AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yeah, but the thing is...hang on.” She drops the newspaper on my desk, brittle and brown from Avery’s blood. I hear her greeting people in the bullpen. Asking a question I can’t make out. My body is fucking ready for this. If she’s got something, a lead, anything. Isobel comes in a minute later, cheeks flushed. “Check this shit out.”
It’s another newspaper. I scan the front. “Is that—?”
“The same date as this one. See?” She puts them side by side, so we both know we’re not making shit up. “This is a first edition copy of the newspaper. A test run.”
“Newspapers don’t have test runs.”
“Yes, they do. Seriously. It happens all the time. If big news breaks after a newspaper prints the first run during the night, they have to scramble to come up with second-edition copies. Those are the ones that go out to everybody. This one would only have been circulated within the newspaper office itself as a final draft. So.” Isobel takes a deep breath, working her face into an expression of professional calm. “Who would have had access to first-run copies of this newspaper?”
Oh, damn.
I turn around to my computer and beat on the keyboard until it does me the honor of starting up. I have to be sure before I say anything, but there’s one witness to the kidnapping who has a connection. I’m fucking sure of it. And there it is, part of his interview file.
Majority stakeholder in The Verona Times.
“Joshua Grayson. He’s a stakeholder. The majority stakeholder.”
Isobel’s already reaching for her phone. “Let’s go have a little chat with Mr. Grayson, shall we?”
Inside half an hour, we have a team at his house. Inside thirty-five minutes, they find the same videos on his laptop as we found on Will’s. They were obviously working as a pair. Inside forty minutes, Joshua Grayson is in handcuffs, headed for a jail cell, and I get to call Avery and tell her we have a new lead suspect.
Her fiancé.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
ROME
I’ll just say this—jail is easy.
In jail, you can see where the torture’s coming from. The assholes who like to dole it out might as well be wearing neon signs above their heads. It’s a simple game to avoid them. It’s a game I’m playing at a fairly high level these days because I’m still fucking wounded, which is not the optimal condition for being locked up. But I’ve been here before. I’ll get out again.I will get out again. I tell myself that hourly, so I don’t go fucking insane.
I’ve let the murder charges and all my little chitchats with the lawyer skim over my consciousness. Jail might be easy but that’s only as long as I don’t dwell on the fact that I’ve traded one dungeon for another. This dungeon is safer, even when taking the gang members into account. They have more targets on the inside. It’s not just me and Avery.
That’s the other thing.I miss her.
I will never say that out loud, not to anyone. But I miss her like I would miss my own arms and legs. It’s as if the XO killer has cut off all my limbs. I miss her like I’m coming off drugs. If I think about it too hard, I find myself fantasizing about the moment when I went under from what I thought was the final overdose. I was holding her hand.
Lucky for me, detaching myself from all of the daily bullshit is a skill I gained early in life as a Montague. Avery did her part to reinforce it when she sent me to jail the first time. It’s a neat split. Mind and body, disconnected. Go through the motions. Survive another day. Dodge the sharp shank blades and surprise fists to the face. Live long enough to attend the next court hearing. Stand up in front of the judge, keep my eyes open, pretend not to care.
That’s what I’m doing on the day everything changes.
Sounds fucking dramatic, doesn’t it?Everything changes.But it does. I’m sitting in the pale sunlight coming over the exercise yard walls, listening to a drug dealer talk about his own bust and skimming along the surface. I’m here in body, but not in soul. Then the world reaches up and pulls me under, my lungs filling up with water. A boulder crashes in over my head, disturbing the ocean floor and flooding it with dirt and silt.
The boulder is in the shape of Joshua Grayson.
The other guys notice it, too.
Jails like the one in Verona don’t get guys like Joshua Grayson that often. Guys with his bank balance and social standing are usually in minimum security federal prisons for shit like insider trading. So when he steps out into the courtyard, blinking in the sun, everything around him...pauses.
It doesn’tstop, because when you’re spending your life in a ten-by-ten cage, you don’t fucking waste your precious outdoor minutes. It’s more like all the motion in the courtyard skips a beat. Guys stop talking. A basketball game halts mid-dribble, the dude holding the ball watching Grayson with interest.
Joshua Grayson looks nothing like he did the last time I saw him.
It was in the underground garage, the first–and last–time I laid eyes on him. He was in a tuxedo, looking every inch the new Capulet heir apparent. Avery clung to his arm, her face white. He wore a self-satisfied look on his face, even in the midst of chaos. That smug fuck thought he had everything under control. He was ready to hustle her into the back of a reinforced car and get the hell out of there.
Thisguy wears the standard prison jumpsuit like an uncomfortable second skin. He’s got the same smirk on his face, jaw set, but he’s a hell of a lot more rumpled than he was that night. The arrest came as a surprise, by the looks of him. Most arrests do.
Somebody whistles long and low from the other corner of the courtyard. “You’re too rich to be here, boy.”
