by Paula Cox
Unfortunately, his timing wasn’t exactly going to go according to plan. Just as Nash rounded the corner on the landing to get to the next flight of stairs, something heavy and hard and thick swung out of shadowy nowhere and clocked him right in the face. The last thing he remembered before real darkness took him was a flash of Eliza’s golden waves wrapped around his hand—and then nothing.
Chapter 37
A throbbing head and a mouth full of blood greeted Nash when he finally drifted back to a conscious reality. Blinking hard, he coughed a few times, the metallic taste in his mouth potent enough to make him nauseous. It quickly became apparent that he was tied to a chair, his hands bound with duct tape, which bit into his skin when he shifted on the spot. The metal chair, one of those cheap ones high schools use for assemblies, dug into him at just about every angle, and he wondered how long he’d been tied to it.
No longer was he in a dark room, but rather a very well-lit warehouse. Empty, save for a few tables and chairs—oh, and a bunch of muscled assholes loitering by them. Above, rain pounded what seemed like a tin roof, but otherwise the place was quiet. Soft murmurs could be heard from the men, but no one engaged him, not even when he sat up a little and cracked his neck.
The drugs were gone. His gun was gone. His leather jacket had been stripped off and discarded on the floor nearby, and his white t-shirt was caked in dark dried blood. Each move made it ever clearer that whoever had clocked him in the face had broken his nose, or at the very least fractured it. Breathing through his nostrils brought on wave after wave of pain, but Nash just shifted to breathing through his mouth. He was adaptable like that. He could take the pain.
Across the massive room, a door creaked open, and Nash’s eyes narrowed at the vaguely familiar, round body of Phillip Crest. The man strolled toward him as if he was dressed for a university tour, his pricey suit pressed and his polished shoes glinting in the light. Stocky and firm, Phillip Crest was utterly repulsive to Nash, even if he wasn’t classically ugly by any means. As he stared at the approaching figure, all he wanted to do was stomp on his face. Break his teeth. Pound the pavement with whatever was left of his skull. It was a pretty picture in his head.
“Mr. Reeves,” Phillip said as he drew nearer, stopping a good five feet from Nash. Good thinking. They hadn’t tied Nash’s ankles to the chair—but he wasn’t idiotic enough to try and run. He was outnumbered, and they probably all had guns. What good was he to Eliza if he was dead?
“Mr. Crest,” Nash responded with forced civility. “This is all pretty unnecessary.”
“I’m afraid I can’t trust a desperate man not to do a desperate thing in the heat of the moment,” Phillip mused with a soft chuckle. He clasped his hands behind his back as if to mirror Nash’s stance. “And I assume you are desperate. Miss Truman makes you desperate, it seems.”
His gut response to hearing Phillip say Eliza’s name in any way was to Hulk-out and break the bonds holding him, then shred everyone in the room to pieces. But he also knew, deep down, that that was the reaction Phillip was hoping for. He wanted to see Nash affected by the leverage he had over him. He wanted to see Nash’s weaknesses, so he could better exploit them.
Sorry, asshole, not today.
“I take it you got the coke?” Nash fired back, working so damn hard to keep his voice from quivering with rage. He then nodded to the men loitering a good distance away. “I mean…your boys didn’t sample it when they sucker-punched me, did they?”
Phillip studied him for a moment, lips pressed together in a tight line. Briefly, a victorious surge swept through Nash’s body in knowing that he’d bested the man—as well as he could, given he was tied to a chair totally weaponless.
“Well, I had to question them about the quantity you delivered,” Phillip insisted with a slight shake of his head. “After all, it was hardly the full amount.”
“I planned to deliver the rest once I saw Eliza was okay,” Nash told him tightly. “Where is she?”
“I wanted the full amount, Mr. Reeves.”
“Well that’s all you got.”
“Then I’m afraid Miss Truman will end up like her father once my boys get their hands on her.” Phillip nodded, a devilish smirk crossing his lips. “And I promise you, Mr. Reeves, they will so enjoy putting their hands on her.”
“I can get it all for you,” Nash snapped. “I’m good for it. You saw it now. Just don’t hurt her. I’ll… I’ll get whatever you want.” He licked his lips. All this talking was making his face pound, as if he’d been hit with a two-by-four. Hell, he probably had. An icepack would do him a world of good, as would a few shots of whiskey, but he had more important things to focus on. He could push through the pain. He’d done it before. Nash’s brow furrowed as Phillip’s words went on repeat in his head. “Wait…? What do you mean end up like her father? What did you do to him?”
“Ah, Darryl… What a fool.”
Phillip turned away and started to pace, strolling back and forth in front of Nash so casually, so calmly, that it threatened to make Nash’s temper boil over. But he took a few deep breaths, remembering that keeping his cool was what would save Eliza in the end. Keep that asshole talking. Get the intel. Find Eliza. Plans had to change. Nash was still adaptable, even in the heat of the moment.
“All the evidence pointed to him being my guy,” Nash insisted. “Was that your doing?”
“It was, actually.” Phillip said it so matter-of-factly, not quite like the smug bastard Nash was expecting. “It took a lot of careful planning, of course. One can hardly frame a man like Darryl Truman in his position willy-nilly. Almost a year of preparation went into this operation, but in the end, I’ve achieved what I wanted in the drug world, I think.”
“Well, shit, you’re a regular gangster, Crest,” Nash mused with a roll of his eyes. “Congrats.”
Phillip smirked. “I find your crass charming, Mr. Reeves.”
Nash’s eyes flickered to the men strolling around the warehouse, trying with as much subtlety as he could muster to discern who had guns and who didn’t. “I live to please.”
“I don’t doubt it,” the man said, shaking his head. “You do your best to make everyone happy. So unfortunate that you sent your dogs after Darryl Truman. When he’s found, I think we both know who will get the blame for his condition.”
“What did you do to him?” Nash growled, hoping that Eliza wouldn’t be the one to find her dad, no matter the kind of condition he was in. No kid should have to see a parent like that.
“He was catching on to what I was doing, you see,” Philip explained. The man paused, as his stare went a little distant, as if recalling a specific event, then shrugged. “I’d planned to use him for as long as possible, keep shifting the blame to him. After all, he was the one to start divvying university funds to where he wanted. It wouldn’t be a huge leap to assume he was hiring hitmen to take out Blackwoods’s most influential drug ring in the process to get a piece of the pie for himself.”
“When really you were the one doing that,” Nash muttered. “Killing innocent guys just to—”
“Oh, no one in that little club of yours is innocent.” Phillip scoffed. “Don’t make me laugh, Mr. Reeves.”
“Wasn’t trying to.” He tried to wriggle his hands free somewhat, only to fail, feeling like the tape just got tighter each time he tried. “Now what the fuck did you do to the dean? He’s a powerful man who—”
Phillip snorted. “I’d hardly call him powerful.” His beady little eyes darted to Nash, as if waiting for more in the silence that followed, then added, “Darryl Truman is alive…” He then paused for dramatic effect. “Barely.”
“And what about Eliza?” While he cared about Darryl’s condition because it would affect Eliza, he worried more about her than him. “Is she hurt?” When Phillip only smiled at him, his temper broke, and he shouted, “Tell me, you bastard!”
Chuckling, Phillip strolled toward him and crouched down so that they were at eye level, then shook
his head and made a tsk’ing sound.
“If you were so concerned about her safety, Mr. Reeves,” the man mused, the pity in his voice grating, “perhaps you should have brought all the drugs I asked for…”
Chapter 38
Eliza Truman had never been on campus this late before. Sure, technically she lived on campus, but she had never been out and about at almost five in the morning, and never with weather this bad.
When she was younger, she’d never been one of those bar girls or clubbers who went out with all of her dorm friends to enjoy Blackwoods’s downtown, then stumble home in the wee hours of the morning high on laughter and a little sick with alcohol and fast food churning in her gut. Eliza had been disciplined. High school was her time to fool around because she’d actually had a really good group of friends to fool around with. But college was different. Law school was different. Everyone was hyper-competitive for jobs and grades and internships, and she just never really felt that draw to anyone.
Well, no, that was a lie. The strongest connection she felt, the greatest pull of her life, was to a man she knew she couldn’t be with anymore. Nash was determined to throw her father under the bus, and even if she had fallen for him, she knew her father deserved more from her than to hop onboard with Nash’s ludicrous theories that her father, Dean Darryl Truman, was secretly running a drug operation and murdering bikers in his spare time. It simply didn’t make sense. Eliza wasn’t naïve to her father’s true nature. He was strict, always had been, but he’d raised her on his own and pushed her to succeed.
Even if her idea of success wasn’t the same as his. Law school, while she was finally doing well at it again, just wasn’t for her. But the guilt of not finishing was just so great that Eliza didn’t see any other option for her future. Her father had forced her to study, to achieve, and to excel on her own merit. He was her driving force. And he was innocent—she knew it from the very depth of her soul.
She’d already gathered evidence to show Nash that he had it all wrong, that her father couldn’t have possibly been the one to commit the murders. Unfortunately, Nash had poked holes in every piece she’d dug up. He’d challenged her, but not in a cruel way. At the time, of course, it had felt cruel, as if he didn’t value any of the time or effort she put into her sleuthing, but now that she’d had some distance from that night, she realized that he had a point. If she’d presented her hold evidence to a judge and jury, the opposing lawyer would have shredded her defense in seconds.
So she needed something better. Without demeaning her or threatening her or belittling her, Nash had made her realize that she needed to step up her game if she wanted to prove her father’s innocence, and tonight, that was exactly what she’d done.
Very seldom did Eliza actually take advantage of the fact that she was the dean’s daughter. In fact, if she could help it, Eliza tried to hide her last name as much as she could, to avoid any external bias from classmates and professors. But with the security office that housed videotapes and recordings of almost every inch of the Blackwoods University campus, Eliza flaunted her status as someone of importance—only to gain access to materials that were off-limits.
They’d put up a fuss at first, as they should have. After all, Eliza was after videos of her father, and no one in their right mind, especially if they were privy to his wrongdoings, would just hand over evidence like that. But Eliza had talked her way in somehow, and before long she was going over footage from all the nights her father was under suspicion for…all the nights Steel Phoenix members were murdered.
And after hours of watching footage, lining up where her father had said he had meetings from his personal journals and where he’d actually been, Eliza had come to the conclusion that he wasn’t involved. Or, at the very least, it would have been very difficult to tie him to any of the murders given his various—recorded—alibis. What would come next would be looking at the university’s financial movements, but given the time, Eliza opted to tackle that another day. In just a few short hours she was supposed to have class, but as she trudged out of the admin building, she decided that she was going to sleep until noon, then skip class to continue on with her investigation.
Time was of the essence, after all.
With her hood up and coat wrapped snuggly around her, Eliza braved the elements as best she could, teeth chattering as she navigated her way back through campus. On a Saturday night, there were bound to still be people around, but seeing as it was the middle of the week in the middle of a storm, the grounds were dead. Dead and dark. Normally familiar sights sent a chill down her spine, statues of famous alums seeming warped and grotesque in the shadows.
She wanted to go home, shed this wet outer layer, and curl up under her quilts and blankets. Warm up. Sleep the day away. Forget for a little while that all of this horror was going on around her. But just as Eliza was headed for the path that would take her to her dorm, she stopped. Something had caught her eye. Something not quite right.
There was a light on in her father’s office. Now, it wasn’t unusual that he worked late, but this was very late, even for him. If he’d fallen asleep at his desk, she figured she ought to wake him and send him home—or, at the very least, move him to the couch so he wouldn’t deal with back and shoulder problems when he woke in a few hours. Nibbling her lower lip, she paused for a moment, rain pummeling her, leaking through her clothing and trickling down her neck. What if it… wasn’t her father in the office?
His secretary would never leave the lights on before she left for the night. The cleaning crew wouldn’t either—or so she assumed. It was just recently that Eliza had broken into the usually off-limits office of the dean, so was it really such a leap that someone else might have done the same?
What if it was Nash?
Or someone worse?
She swallowed hard, and without another thought took off at an easy pace toward the building. It was still open, and she hurried to the upper floors as quietly and carefully as she could, trying her best to keep her pace steady. The light had been on. She swore it had. She saw it through the office windows. If it was suddenly off by the time she arrived, Eliza would know something was wrong. Down the hall from the dean’s reception doorway, she paused and dug out her phone, then punched in 911 without pressing the call button. If someone was rifling through her father’s things, and that someone wasn’t Nash, she planned to have the proper authorities there in moments.
The lights were off in the reception area, but just standing in the doorway she could see the lights on in her father’s office through the outline of his closed door. Nearby windows illuminated the pristine reception desk, the recently vacuumed carpet, the dust-free seating area. Her father’s secretary had clearly been in to tidy up and arrange things before she left. That must have been hours ago.
Gripping her phone tightly, Eliza pressed onward. Each step was purposeful, deliberate, her breath held and released so painfully slow if only to keep any noises she made to a minimum. Even her feet pressing into the thick, new carpet seemed too loud for all the silence around her, and she could feel her heartbeat in her ears, throbbing steadily and rapidly.
Before pushing the door open, Eliza waited, listening for any sounds in her father’s office. She was used to the noises he made, given it had just been him and her in a house together for a long time, but nothing familiar hit her as she stood there. She should have been exhausted, but something about the moment kept her wired, kept her functional. Swallowing hard, she pressed her hand to the door, palm flat and fingers spread, and it was then she noticed a slight quake in her wrist.
The doorknob squeaked when she turned it, and the door itself creaked like some ungodly terror as she gently, gently, pushed it open. Her heart was just about ready to come flying out of her mouth—she half-expected to find some thug rooting around her father’s things, and she was ready to flee the second she saw a stranger.
But she didn’t see a stranger. Not even close.
She saw her fat
her.
Only in the condition she found him in, he certainly looked like a stranger. Familiar yet not. It was the man who had raised her, but right then and there, he looked nothing like Darryl Truman to her.
“Oh my god!” she cried, rushing into the room and practically falling over herself to get to his desk. “Oh my god…”
Tears obscured her vision, as she tried to take in the carnage, a trembling hand coming to rest on her father’s shoulder. He was coated in blood, and given the extent of the injuries to his face, she assumed it all belonged to him. Someone had beat the holy hell out of him; there was no other way to describe it. Dried and crusted blood gathered around his nostrils. Both bottom and top lips were split. Bruising had already started to take place around his eyes, and blood dribbled down from his hairline and into his eyebrows.