorite color codes. She added a joke about cilantro, and I swallow a giant lump, trying desperately not to fall apart in HR.
Esther watches me like I’m a ticking bomb in a suit, and I usually am, if I didn’t have this feeling in the pit of my stomach that my heart, lungs, and all other vital organs were clawing their way through my skin.
I tuck the handbook under my arm and the letter in my pocket and walk out without saying anything, because if I open my mouth, the office will see a different side of me, and I’m not sure they’ll respect me after that. This shitty situation is of my own doing, and I need to fix it myself.
“Where is she?” I ask Martin again in the hall, even though I know the answer is not here.
He lifts both hands. “She was in before seven. Badge, laptop, ritual sacrifice of our collective sanity, were all left on Esther’s desk.”
My throat works, but no oxygen enters my body. “Her phone?”
“Airplane mode, probably.” His eyes go soft, which is an assault to me right now. I don’t want soft. I want angry. I made this mess. “Noah?”
I pivot and head for my office where I shut my door, lock it, and dial the number I recall from memory. Straight to voicemail. Again. And again.
“Pick up, Bea.” It comes out shredded. I scrub a hand down my face and do the next thing on the list: Maeve.
She answers before the first ring as if she’s been waiting with her finger on the screen. “If you’re calling to ask where my sister is, start with sorry.”
“I am sorry,” I say, forgetting my pride. “I’m an idiot. I said the wrong thing to the only person who stuck with me and started changing my life.”
Silence.
“So you did say something.”
“Wait, what? You don’t know why she left?”
“Now I do, asshole!” she bellows through the phone. “I just got my sister back, and you did something to her! I knew it!”
“I did,” I say. “I was an ass to her at my mother’s, and I’m sorry. I’m fixing it. Where is she?”
A long beat passes. I can hear her breathing. It’s jittery, pissed, and protective. As it should be. We all should be; we all failed Bea. Starting with me, when I didn’t defend her in front of her parents.
“She texted me. Said she loves me and not to panic. Then ghosted. I assume she’s flying somewhere because she knows I’d find her anywhere in the city. So I asked for her flight info; she didn’t send it.”
“Maeve.” I press my fingers into my brow until stars spark. “Please.”
Another pause. Then she mutters words that I’m ashamed to repeat. “She turned her read receipts off. I can’t help you here. And quite honestly, I don’t want to.”
I pull in a heavy breath. “I understand.”
“Do you though? I like you, Noah. You are the brother I’ve never had, and you did me a solid before, but I’m too pissed at you to help you right now.”
I swallow all my words instead of replying. She sighs loudly.
“Fuck.” Another sigh. “Why are you even bothered with her departure? What is it to you?”
“Because I love her.”
“You don’t even—Wait, what?”
“I love your sister and regret not saying it to her before.”
The silence that follows is suffocating and not promising at all.
“Oh, man. You King brothers don’t know how to communicate at all, do you?”
I don’t respond to that because the question is self-explanatory. “What do I do now, Maeve?” I’m not above pleading. “Tell me what. Please.”
She hums to herself for a moment before replying. “You apologize. You don’t make it about you. Let her decide, because she’s never had this opportunity.”
“What if she doesn’t want to listen to me?”
“Then you leave her be.”
“Do you have any other advice on this regard?”
She chuckles. “I forgot that you are a King. Do what you need to to convince her you are a dumbass.”
“I don’t think she’ll need much convincing there.”
“Fair point,” she laughs. “But I think you stand a fair chance. She was very fidgety and mysterious when I asked her about you, so I’d say you’ve got a chance.”
We hang up, and I stare at my own reflection in the black glass of my office. I look like a man who’s lost part of his soul. I didn’t know a person’s face could change so much just from being sad and down.
There’s no point wallowing in self-pity since it’s of my own doing, so I pull up the file of contacts Bea keeps in that frightening color-coded universe she calls order, skim to City—Permits, and dial the possible clerk she “lubricated.”
“Department of Buildings, Tori speaking.”
“Hi, Tori. Noah King.”
Silence. Then a small squeak. “Oh. Oh! The Noah King.”
I ignore the urge to be insufferable. “You took a Chanel bag from my assistant.”
She inhales loudly. “No one took anything. She offered. I refused. Several times. She insisted. It was—she said it was a thank-you, and it wasn’t a bribe.”
“I’m not accusing you,” I say more softly. “I’m asking for it back.”
She exhales. “You want me to give back the vintage Chanel bag that I can resell for fifteen grand?”
“Yes. I’ll give you the money back.”
I can hear the gears in her head turning. “Make it twenty, and you’ve got a deal.”
Looks like Tori has mastered the art of being lubricated.
“Deal. Bring it to my office by the end of today.”
“It will cost you extra.”
I smile silently at her business antics. “I’ll double it if you stay at my office at Beatrice’s desk until she is back.”
“Hold on,” she says without asking any more questions, and puts me on hold. The phone beeps back a minute later. “For the past twenty years of working for the city, I’ve got six weeks of unused days off. You gotta make sure she’s back within that time.”
Damn, Tori is all business.
“She will be back.”
“Great.” She starts coughing into the phone.
Then louder. A few moments later, it sounds like her lungs are about to come out of her body.
Then she starts yelling to someone in her office.
“Joe? Hey, Joe? I think I’m coming down with something.
” Joe yells something back, something close to ‘get the fuck outta here before you get everyone sick.’ “All right,” she yells back to him, and then quieter to me, “I’ll be there in an hour. ”
She hangs up without waiting for my reply, and I realize that Tori is very much like Beatrice, and it’s no wonder the bag was traded for favors.
Tori, a dark-haired woman in her forties, with narrow eyes hiding behind giant glasses, shows up in under an hour, wearing a grin that says she just hustled me for sport. Pushing through the door without knocking, she heads straight to me.
“Mr. King.” She slaps a dust bag on my desk with no pleasantries. “Bag’s in there. You’ve got me for as long as you need me. But make it under six weeks. I want to take a full day at a spa with that money you are about to pay me,” she says, extending her arm with an open hand.
I pull the drawstring of the bag open and there it is. Black lambskin, chevron quilting, the kind of faint patina you can’t fake.
I pull the top drawer of my desk open and give her the cashier’s check I got ready before her arrival. “It’s half, the other half you will get at the end of our term.”
“Works for me,” she says, snatching the check from my hand.
“Thank you,” I say, and for once the words don’t feel like a foreign language.
She eyes me like she’s cataloging me for parts. “Where am I sitting?”
“Beatrice’s desk,” I say. “She left you a how-to. Color codes and seating chart of my neuroses.”
“Noted.” She pivots on a dime and vanishes through the door before I can even blink. But then her face appears for a moment. “I knew she was too good for you.”
And she vanishes again.
Tori’s parting shot lodges under my ribs and stays there. She’s not wrong. Everyone in a three-mile radius knows I detonated the thing I wanted most, and now I’m trying to glue the shrapnel back into a shape without knowing how.
Sitting here and waiting for the situation to resolve itself won’t help, so I head straight to IT.
“I need you to pull the last activity off Beatrice Wrong’s account. Doesn’t matter if it was from her work computer or her phone’s browser,” I say, not bothering with a hello. The kid at the desk startles like I shook him awake from a nap.
“You want… what specifically?”
“Browser history from the past twelve hours. Screenshots if you’ve got them. Any travel sites, confirmations, whatever you can legally get me without sending us both to federal prison.”
He blinks twice, hands already moving over his keyboard. “I mean, the word legally is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, but… yeah. I can do that. It’s been sort of boring today anyway.”