“Thanks for your help, Mr Parker. I’ll see you soon.” He leaves the room as Eve starts to moan and move about again.
“Eve?” I lean over her as her eyes begin to flutter open. A huge wave of relief crashes into me, making me grip the edge of the bed rail to keep me steady. She looks confused for a moment before the creases on her forehead smooth out.
“Mason?” she croaks out, her voice sounding hoarse.
“Here, let me get you some water.” I grab the jug from beside the bed and fill a little plastic cup. There are a couple of straws beside it so I grab one and pop it into the cup and hold it to her lips. She sips greedily until all the liquid is gone. I place the cup down and turn back to her. I sit on the edge of the bed, careful not to bump her, and smooth some of her wayward hair away from her face.
“How you feeling?”
“Like I got hit by a car.” She smiles at me wryly, but it turns into a grimace when it pulls on the split in her lip.
“That’s because you were in a car accident, pretty girl.”
“Urgh, don’t remind me. And what’s with the nickname? I think I’m more hot mess than pretty girl.”
“You will always be beautiful to me, Eve.”
She looks away and I worry I’ve pushed her too far. “He found me quicker than I thought. Guess someone must have called the police before he could finish me off. So, tell me, what’s the damage? I still need to get out of here before he comes back to finish the job.”
“We’ll come back to that comment in a second. As for injuries, you were lucky. You have a concussion from a thump to the head and you have some extensive bruising especially where the seatbelt did its job so your ribs will probably feel tender.”
“Shit,” she hisses out. “How the hell am I supposed to drive anywhere in this state?”
“I hate to break it to you, Eve, but you won’t be driving anywhere. Even if you could drive, which just to clarify you can’t, your car is totalled.”
Her face pales as she realises she is truly stuck here.
“Calm down, pretty girl. I’m taking you home with me. Whoever is after you won’t know anything about me. I told people here that I was your fiancé so they wouldn’t kick me out but apart from that, we have no link to each other outside of work. That will buy us a couple of days for you to rest. Then I will drive you anywhere you want to go but, Eve, I’m going with you.”
She opens her mouth to protest but I stop her.
“You need me, Eve, you can’t do it alone anymore.”
She is quiet as she watches me. She doesn’t say anything for so long that I start to worry. Before I can reassure her some more, she speaks. “Fiancé, huh?”
I chuckle at her cocked eyebrow. “I wanted to make sure I could stay with you. Acknowledging the elephant in the room, I need to know what’s going on and who is after you but all that can wait until we get you home. I’m going to call for the nurse so she can get you checked over and get your medication sorted for you, all right?”
She nods reluctantly as I hit the call button for the nurse. The nurse comes in followed by the doctor who runs through Eve’s list of injuries as they check her over. She insists I stay with her, clearly uncomfortable with the idea of being left alone with them but she needn’t have worried. I’m not going anywhere. After she’s checked over, we find ourselves waiting in her room for her discharge papers. She has been quiet since the nurse left to collect her pills, but it’s been a long day so I let her have her space.
“I don’t want to tell you what happened.” She breaks the silence as she twists her fingers in her lap.
“Eve….”
“I don’t want to tell you, Mason. It’s not a pretty story. What happens if it changes the way you look at me?”
I lean down over her but only touch her with my forehead as it lightly presses against hers. “And how do I look at you, Eve?
“Like I’m a cupcake and you’ve been on a diet for a year.”
A surprised laugh leaves my mouth at her cute analogy, but she is far from wrong. “All in good time, pretty girl, but for now all you need to know is that I will never judge you for your past. That’s why it’s called the past, it’s over and done with. I have skeletons in my closest too that I would rather not have to share but I don’t want to start whatever this is between us out on secrets and lies, so you need to know. The good, the bad, and the ugly. I just pray that you don’t look at me any differently than how you are looking at me right now.”
“And how am I looking at you?” she whispers softly.
“Like I’m a glass of whisky and you’ve been sober for years.”
She smiles at me, wincing yet again when her lip pulls.
“The fact is, we have both had to learn hard lessons but hopefully we have come out the other side stronger than before. Like an Eve 2.0.”
She frowns now as she considers her next words.
“What’s wrong, Eve?”
“It’s Eden,” she tells me, twisting her fingers in the bed sheet. “My name is Eden.”
Chapter Four
ELI
I’m just finishing up going through what I could find about Eve Temptation which quite frankly is fuck all when the door to the hotel room slams open.
“Let yourself in, Noah,” I mumble, scanning the screen in front of me. A home address which I gave Noah earlier and a mobile number is the extent of information I have been able to dig up. This girl is surprisingly good at living off the radar. She pays rent on a flat six months in advance, in cash. She has a car, also bought with cash, and a job which must pay her under the table because I can’t find a bank account in her name anywhere.
“She’s gone.”
I look up at an irate Noah and sigh. I knew this shit was too good to be true. Guess we won’t be going home anytime soon then. “What do you mean she’s gone? Gone where?”
“How the fuck am I supposed to know? Her place is empty of anything personal so there is nothing there to obtain a DNA sample from.”
“Further proof, if you ask me, that it’s the right girl if she is running after our little encounter last night.”
“Let’s just pack up our shit and head down to the strip club. It’s a long shot but she might have left a forwarding address or told a friend where she was going. I’m going to jump in the shower then we can leave. There is no point hanging around here if she has already left.”
Now that we can agree on. I pack up my stuff while he’s in the bathroom and do a quick sweep of the room to make sure we haven’t missed anything. I take my stuff down to the car before jogging back up to the room. Noah is tying his shoes when I open the door. He is dressed similarly to me in a grey suit but in a darker shade to mine and wears his don’t fuck with me expression as per usual. He looks up when I walk in and nods his head to his own holdall on the bed behind him.
“I tossed your stuff from the bathroom in there with mine. You ready?”
“Thanks, man, yeah, I’m all set.” I walk over to my own bed and pick up my laptop bag and sling it over my shoulder before following him out the door.
Thirty minutes later finds us back at the bar in Midas trying to catch the attention of a harried bartender who looks like she wishes she could be anywhere but here. Yeah, sweetheart, I know that feeling. It’s surprisingly busy considering the early hour but then I guess sex sells regardless of whether it’s night or day.
Finally, the bartender spots us and makes her way over, pulling her top down to showcase her boobs and plastering a wanton smile on her face.
“Afternoon, darling. I was wondering if you knew where we could find Eve?”
Her smile disappears as she eyes us with distrust. “She doesn’t work here anymore, some kind of family emergency or something.”
“Jackie!” a voice bellows from the other end of the bar making her turn. A portly man with a receding hairline and a furious expression on his face stares at us from across the bar as Jackie scurries off to serve someone else. He storms
toward us clearly unfazed by the fact that both Noah and I tower over him.
“Get the fuck out of my club and stay away from Eve or I will call the cops.”
I raise my hands in a placating gesture to let him know that we aren’t looking for any trouble.
“Her stepfather is a cop and he has been going out of his mind for the past six years not knowing if she was alive or in a gutter somewhere,” Noah tells him, anger clear in his voice.
“I don’t give a fuck who he is. What I care about is the fact that you two fucks turn up here last night and today Eve gets run off the road and left for dead.”
I whip my head round to Noah who is staring in shock at me too. It’s a nasty occurrence for sure but still just an unfortunate coincidence.
“I’m sorry, sir, but that had nothing to do with us.”
“Right…You keep telling yourselves that. Don’t come back here. You won’t be allowed in again.”
“Come on, Noah, let’s get out of here.” I nudge his shoulder, but he doesn’t move for a second continuing his staredown with the man in front of us.
“I get that you might care about her, but she was just fifteen when she ran, leaving behind someone who has spent years suffering. We aren’t in the business of stirring up trouble, we’re just trying to give the people left behind some closure.”
“Now doesn’t that sound so gallant?” he answers in a mocking tone. “What about Eve? What about what she wants? Or better yet why not ask yourself this, what is so bad at home that it makes a fifteen-year-old girl run off in the dead of night and never go back?”
This time Noah allows me to maneuver him outside. We walk to the car in silence, him brooding, me contemplating that guy’s words. Did we fuck up? We climb in and sit for a minute. Noah doesn’t even start the engine. He just grips the steering wheel hard enough to turn his knuckles white.
“Find out what hospital she is at,” he tells me, his voice loud in the confines of the car. I’m already one step ahead of him. Despite my earlier feelings of conflict about doing illegal shit, this doesn’t bother me one bit. With my laptop balanced precariously on my leg, I hack into the police database and find out that a female fitting Eve’s description was pulled from the wreckage of a car and taken to Bellevue Hospital about forty-five miles north of here. I type the GPS coordinates into the satnav and shut the laptop down as Noah finally starts the car and heads toward Bellevue.
“I need you to be honest with me here, Eli, because for whatever reason this case is clouding my judgement. What’s your gut telling you?”
I close my eyes and think about all the information we have on this case. “She ran when she was fifteen and left no trace. We only found her by sheer luck. If your contact hadn’t recognised that photo of Eden and the new name he had given her on her fake ID, we wouldn’t even be here. What fifteen-year-old has that kind of skill? To blend in, hide and adapt like that. We were under the impression she had a meltdown after her mother’s death and became a junkie but that doesn’t fit with someone as smart and resourceful as she obviously appears. Plus, the only person who had seen her before her disappearance was her stepfather. Everyone else assumed she was just grieving her mother, so we took Karl’s answers as gospel. He was the one who gave us all the information about her and he was the one who wanted to get her declared legally dead. The only reason we were assigned this case to begin with was because every avenue he tried had failed.”
“So, what are you saying?” he asks but his voice is quiet like he’s just waiting for me to confirm what he’s thinking.
“I think Eden Myers ran away to keep herself safe and we just gave her whereabouts to a predator intent on finding her.”
“Fuck!” He punches the steering wheel but manages to stay in control of the car.
To be honest, I don’t think I would care if we did hit something. Crashing at this point would be karma’s way of evening the score. How the hell did this manage to slip through the net?
“It was the badge,” Noah answers the question I was just contemplating. “We bought into everything he said because he is a decorated police officer and a well-respected one at that. We would never have taken any of this information beyond face value if it had come from anyone else. Never again, Eli. This shit can’t ever happen again. We need to get to this hospital and make shit right. We are going to be sticking close to Eden like white on rice until I can determine if the threat to her safety is over. Call Malcolm, fill him in on what’s going on and tell him we are not taking on any more jobs until this situation is rectified.”
“On it.”
I make the call as Noah drives like a bat out of hell to get us to the hospital. To say that Malcolm is not impressed would be an understatement. I don’t think I have ever heard the guy swear so liberally before but he could have given Noah a run for his money. Malcolm is somewhat of an anomaly to me. A big cat within the legal system, he spent years building his law firm into one of the most successful firms in the country. He was ruthless, cunning, and somewhat of an asshole but as I was just a junior apprentice at the time, I had to suck it up. Then something changed, not overnight but gradually. He lost a friend to cancer and became a father figure to the widow left behind. She helped change him drastically. The big cat became the leopard that changed his spots. Now he has two goddaughters that have him wrapped around their fingers. Doing all the legwork so a psychopath can finish the job he started earlier is not something any of us are willing to live with.
“I tried calling him after I received your text yesterday, but I keep getting a message telling me that the number has been disconnected. I thought there was something wrong with his phone or the network so I sent him an email instead.” Malcolm laughs but there is no humour in it. It’s self-deprecating and filled with remorse.
“I sent a fucking email and carried on with my day as that asshole drove across the country to murder her. I don’t fucking think so. Bring her home, boys. Do whatever is necessary but bring her back here where I can get Frankie’s husbands to sort out some protection for her.”
Husbands. Only one is recognised legally but it still takes some getting used to, especially when he drops it into the conversation like that. Like it’s the most natural thing in the world to have multiple husbands and, who knows, maybe to them it is. After all, Malcolm has one client who has five boyfriends on the go at once. It caused a bit of an uproar at the time especially as it came out after she was kidnapped by her ex and saved by her sister. Now people brush it off deeming her eccentric and treat it as if it is one of her endearing quirks. I call bullshit. She is one of, if not the richest women in the country and money can make most people look the other way. If she were some broke-ass girl living in social housing, I’m pretty sure people would have much harsher names for her than eccentric and quirky.
“We’ll do our best, Mal, but let’s get real here for a second. The chances of this girl wanting anything to do with us are slim to none. She is lying in a hospital bed for fuck’s sake, and it’s all because of us.”
He sighs on the other end of the phone and I can just picture his hair sticking up on end as he tugs it in frustration, a habit which usually means you need to back the fuck off.
“It wasn’t a request, Eli. Use some of your famous charm and get it done.” He hangs up before I can say anything else. Perfect. What a motherfucking clusterfuck.
“What did he have to say?” Noah looks over at me briefly before turning his eyes back to the road.
I see the signs up ahead for the hospital and I say a silent prayer that we don’t get pulled over with the speed Noah is driving. “Well, he is understandably pissed off. He wants us to bring Eden back to London with us.”
Noah barks out a laugh but sobers when he realises I’m serious. “He’s nuts. That girl isn’t going to want to go anywhere with us. Whatever are we supposed to say to her? “Come on, little girl, I know we tried to serve you up to a bad guy, but we would really like you to get in the car and come wi
th us?”
“Yeah, maybe dial down the psycho factor since she apparently already has one of those in her life. We should start with the truth and take it from there but please, for the love of god, try to rein in your sparkling personality. We want her to trust us, not traumatise her further.”
“Fuck you, asshole.”
We pull into the carpark and spend the next ten minutes trying to find a spot. While Noah feeds the parking meter, I lock the laptop with the rest of our luggage. Fifteen minutes later, we discover we are an hour too late. Eden has been discharged and that was the extent of the information they would give us. Back in the car, which at this point is more like an office, we try to figure out our next move.
“Where would she go?” I muse. “We know she is an expert at hiding but I’m willing to bet that even if her injuries aren’t severe, they will be enough to slow her down at least for a couple of days. There is no way she walked away without any at all. I looked online at pictures of where her car went over. It’s a steep incline covered with bushes and brambles that gives way to a ravine at the bottom. At the very least she will be covered in cuts and bruises.”
“Let’s not forget that she doesn’t have a car anymore either. She’ll be hiding out somewhere close by where she’ll feel relatively safe given that her ability to run will be hampered by whatever injuries she has sustained,” Noah states.
“A hotel, maybe under a false name?” I think out loud. “What other options does she really have? She can’t go back to the flat. He would be able to find her now in a heartbeat just like I did.”
“That bouncer guy. The one from Midas. They seemed pretty close and he was extremely protective of her.” Noah rubs his chin remembering the guy from last night.
“Yeah, but he could be like that with all the dancers that work there,” I point out.
“Then it won’t take long for us to eliminate him. Think you can find out who he is from Midas employment records?”
The Promise of Tomorrow: An Inheritance Novel Page 4
