Crash for Me (The Blankenships Book 7) (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

Alex didn’t need anyone to tell him that the press conference had been a disaster. His carefully prepared statement regarding the future of AEGIS after the heart breaking loss of its emotional center—he almost laughed when he’d written it, near giggles at the idea of his mother being called the emotional center of anything beyond a pit of despair—had been shouted down by reporters desperate to figure out what, if anything, he knew about the deaths of his mother and his sister. He’d gotten tired of trying to shout his prepared remarks, tired of shouting no comment, and when his temper finally snapped, he’d cursed at the reporters. It was a good thing he’d had the speech on a tablet, or he might very well have flung that at them, too.

It was a rookie mistake, the mistake of a high strung kid, not someone who’d been trained to exist in the public eye for most of his life. He knew how to grin and let it go, turn it into a joke, make the press laugh and love him. God knew he’d had to learn. They certainly weren’t going to do it for him like they would have if—well. Olivia had quoted her father once, well drunk on wine, telling Alex to shit in one hand and wish in the other. She’d been too slurry to finish the quip, but he knew the rest of it.

See which one fills up first.

Was that what he was doing with Zoey? Wishing for a dream that he couldn’t ever have? She said she loved him, but there was a not small part of him doubting if she could ever really mean it. Since they’d known each other, he’d brought her nothing but pain. Helping her get a good job, maybe find a better apartment, wasn’t going to balance out against exposing her to so much fear and death. It was impossible.

He took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.
Irrational thoughts
, he told himself. Zoey insisted that she was with him because she wanted to be. It was her job to decide where she wanted to be, and his job to take her at her word.

After cursing out the reporters, he went back inside AEGIS and gone up to his office. He stared at his computer for a while, wondering what in the name of hell he was going to do.

Business as usual was going on outside his door, but other than someone from the lower floors coming up to let him know that Brianna had picked up her things and asking if he wanted to look for an assistant internally or hire out through a temp agency, no one bothered him.

He stood up and walked the halls until he found himself outside Olivia’s office. The door was closed, but unlocked. He went inside, shutting the door behind him.

The air already seemed stale, the office uninhabited. All of her things were still here. The desk surface was spotlessly clean, completely sterile. The only concession to life in the room was the plant hanging in the corner, and he knew damned well that the only reason it survived was that the same person who tended the plants in the hallway had tended this one as well.

He rested his hand on the back of her chair, considering it for a moment. He’d never sat in his father’s chair, and he’d never particularly thought of sitting in hers either, but somehow, it seemed the right thing to do. It was set far too low, his knees rising up at an angle from his hips, but it was his mother’s chair. It expelled a light whiff of her perfume before allowing the scent to fade.

He leaned back, resting his elbows on the chair’s arms and steepling his fingers.

There was more going on than anyone knew. It might be over. He thought that he was supposed to think that it was over. He was supposed to think that Olivia was behind it all, and that either she’d killed herself from the guilt of targeting her own child, or killed herself from guilt that she’d killed the wrong child. But it didn’t wash, somehow. It didn’t make sense.

He ran his hands over the desktop, and his fingers brushed the mouse. The computer hadn’t been shut off, just left to sleep, and the lock screen challenged him for a password. He reached forward and turned the monitor off. Everyone else he knew had changed the background on their computer. It was practically the first thing someone did on their first day, part of setting up their desk. His mother’s computer still boasted the AEGIS logo, and nothing else.

He’d tell IT to wipe the computer. No reason it needed to go to waste.

There was a soft tap on the door, somewhat gentler than a knock. He had to clear his throat before he could speak. “Come in,” he called, after a moment.

One of the assistants poked her head in. “I apologize for disturbing you, sir, but there’s a gentleman here to see you. I wasn’t sure if you’d be available…?” She trailed off, and her pretty blue eyes watched him hopefully.

There was a time he would have flirted with her, sexual harassment lawsuits be damned. There was a time when he would have let such a pretty girl know that, if she was interested, he’d be at such and such a bar at such and such a time, and no harm no foul if she was busy, but if she wasn’t busy…there had been a time when such things had intrigued him. It wasn’t that he was with Zoey now shutting of his dick; it was the hurt that was surging through him all the time. It was the sense that nothing he did would be right, ever again.

“Who is it?” He asked.

She shook her head impatiently, like she should have mentioned that already. Which, to be fair, she should have. “A Mr. Leonard Khodorkovsky?”

Alex felt a twinge in the center of his chest. Neither he nor Zoey had given any thought to Leo after their adventure a few nights before. He knew he should be ashamed of that, but he couldn’t muster up the energy. “Of course,” he said. “I’ll see him in here, if you don’t mind. I’m in the middle of something.”

It was a total lie, of course, but she didn’t so much as blink. She closed the door, and a few moments later, it opened again to admit Leo.

He managed to stand for that, to accept the huge, bearish embrace of his friend. That much, at least, he could do.

“How are you holding up?” Leo asked, after they’d sat back down. Alex switched around to sit on the same side of the desk as Leo; it was far too awkward to put his mother’s desk between them.

Alex didn’t know what to do other than shrug. “They think my mother killed herself.”

“And you disagree?”

Alex snorted. “The stubborn bitch would never off herself when she could have stuck around and made herself miserable.”

“The newspaper said that she had been drinking, and had taken a number of medications. She may not have been in her right mind.”

Alex shook his head. He knew the motion was stubborn, but it was also truthful. “I just don’t believe it, Leo. I can’t.”

“All right,” the big man said, his tone calm and placid. “Then what is your next step?”

“I don’t know. I can’t prove any of the things I think. I don’t even know how to tell Zoey that she’s safe…,” he trailed off.

“
Da
,” Leo said. “And perhaps this is your biggest worry?”

“Perhaps it is.”

“If it comes to it, my friend, I will get you out of the city.” Alex started to speak, but Leo made a sharp motion with his hand, and Alex let him continue. “We do not tend to talk of what I do here. It’s better for both of us that you remain unstained by my work, and I remain unstained by your morals and ideals. But if things become dangerous for you here—I will get you out. You, and the dear Zoey as well.”

There was some part of him that thought he should argue. That if the criminal justice system thought that he should be charged with a crime, then he should stay put and allow the system to work. After all, he had enough money to hire the very best lawyers and make sure that any charge was legitimate. He wouldn’t be put in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. He knew that much for certain.

Unless the person framing him was very, very good. That was something to consider. It was commonly known that there was no real love lost between himself and either of his parents, and god help him, but someone could probably come up with a motive for why he’d hurt Claire if they tried hard enough. To get at her shares for AEGIS, or to secure his own fortune. And if he were put in prison, who would be there to protect Zoey?

Not that she couldn’t protect herself. But if there was something deeper going on, if he was being pulled into the seedy underworld that he was starting to suspect that Philip had swum in every chance he got, Who could really protect themselves from that?

He was in a position of intense privilege here. He could get out of the country, somewhere where no one would be able to touch him. He could transfer enough money into offshore accounts that he would never want for a thing, especially in countries where dollars went an awful lot farther than they did in the United States. Or he could stay and hire a high priced defense attorney who, at the very worst, would see him serve a minimum sentence in some rich people prison.

As long as the judge and jury didn’t get caught up on the color of his skin. He was half white, after all, but on the witness stand, that wasn’t the half they’d see.

“Thank you,” he said to Leo. “I appreciate it. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”

Leo nodded, but he didn’t look even remotely convinced. Alex wasn’t what a person would call convinced of his own safety, either.

“So what do you need from me?”

Leo shook his head. “Nothing. And the less you know, the better, so don’t ask me about how I make these things happen.”

Alex hadn’t planned on asking, but all the same, it was a sensible thing to hear, in its own way.

“How is Zoey?” Leo’s voice was casual, almost too much so. Alex felt a faint smile trying to bend his lips. Good thing he’d met Zoey first, apparently.

“As well as can be expected,” he replied. “She’s nervous. A little frightened. But better than I might have hoped.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Leo said. “Would you welcome company tonight?”

“As far as dinner and company, absolutely. As far as anything else—things have happened so fast that we haven’t had a chance to talk, and I don’t want to agree to something on her behalf.”

“Of course,” Leo nodded. He started to say something else, but the trill of a phone interrupted him. It took Alex a long, embarrassing moment to realize that the ring tone was coming from his pocket.

“I’m sorry.” He pulled the phone out and frowned at the screen. The phone number on the caller ID was one of the internal exchanges at AEGIS. “Just a moment.”

The caller was young, and Alex’s brain spun for a moment, trying to place the voice that stuttered through calling him “Mr. Blankenship.”

“This is he.”

The young man cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for calling your cell phone, sir, but I didn’t know if you were in your office today, what with—everything—and I thought you’d want to know as soon as I found out.”

Alex choked down the urge to shout at someone and forced himself to smile before he answered. “And who am I speaking to?”

The young man cursed. “Sorry—sorry—this is Jason, in IT?”

It took a long moment to realize why IT might be trying to contact him. After all, it had been a very long time since he’d thought about Philip’s laptop. “Yes, James, hello. Thank you for calling me. What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Blankenship, I finally got the password cracked.”

Alex sat up straight, his pulse thrumming in his throat. “What?”

“It’s been the weirdest thing. I’d reset it, set it to something neutral, and then five minutes later, it wouldn’t work. For weeks. But today, it finally behaved.”

Today, the day after Olivia died. Discomfort curled in his stomach, and he fought down a rising tide of fury and fear. What had she been hiding from him?

“Anyway, if you want to come in to the office and pick it up? I haven’t looked at anything on the hard drive, just like we talked about, but you should be able to access anything from here.”

He felt—dizzy. Frightened. Excited. Perhaps there would be something on the laptop that would put a final ending on this whole disastrous mystery. “I’m in the building, but not in my office. Would you be able to bring the laptop by in about—call it fifteen minutes?”