Heated Manipulations

by Aiden Bates

  “You were helping him on his story,” I guessed.

  “As much as I could. The leads he was following, I was already collecting data on.”

  “For your work?”

  “Personal interest,” Nick admitted. “I had, ah. Skin in the game already, I guess you’d say. We were partners in it for a little while—but then, I don’t know. Something happened. Josh started getting a little distant. Keeping me out of the loop.”

  I rubbed the back of my neck, feeling the tension that had been building in my muscles there ever since I’d gotten the call to come ID Josh’s body. Something happened. That was never a good sign. And if Nick had stakes in Josh’s story too…

  “This is for that birth control thing, then.”

  Nick nodded, the color draining from his face a little. “That’s the one.”

  “Still remember when the recall hit the news. I’m an Alpha, of course. Didn’t affect me, but—”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  I shook my head. “I tend to fly solo. But friends of mine, sure. Couple of Omegas I know ended up in a bad way because of it. That heat they went into after they took those pills… One of them’s going to end up a daddy by summer because of it. Can hardly imagine…”

  Nick nodded again, this time a little more grimly. “Yeah. You might not be able to, but…Yeah, I definitely can.”

  I paused, pacing toward the fireplace and avoiding his gaze. When I finally glanced back over to him, I realized he was avoiding mine as well.

  “I’m sorry,” I told him, and meant it. “That must’ve been a head trip.”

  “You’ve got no idea.” Another laugh, this one a little bitter. “It was a long night, anyway. And at the end of it…”

  Nick placed his hand on his stomach, looking down at it as the bitterness softened into something a little more loving. Tender.

  “You’re in the family way too now, then.” I bit my tongue, unsure of how to react, then made a gamble. Looking the way he did, plus the fatherly tinge to his gaze, he must’ve had an Alpha that was helping him through all of this. “Congratulations.”

  “Family of two,” he corrected me. “It’ll just be me and the baby. I’m a little over a month along now. But…yeah. Thanks.”

  “Sorry.” I supposed not every one of my guesses would always be right.

  “Don’t be. At first, it was…scary, sure. I was embarrassed. Felt ashamed. But now that I’ve gotten used to the idea… I always wanted a family. Just, expected it to go a little differently, when the time finally came.”

  “You’re going to be a father. No shame in that.” I tried to sound as reassuring as I could, but the pink that was rising to Nick’s cheeks told me I’d missed my mark there, too.

  “Some shame in how it happened, though. The night I took that bad pill…” He sighed, hesitating.

  “You don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

  Nick shook his head. “No…no, it’s fine. I was out in public when it happened. There’s this place in town, Coda—”

  “Tom Tully’s joint. Sure, I know it. Classy little piano bar, right?”

  “Classy is…not the word I’d use for it. Any other night, maybe. But not that one.” Nick ran his tongue over his lips. “That heat…it wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt before. I was out of control—and so was every Alpha I ran into while it happened.”

  “Fucker skipped town when you told him?” My jaw clenched. Nothing I hated more than an Alpha who couldn’t take responsibility for his own actions—heat-induced or otherwise.

  “He might have—if I knew who it was. I was drunk, and there was…well.” The pink on Nick’s cheeks shifted to bright red. “There was more than one. So.”

  He glanced up at me like he was expecting to see judgment in my gaze.

  He didn’t find it.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out who the father might be ever since,” Nick continued, his blush fading a little. “But if anyone suspects it might be them, they haven’t been interested in coming forward.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” There wasn’t anything else to say. No wonder Josh had been working so hard on that story. For one bad pill, one awful night, to go on to affect so many Omega lives so permanently… He’d always had a soft spot for sad stories. An even softer one for sad stories that might’ve connected to a bigger picture somehow. “You tell Josh all this, then?”

  “Told him my story, sure. And connected him with some other Omegas who had similar ones. None of us got our pills from pharmacies—we ordered them online. Some kind of exclusive sample run direct from the manufacturer.” Nick’s lips thinned into a pale line. “They were supposed to make heats less intense. Instead…” He sighed. “Anyway, Josh seemed really interested in that point. Excited, even. It was…”

  “Weird, right.” I gave a little laugh, remembering how Josh had met breaks in even the darkest stories with that intense sense of delight. “That’s a journalist for you.”

  “Seems that way. I think it was when he was digging into the manufacturer that he started to go a little quieter. Up to that point, we’d shared anything we could find with each other, but after…”

  “What about that night that Josh called you?”

  Nick shrugged. “I didn’t lie to you. I missed that call. No idea what he might’ve had to tell me. He didn’t leave a message. But when I got home…”

  He rose from the couch, brushing past me to pull a book off the shelf. I glanced at the cover—Stephen King’s 11/22/63. It fell open in Nick’s elegant fingers to a bookmarked page. He pulled the marker out from where it was nestled and handed it to me.

  “This had been pushed beneath my door,” Nick explained.

  I read the note over twice, recognizing Josh’s handwriting on it. A little sloppy—he’d obviously written it quickly—but undeniably the scrawl of my brother’s hand.

  Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t trust anyone. Not even the police—this goes deeper than either of us ever imagined.

  “Funny,” I mumbled, reading it over a third time for good measure.

  “Is it?” Nick raised a dubious eyebrow, staring up at me like I was half-crazy.

  “Only in a gallows humor kind of way.” I blinked, biting back the information for a moment while I decided whether I wanted to tell Nick or not.

  He’d been through a lot, from the sounds of things. Been through something that, at thirty-seven, I couldn’t even imagine handling. Especially not on my own. But even though he was ten years younger than me, he seemed to be handling it all pretty well. Holding himself together. Making the best out of the bad. It was admirable—and despite his initial reluctance, he’d already helped me. Maybe more than he knew.

  “Josh had a similar text from someone on his cell,” I revealed. “Unknown number—and unlike you, they haven’t bothered answering my calls.”

  “You got hold of his cell? Thought the police had that locked up in evidence.” Nick looked impressed enough, I almost smiled.

  “I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve for situations like this. Run a private investigation business out in Miami. If it’s taught me anything, it’s that sometimes, you’ve gotta take matters into your own hands.”

  Nick laughed, short and sharp. “That is funny.”

  “Is it?”

  “Josh told me the same thing when we first started working on this thing together.” There was a strange flash of fondness in his eyes—pale blue-gray. The color of the sky just before a storm. “You two are actually a lot alike.”

  “King family genes. They run stronger than you’d think.” I ran a thumb over the note, feeling a little warmth creep into my chest at this little piece of my brother that had made its way back to me. “Anyone else see this yet?”

  “Don’t trust anyone,” Nick quoted.

  “Smart man. Anyone been…hanging around? Making you feel uncomfortable? Making you feel watched?”

  Our eyes both drifted to Nick’s door. The deadbolt. The chain
lock.

  “I’m taking precautions,” he explained. “But no, not yet.”

  “You’re worried, though.”

  He nodded down at the note in my hand. “I’ve got a few reasons to be.”

  I held it up for him. “Mind if I keep this?”

  Nick only shrugged. I pocketed it with a soft little hum.

  “I’m, ah… I’m in a hotel at the moment,” I told him. “And you’ve got my number. I’m sticking around for a while to see if I can’t find out anything that will help all of this start to make sense.”

  “Your brother’s dead, Harper,” Nick said, moving to me. He placed a hand on my elbow, his blue eyes calm and clear. “It’s going to take a while before anything makes sense. Grief is rough like that.”

  “It’ll get easier once I know what happened, though.” I held his gaze, grateful for the little gesture. Out of all the handshakes, hugs and condolences I’d gotten over the past few days, it was the only one that had felt completely unscripted. Wholly genuine. “You think of anything else, you call me.”

  “Sure.”

  I felt the warmth of his hand through my jacket, relishing it for a moment. “And if you need anything—even if it’s not related to Josh or this case…”

  Nick hesitated, biting his lip for a second, then nodded gently. “Thanks, Harper. That means a lot.”

  I slouched back through his front door, folding Josh’s note and pushing it into my pocket. I didn’t leave Nick Paulson’s front step until I’d heard all three locks click into place. Click. Click. Click.

  When I’d told him he was a smart man, I’d meant it.

  Nick had only given me more pieces to this puzzle, but with them, I was beginning to get a sense of the shape of this whole thing. Unfortunately, it was bigger than I’d expected.

  And something told me this was only the start.

  6

  Nick

  I watched through a space in my blinds as Harper King got into his black Mustang, then pulled the curtains shut tight.

  Part of Harper’s visit had been reassuring. Josh might’ve been gone, but whoever did him in hadn’t accounted for the fact that he’d had allies. Maybe I couldn’t help Josh now, but Josh’s handsome, capable, six-foot-four private investigator brother seemed determined to set the record straight. Put things back to right.

  How much right, though? That had yet to be seen. Harper talked a big talk—and from one of the most gorgeous mouths I’d ever seen on a man, to boot. Having seen Harper’s interrogation and reasoning skills in action, I could trust that anyone who had something to hide from him was in trouble. What had taken Josh two visits and a lot of needling had come out of me in barely ten minutes under the gold-flecked gaze of Harper’s bright green eyes. But did he have the skills to take on whatever shadowy, murderous evil that had been willing to kill to keep Josh’s story from breaking?

  I padded back into my office, opening Facebook to try and find an answer to that. I didn’t expect Harper to have some kind of resume of badassery on his Facebook page for all to see, but I did this for a living. Sometimes, it wasn’t the big things that gave a person away. Often, it was the little things that told the real story. All the minutiae of a person’s social media profile, coming together to bring the bigger picture to light.

  To my annoyance, most of Harper’s Facebook was under wraps, however. For someone whose family had once made their name in town by running a security business, I wasn’t exactly surprised. But a little digging into Harper’s LinkedIn page told me that he’d worked for KPS almost ten years ago. A little more told me that he’d left it for a big legal firm in Miami, after which his work history dropped off the radar completely.

  Appropriate for a private investigator, I supposed. There was no way to track down cheating husbands and money-laundering employees if a page on the internet revealed you weren’t exactly a tourist with a nice camera snapping pictures for the family photo album.

  With that in mind, further digging was required. The Fort Greene Gazette archives turned up a picture of the four King boys outside the King Private Security building nearly twenty-five years ago with a headline announcing the firm’s grand opening attached. There was an older man with them, standing tall with the hint of a smile at one corner of his mouth and a baby that must have been Josh in his arms. I didn’t have to read the caption to know that he must have been Harper’s father—Harper obviously favored him.

  A search of the other King boys back on Facebook gave me another picture to go off of, this one more recent. Kaleb King didn’t have a profile to speak of, but Rusty King was apparently a pretty prominent MMA fighter with his own fan page. A little scrolling revealed a post from five years ago, all four brothers with their arms around each other, lit up by the Las Vegas lights.

  They looked happy together—especially Joshua. I saved the picture on my desktop, feeling oddly sentimental over an event I hadn’t even been at. Seeing the way Josh’s face was transformed with a smile while Harper threw up bunny ears behind Rusty’s head was a much-needed sight, given the other feelings Harper’s visit had left me with.

  My hunch hadn’t been wrong. Someone—or several someones—had almost certainly wanted Josh dead. They’d gotten their wish. And while the police might’ve believed it was just a robbery gone wrong, Harper King was obviously not so easily misled.

  Satisfied with my digging, I set about the rest of my real work for the day. Data to analyze. Patterns to figure out. I sent my final round of analytics on the profiles of Victor’s Secret models over for Salinger Image’s Omega underwear influencers just as the sun sank beneath the horizon and my stomach began to growl.

  “Okay, baby,” I said to my stomach, patting it reassuringly as I sent my final invoice of the day. “I know, I know. More salt. Let’s get dinner on.”

  I diced up an eggplant, a zucchini and an onion, then set them to sauté in some olive oil and minced garlic while I whipped up a pesto sauce in my food processor, boiling some whole wheat pasta al dente on the stove. It wasn’t easy, trying to manage my sodium levels to keep my blood pressure down when all this baby wanted me to do was sit around with a salt lick all day, but I figured some vegetables paired with a nice Parmesan and some pine nuts might do the trick. There was an apple tart in the oven for dessert—nothing fancy. Just a little sweet note to end the night on.

  I was just mixing the pasta and sauce together when I saw a pair of headlights light up the curtains in the living room. A few minutes later, they returned—and this time, they lingered.

  Strange. There was no stop sign outside my house. No traffic to cause a vehicle to sit and wait around at the intersection for so long.

  “I think you’re making me paranoid, baby,” I chatted idly at my stomach, sighing as I abandoned my dinner to peel back the curtains and peer through the blinds.

  It was just a car, of course. Parked in the NO PARKING area on the street facing me, sure, but not particularly sinister looking. I imagined the kind of people who murdered for hire drove around in black utility vans with unlikely sounding plumbing businesses advertised on the sides. Sleek SUVs with tinted windows. Not gray Honda Odysseys parked illegally with their lights on.

  Probably just one of the neighborhood teens borrowing their mom’s car to pick up their friends, I decided as I turned back to my pesto. Nothing unusual. Just a normal Saturday night in Fort Greene.

  But ten minutes later when the headlights finally turned off, I checked again.

  Still there. Still waiting.

  And now that I wasn’t being blinded by the headlights, I could tell that someone was inside.

  I drew away from the window slowly, letting the curtains flutter back into place. My heart was pounding, hard and fast like a techno bass line. I twisted my fingers in my hand, setting into a pace across my living room floor that only amped up my nerves even more.

  Maybe I was just paranoid—but I was someone who had a lot to be paranoid about. Harper had asked me if I felt watched, and i
n that moment, with the way my adrenal glands were firing off, I might as well have invited an entire reality production crew into my house to film me.

  Something about this didn’t feel right—and if there was ever a time to indulge in my gut feelings, it was now.

  BEEP! BEEP!

  The sound of my smoke alarm erupted from the kitchen, leaving me practically jumping out of my own skin. I rushed into the kitchen to find smoke snaking up from the stove toward the ceiling.

  Fuck. In all my nervousness, I’d managed to forget about the apple tart.

  I pulled it out of the oven, cursing my sweet tooth all the while. Maybe the baby had been right—salt, yes. Sugar, hell no.

  The tart was just scorched to the point that I knew I probably wouldn’t enjoy eating it. I dumped it into the trash and turned off the oven, waving smoke away from my face as I went.

  But when I went back to the window, tiptoeing over with care, the car was still outside.

  Not normal. Very not normal.

  As panic set in, I did the only thing I could think of.

  I dialed up Harper King’s number and prayed that he would answer.

  “Nick?” There was already an edge to Harper’s voice when he answered—one that could go the way of excitement or grim dismay.

  “I’m so sorry to bother you, Harper—”

  “Don’t worry about it. Told you to call if you needed anything. What’s up?”

  “There’s…” I sighed. It sounded stupid now that I had to say the words out loud, but the feeling of dread settling in my stomach refused to budge. “There’s a car outside. Someone in the driver’s seat. A man, I think. I know it’s ridiculous, but—”

  “It’s not ridiculous. What’s your gut say?”

  I swallowed hard. “Nothing good. Joshua tried to warn me, and now— Harper, what if they’re coming for me now? What do I do?”

  “You got any guns in the house?”

  I blinked. “No. I don’t know how to shoot.”

  “For the best, then. Grab something heavy, just in case. A metal flashlight will do in a pinch.”