Whoa, okay. What was happening here? She was touching me and not in a way I wanted her to. Yes, Alyssa was hitting on me. Her hand was in my hair, and she was trying to give me a come-hither-I-want-to-fuck-you look. The problem? I wasn’t even a little bit interested. I was a love is love is love girl and I had no problem with whoever anyone chose to love. I was all for it. If I didn’t have five guys taking up all the space in my heart, I could have imagined loving a woman. But not psycho Alyssa. No thank you. No.
I had the only Smythe I wanted. His sister could drop dead.
I pushed her hand away. “Not interested. That clear?”
She pouted and then shrugged. “I was momentarily interested in seeing what the hell my brother sees in you. I can’t fathom it. He was raised to love someone better than you.”
“You just said they couldn’t love. That the Alliance screws all of that up. He wasn’t raised to love anyone. He was raised not to, right? “
She pointed at the window. “We’re here.”
That was convenient. She wasn’t going to have to answer my statement. I actually didn’t disagree with her. Judson was too good for me. All five of them were, but I wasn’t giving them up so that was all there was to it.
Our driver pulled over, and we got out of the car. If she didn’t have guns pointed at my loves’ heads, I’d have run for my life. I was a smart woman. I would never end up in a horror movie where I didn’t go out the front door when the killer was in the house. Taking off down the street wouldn’t solve this problem. I had to face it head on.
The building itself looked like any other office building in Manhattan. I’d have loved to have spent some real time gaping at the size of the buildings in New York City and feeling great about being there. The truth was, like Hawaii, which had been on my bucket list, everywhere was just a place right now. I didn’t give a shit where we were, not while Alyssa was in my face.
We walked in together and the inside of the office building didn’t look any different than a million nondescript offices I’d visited before in my life. I hadn’t considered the problem of getting to the locked area itself.
I turned to Alyssa, but she didn’t stop to speak to me. Instead, she strode toward the guard in front of her. Was he one of her men? She pulled a gun out of her pocket and while I watched, shot him in the head.
I gasped as the man who hadn’t even had time to be stunned hit the ground.
I guessed that was a no. He hadn’t been hers, and he was no more. I stared at his dead body on the floor.
“Come on, Everly, sweetheart. We have things to do.”
19
I stared at the dead body on the ground. I didn’t know who this person was, and I was getting a little tired of the body count in my wake. I could almost guarantee he was an Alliance member. No way would an ant—to steal from Kade who learned it from Ben and now Alyssa—guard this place where they stored their prized possessions.
“Everly.” Alyssa snapped her fingers and kept walking.
I pictured punching her in the face. Whack. I’d break her fucking nose. “How many people are going to have to die to get to my father’s vault?”
“It’s not a vault. Just a big locker. I don’t know how many people have to die. As many as have to.”
I hurried to catch up to her. I felt like I might as well have carried a death scythe around with me. Hey, watch out world, Everly Marrs, was coming and when you see me, you will die. I rolled my eyes at my own thought. I hadn’t killed that man. I hadn’t even known he was about to die, but now the person who got off the elevator when we did stared at us with wide eyes.
I didn’t know if he recognized me or if he knew Alyssa or if it was just strange for him to see two women in this building. I’d imagine it had never had one visit in all the years it had been in existence. I grabbed him, pulling him all the way out of the elevator.
“Run, and if you value your life, then don’t look back or tell anyone you saw us here. We’re both incredibly evil people. Go.”
He looked like my father, in the sense that he wore similar, conservative clothing and a bow tie. My father had sometimes sported one. Was this one of the places where all the accountants working for the Alliance hung out? Had he known my father?
These were all questions I wasn’t going to get answers to because instead of asking them, I shoved him hard, hoping it would make him move faster. The elevator doors closed behind us.
Alyssa glared at me. “If I didn’t need your voice to get that lock open, you’d be dead right now.”
I had to get that gun from her. Or find my own. The second I opened the door for her she might very well shoot me. I’d ripped a gun out of Derrick’s hands once just because I’d shocked him by trying to do so. I might be able to pull that off twice.
The little I knew about any of this was that I had to be ready to take any and every opportunity when it presented itself to me.
“We didn’t need to kill him. He gets to go home to his family.”
She lifted her eyebrows slowly, in an annoying way that told me she was doing it for show. Had she looked in the mirror and practiced that move? Read it in a book? How can I look like I’m about to say something of significance 101?
“Did you know that man?” She hit the button to take us down to the basement.
“No, I don’t have to know him. People don’t have to be personally acquainted with me to not be killed.”
She shook her head. “You’re going to regret that when he calls the Alliance authorities and we get killed.”
“There is no Alliance right now except you. Who are they going to call?”
Alyssa blinked. “I… I suppose that is true.”
“It is, and if you’re about to come out of the closet, so to speak, about running things, who cares if he saw you? I mean… enough. Seriously. No one else has to die.”
She didn’t comment which made me more concerned than anything else.
The elevator door opened, and I followed her into the basement. It was well lit and looked more like a storage area, like the one where I’d killed the drug addicts, than any basement I’d ever been in. Her heels clicked on the floor. I hadn’t noticed the sound earlier, but now it was nails on a chalkboard.
I stared down at my sneakers. I was lucky to have them. She could have insisted I dress like her again. In fact, she’d all but suggested that before we left Hawaii. It was like she wanted to play twinsies with me. I didn’t understand her.
I stared at the numbers moving by me as I hurried to keep up with Alyssa. What were in all of these lockers?
“I liked your father. He was a little bit blathering, but I did. I have to admit it was pretty hard-core how he had your mother killed. No sex really to speak of after that until me.”
Oh, no. This was not happening. “I don’t want to discuss my father with you. However you knew him, whatever you did. Keep that to yourself.”
“It’s just sex. God knows you’ve had enough of it. How is my brother?”
Nope. Wasn’t going there either. We must have reached where we needed to be. My father’s locker. This was where he presumably kept all the books he’d used to discredit the guys under the direction of Alyssa. She pointed toward it. “Open it up.”
I stood in front of it, staring at it for a moment. Number 333. I reached up to touch the numbers. I’d been through so much of his stuff when I’d sold the house, when I’d taken down his life, which was really what disposing of things for the dead entailed. The removal of an active life to one that would fade away.
I’d hardly let myself feel anything about it at the time. I’d had to survive the experience, regain some sense of normal, find myself again. I couldn’t deal with the fact that I’d killed him. But now, standing in front of number 333, I felt a sob rise in my throat. Alyssa was not the person for me to have a breakdown with, and if I’d learned anything at all in that time where I’d wrenched myself back from the pit of despair, it was that I could survive things.
<
br /> Opening this door wouldn’t bring my father back to life, it wouldn’t rewind time so I shot him again or didn’t, it was nothing. It was just a door. Still, I reached up to touch the number. Did it mean anything? Had he selected it or was it randomly assigned? Who did the assigning?
“Everly, sweetheart.”
Fuck, I really hated how she called me that. “Why the sweetheart?”
“Because that is what Judson says about you. When he talked about you the day you killed my Ben and shot your father. He was on a stadium calling you kind, calling you nice. If Judson thinks you’re a sweetheart, that’s what I will think, too.”
So in other words, she was fucking with me. Fine, so be it. I stepped forward. The lock looked pretty easy to operate. Mercer had made it for my father, which meant all of the locks in this place had their own ways of entering. The secrets behind these doors… I didn’t even think I wanted to know them.
“If you could go back and never know about the Alliance?” I regarded Alyssa from where she stood, almost too close to me. “Would you? Would you make it so you were kept in the dark? Lived your life. Went to Harvard. Fell in love with Derrick but never knew about any of this, would you do it?”
I hated to even ask her that question because that meant that I’d never have been with Derrick. She’d have been his life, not me.
“I can’t imagine like that. My brain stays in the here and now. What do I have to do to survive? Who do I have to do to survive? What can I do to never be out of control again? How do I make myself more powerful? Those are the questions I ask myself. Not… speculation or bullshit.” She put her hands on her hips. “Do you? Do you think you’d rather not know?”
When faced with my own question, I knew the answer immediately. “No, I’d want to know. I… I might have denied or felt differently before but not now. I’ve changed. And the people I have in my heart now are worth it. The pain.”
I touched the lock. It made a clicking noise. Okay, then it would be my voice and my eye print. Why had he done this? Why had he thought I’d ever get here? I knew the answer. He hadn’t. My father never intended for me to know the Alliance, which meant at the end of the day, he’d considered my being able to do this an impossibility. He didn’t want this lock opened, ever. And yet here I was, doing it.
Sorry, Dad, even after your death I’m always fucking up your plans.
* * *
Kade
Something was wrong. I couldn’t really put my finger on what but this whole place screamed “get out” to me. I’d grown up on comic books and science fiction. I knew when to listen to that little voice inside of me that screamed run. I’d spent my life paying attention to it and I was still here.
I stared at Mercer. He didn’t seem concerned. This was his expensive apartment. I followed real estate. Having never officially bought an actual above ground house until I bought Evy hers, I was still sort of obsessed with it. This was a five million dollar apartment at least, and it overlooked Central Park from the West Side of New York City. Old building but refurbished. Prime real estate. He was proud of it, and he wanted me to be impressed.
That much I’d cued into. It was bizarre… I’d hardly thought of this man, and he’d been outthinking and outgunning me for years basically to get my attention. What was the thing people said? Even negative attention was better than no attention at all.
I really wasn’t cut out for this. Right now I should have been designing a button Everly could wear so she could never be spotted by satellites. I was good at that. I was bad at people.
Except with her. I was good with Everly. Or… for some reason she didn’t mind the ways I did things the wrong way. I’d never loved a woman before and somehow it wasn’t a problem that she also loved the four other guys I could tolerate in the world. Oh, who was I kidding? At this point I cared about them.
“Derrick.” I got up from where I sat on the couch, catching D’s attention. Sometimes I preferred to think of them as Letters. It was easier for us to do hard things together that way. “We need to get out of here.”
I had the attention of everyone in the room right then, even the guards who were going to try to stop us. Derrick lifted his head and met my gaze. Unless you knew him, you’d never know he was tense. I’d watched him play enough baseball to know he had the slightest tell when it came to stress. It was in the way he held his shoulders. I could see it now.
Mercer walked over to me, putting his hand on my arm. “Everything is fine. I know this is shit right now, but Everly is going to be fine. Alyssa will get her back.”
I believed he thought that. Whatever was about to explode, he hadn’t had a hand in. That was interesting. Still, there was something just on the peripheral of my consciousness, and so help me, I wasn’t going to ignore it.
Maybe it was a beep. Was I hearing a beep? Fuck it. I grabbed the gun out of the holster of the guard closest to me and before I’d even lifted it all the way up I fired.
We were getting out of there.
* * *
Everly
The door swung open, and I stepped inside the locker. Inside it was huge but organized. Everything was pressed against the wall with a white sticker label on the outside. I was in a dire situation, but I had to smile. This was what our whole house had been like when I put it on the market. My dad had labeled everything, even the spices. On the outside it would say pepper and he’d have stuck another label on that said pepper-spice.
Everything was cataloged.
He was a murderer who was probably going to kill me. I was all but sure of it. That shouldn’t have surprised me. He’d had his wife, my mother, executed. My feelings for him were so complicated. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get an emotional consensus inside myself with how I felt about him. He’d been my only parent, the one who’d taken care of me when I’d skinned my knees or had my feelings hurt.
“Perfect. I can’t understand why he didn’t just give me what I wanted.” Alyssa scooted by me, walking over to look at several binders to my left. “I need to prove my family’s long term Alliance membership. The men are going to object to me. They can’t have any leg to stand on when it comes to my genetic superiority.”
My father slept with this woman, had screwed up my Letters lives for her, and he wouldn’t give her a genealogy report? Why not?
The dead couldn’t give me answers, so I had to be smart about this. Maybe he thought she wouldn’t like what she found. Judson’s family had been high up in the Alliance a long time. They were important, but she’d needed to marry Derrick because his family had been more connected somehow. That was strange. I walked over to the books and followed the names until I got to the letter N. I pulled out the book.
Alyssa muttered to herself on the other side of the room. She was looking through files. “Your father is a pain in my ass. Why does he have so much stuff?”
I ignored her. This had clearly been his role in the Alliance, to hold onto the genealogies. I flipped through Derrick’s binder, finding his last name, Norris, and looked through it. His family had been in the Alliance a long time, so long there wasn’t record of the first person admitted into that. Was that true for all of them? I grabbed folders. W for Warden White. D for Kade Doyle. H for Trace Hill. S for Judson Smythe. I needed to look through his fast. Alyssa might want to see her family’s folder any second. She might even be looking for it now.
She just didn’t know my father as well as I did. He was psychotic, but he was organized, and I’d lived with his methods my whole life.
I flipped through Warden’s book. Same thing. Long term Alliance membership. If anyone ever got ahold of these books, the people in them were seriously screwed. I quickly set W aside. H… I at least knew where to flip to quickly. Nothing different. D… Same deal. I grabbed S. Funny, how I was back to letters. Every part of my life being dictated by an initial, this time the last name.
Or maybe not, maybe I was on the wrong track and finding nothing of importance. I stared at the S. Immediate
ly, I knew why she’d married Derrick and what she wanted today. The S was traceable. The Smythes weren’t in the Alliance as long as the others. Oh, they’d been in a long time. If this was accurate, my father tracked the first Smythe to come over just after the founding of Jamestown. But not before that.
Ustis Smythe had been granted entry because of a favor done for another Alliance member. What kind of favor had earned entrance? It had probably been deadly or he’d saved a life. Something of significance. But they weren’t anciently connected. The Smythes hadn’t been leading the Alliance since before the birth of Christ. They could be challenged for their ruling.
This was why Alyssa wanted the books. She wanted to hide this. If she was going to convince the Alliance to listen to her as a woman, she couldn’t have them finding cause to say no. I wondered if Jud knew this, and then I dismissed it. He didn’t. As far as my J was concerned he was Alliance royalty. I had to do something about this.
Alyssa started dropping folders onto the ground. It was a perfect opportunity. As quietly as I could, I dropped the S folder into the discard pile and rounded on Alyssa before she could notice what I’d done.
I pushed her, and she fell. I’d never had a playground fight, but this felt similar except that I needed her gun. I hadn’t wanted anyone to get hurt and that included myself. I didn’t want to kill Judson’s sister. What would that do to him?
I ripped the gun out of her waist where she’d shoved the gun into the decorative belt she wrapped around her dress. She gasped and jumped for me, but I took two steps backward, the gun pointed at her by the time I’d found my footing. It was ridiculous how much more settled I felt holding a gun. Weaponry was like my love in this moment, my death wielding security blanket.
“We’re done here. Nothing is going to happen to you if you behave. Come on. We’re going to get my guys. You have access to this place now. We won’t lock it.”
Deadly Truths: Kiss Her Goodbye #3 Page 22