AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Nick nodded.
“I know where you’re coming from, more than you could possibly understand.” A shadow passed over Damian’s face. “It’s because I understand that I feel compelled to issue a warning: desperation is dangerous. It makes you foolish, reckless. It makes you do stupid things in an effort to make something happen when sometimes the best thing to do is nothing at all.”
“Nothing?” Declan shook his head. “That’s your advice? Do nothing?”
“In my experience, if you give people like the Walkers enough rope, they eventually hang themselves. One crime? Not so hard to cover up if you’re smart with unlimited resources. A string of them spanning decades? Committed by someone who now has a high profile?”
“You think they’ll make a mistake,” Nick said.
“I know they will. People like Leland Walker don’t change.” Damian stood, removed his wallet,and threw a $20 on the table. “I’ll have our guys take a look, but if you really want my advice, it’s to wait — keep watching and wait for them to fuck up. It’s not the satisfying answer, but it’s the right one.”
He stepped away from the table and headed for the door, calling out a thank you to the waitress on his way out the door.
3
Alexa stood next to the counter in the kitchen, tapping her fingers on the granite countertop as John Thomas wailed.
“How much longer?” Nick called, pacing the floor in the living room with the baby in his arms.
“Just a few seconds,” she called out, wondering if he could even hear her over the baby’s crying.
The bottle warmer heated the frozen milk in less than two minutes, but it was funny how two minutes could feel like forever when a baby was screaming for food.
The warmer beeped and she removed the bottle and shook it to make sure the heat was even, then tested it on her wrist the way Julia had taught her.The milk was warm and she rinsed off her wrist and hurried into the living room.
“Here you go,” she said, holding the bottle out to Nick.
He held out the baby. “You want to…?”
“It’s okay,” she said, thrusting the bottle more insistently at Nick. “You’ve already got him.”
He took the bottle and touched it to the baby’s lips and the baby immediately started sucking, taking long pulls on the bottle as if he’d been starving when Julia had nursed him right before she and Ronan left the house for one of their very few date nights.
Alexa took a seat next to Nick on the couch, avoiding his eyes. Had there been a shadow of concern there when she’d refused the baby? Had he caught onto the fact that Alexa tried to avoid holding John Thomas?
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to hold the baby. She longed to hold him, even dreamt about holding him. It was the very strength of her desire that scared her.
During the few times she’d been corralled into holding him her chest had filled with unnamable emotion until she thought it might burst. She marveled at the infant’s tiny body, the silken fuzzcovering his smooth head. It was surreal to look into his face, to see Ronan’s eyes and Julia’s mouth in miniature, to know their love had created a tiny person.
She’d been simultaneously terrified and overwhelmed with love, filled with joy that such creation was possible and filled with despair that the experience was denied to her.
But it was the shame that nearly killed her. It was because of her that the kitchen had caught fire the night of the assault at the hotel. Frederick Walker had been sending a message to the Murphys, letting them know that if they aligned themselves with Alexa, if they continued digging into Leland’s past and trying to derail his political career, they would pay.
The alarm had gone off when the Molotov cocktail had been thrown into the courtyard, but by the time the police arrived the kitchen was already on fire, the perpetrators long gone.
And she hadn’t just put them in physical danger. By being in such close proximity to the criminal activity surrounding Alexa — the break-in at her apartment, the invasion of the hotel that had left multiple dead bodies in its wake, the targeting of the Murphy house — the Murphys were shining aspotlight on their business and themselves at a time when they couldn’t afford the attention.
The AG’s office had opened a formal investigation into MIS, a follow-up to the allegations leaked by Yael Dohan when Ronan, Nick, and Declan had been trying to bring down the organization responsible for Elise’s kidnapping. She and Nick had coordinated their stories with Ronan, Julia, Declan, and Elise when they’d been interviewed by the police, but Alexa hadn’t been surprised to see suspicion in the detectives’ eyes.
They’d all been called in more than once — Alexa, Nick, and Ronan three times — for interviews about the night of the hotel invasion and fire at the house. It had been obvious from the line of questioning that the police didn’t think they were getting the whole story, but without proof of a connection between them and the dead men Nick had left in their wake at the hotel, they didn’t have anything but a man defending himself and his girlfriend from a gang of criminals.
Despite all of it, Ronan and Julia had welcomed Alexa into the house like a member of the family. They refused her offers to contribute to the household expenses, balking even when she stopped to pick up groceries, one of the few ways she managedto pitch in.
They didn’t need the help. She knew from her background at the AG’s office that the Murphys were rich. And not just garden-variety affluent, but truly wealthy.
It had been a surprise to her. On a day-to-day basis, they didn’t live like they were rich. Sure, the house was elaborate, professionally designed inside and out and massive by city standards. But other than the house and their cars, their outward displays of wealth were few and far between. They were as likely to wear jeans and T-shirts as they were to wear suits, and they spent their free time playing frisbee on the beach with a picnic packed from home.
But their wealth had become apparent as soon as she’d looked under the hood. There was a private plane ostensibly used for company business, multiple investment accounts in each of their names, multiple houses across the globe, a boat moored in the harbor, and several investments with small companies in emerging industries.
