And then, I died

by Sage, May

  “Who's to say you wouldn't have been just as bored if everything had gone according to plan? Most activities get tedious when you do them for a living – hours on end every day. However, you're still very much interested in books, aren't you? I'm pretty sure Prunelle likes you more than I,” she added, referring to the Persian purring on her laps, “and I'd be so bold as to guess that you very much like her, too.”

  It was unfair: the cat was an absolute cuddle whore. Anyone would like her.

  “So I like cats and books. I don’t see your point.”

  “I’m only saying that you very much seem like the girl you just described. Don’t bury her too quickly. There's still hope for poor Eliza.”

  Poor Eliza was a mess that night; she tossed and turned, threw the covers off, pulled them back up as she realized the April air wasn't nearly as warm as her body seemed to believe.

  The truth was, it was frustration she battled with. Frustration of a very particular kind.

  William was next door, just behind her red walls, and she wanted him in here – his arms around hers, her legs locked around his torso, continuing what she'd stopped only hours ago.

  She'd read, proofread, edited, and translated enough trashy novels to understand just what she was desperate for – release.

  She gave up and finally slid her hands under her PJ bottoms, tentatively brushing her flesh. It was pleasant, enjoyable, satisfying; however, it most certainly wasn't cutting it.

  Reasoning that no one was there to see what she was doing, she spread her legs apart and stroked harder, faster, curling her fingers inside her.

  God, that was good...

  But if anything, her frustration grew exponentially when she discovered that, enjoyable as her first masturbation in ten years may have been, it wasn't enough.

  •

  It was so very faint, he would have missed it if he'd been anywhere else; but with his back against the wall separating their bedrooms, stretching after his hour on the treadmill, he'd heard it.

  The moan was low, hoarse, and gave him a valuable insight into how Beth occupied herself on that fair Friday night.

  God, he could imagine it: her naked on the top of silk covers, her hands between her thighs, frantically working on her orgasm.

  He deserved a fucking medal for staying where he was, but as he was no saint, he reached under his boxers and pumped to the sound of her voice.

  Chapter 7:

  Intruder

  The Steinway had no use in her house, save for gathering dust.

  She didn't know why she hadn't sold it back when she'd been trying to get enough funds to revamp the four houses she now rented; it had been kept in pristine condition, and could have easily fetched a good fifty thousand.

  The two century old grand piano was something of a monstrosity, with imposing carved legs, golden trims, and flourish embellishments along its sides, yet she'd made it the star of the show in her sophisticated, modern black and white lounge.

  “Can you play?” Linda, the cleaner who came once a week asked, finding her in front of the instrument that Saturday morning.

  Beth frowned. Usually, people simply asked if she played. To that, she would simply answer no, but she was uncomfortable with outright lies, and she could play. George had made sure of it.

  Practice, stupid girl. We need to find you a decent husband.

  She could still feel the sting of the belt that had accompanied such admonishment. Muscle memory sucked.

  Luckily, she was spared the need to answer when her phone finally rang.

  It had taken a while but her friend in low places got results.

  The Bass hadn't taken the name of their commissioner, but they had everything else: a recording of his voice – obviously modified – a phone number – pre paid by cash – and, more remarkably, a location.

  By lunchtime, Beth was in a Miami golf club, tanning on a chaise longue in front of a pool.

  She'd chosen a red bikini as a fishing hook and, unsurprisingly, the thing worked wonders.

  “Excuse me, but do I know you?”

  She'd never heard that line before.

  In that case, though, she could imagine that the man knew exactly who she was supposed to be: William Slate's girlfriend. And he had every intention to hit that if he could.

  Mike Dawson was a pig. His looks were similar to Will’s – they were very close in colouring and frame – yet he made her skin scrawl.

  “I think I've seen a picture of you somewhere,” she admitted. “You wouldn't be William Slate's brother, would you?”

  “That would be me. The brother.”

  The sickening feeling that had all but disappeared over the last few weeks was back with a vengeance, begging her to take a step away from his reach. She contained the need to strike when he got uncomfortably close and smiled instead.

  It wasn’t a sincere sort of smile by any stretch of imagination, but the man didn’t notice – or care. Within five minutes, Beth was confident Mike was the pig who had set the Bass on his half-brother.

  The only question was, how did he think he could benefit from it? No one spent three quarter of a mil without expecting to get something back.

  As things stood, she understood everything Will owned would revert to their father in the event of his death, and Michael Senior was a very healthy retired man just under sixty; no one could expect him to kick the bucket for a good twenty-five years at the very least.

  But regardless of his motive, Mike was guilty. It was behind every word he said, every look he gave her.

  All she needed was a proof.

  She was home by dusk, utterly exhausted. There was something infallibly draining about airports, despite the comfort coming with her frequent flyer status.

  Tired as she was, she still felt it almost instantly. There was a presence around her, and it wasn't William's.

  She removed the silver pin holding her hair together in a smooth, swift movement, as if it was one of the things she always did after getting rid of her coat.

  A shadow on her right caught her eye and she lifted her hand, ready to use the weapon, but a laugh stopped her right in her tracks.

  “You're losing your mojo, sis,” a familiar voice called out from behind.

  She attempted to glare at Christopher Sanderson's tall frame at first, but it soon became an astonished stare.

  He had been Dante Maine, her brother; they'd lived under the same roof and worked together for over five years, and not once had she seen that.

  He was a hunk.

  What she'd noticed before and frowned at – the fact he never shaved, refused to wear a shirt for anything less than a marriage or the occasional funeral, the leather jacket, the tanned skin he had to get from sunbeds – were still part of him, yet, together, they formed something very alluring.

  What the hell had happened to her world?

  William. William happened.

  “What the freaking hell are you doing here!” she yelled.

  It wasn't fair: he'd kept his door open for her if she'd have felt like popping by, and the reverse should have been a given. He'd had her back for years. Actually, she wouldn't have seen her twenty-third birthday without him.

  Her career hadn't had the usual start. She hadn't exactly been recruited; she'd fallen head first into her role.

  She'd gone to Kiev the summer following her senior year to perfect her Russian, and while she hadn't been ecstatic about the prospect, she accompanied her flatmate when she had insisted on going to a club. Letting one lone girl brave a foreign city's club scene without an escort was against everything she believed in.

  Tania hadn't been the one who got into trouble, though.

  Always at the wrong place at the very worst of times, Beth took a cigarette break just as a group was carrying a very drugged up man to the back of a van. She didn't see anyone clearly, but they hadn’t failed to notice her.

  “Shit. She's coming with.”

  “Nah, don't bother,” one of them had
replied. “That's Talia. Told you about her. My sister. Kid's just got in town, but she's good.”

  That night, three agents had knocked at the back door with fake IDs and the rest was history.

  “Wow, who pissed in your Cheerios?”

  You, the day you became hot.

  “Sorry. You're welcome here, and for as long as you want. Just don't spook me again.”

  She knotted her hair back up on their way to the kitchen.

  “Anything bringing you in town?”

  “I'm off too. I was in Miami with the hottest chick you've ever seen and a tequila when you wouldn't believe who I saw flirting with some white boy.”

  “You're about nine tenth Caucasian: you don't get to use that term.”

  “Whatevs, sis; I'm bored. You're up to something and I want in.”

  “This? This is your Christopher?”

  Beth sighed, unable to formulate an excuse; she hadn't hidden Chris' attributes on purpose, she'd just been entirely blind to them until now.

  “Damn, girl, you should have shared that years ago,” Vick whispered so loud that Jack, on the other side of the room, rolled his eyes.

  As for William, he was thoroughly, indisputably pissed off by the turn of events.

  She saw his reasoning and it mortified her; when she'd rejected him, she'd given her motives, yet, now faced with an exceptionally attractive man she introduced as a close relation, he saw them as mere pretexts. In his mind, she was a bit of a slut who flirted with one too many man, and a coward who should have told him about a prior attachment. She needed to set the record straight right away:

  “Chris is certainly not mine to share. We're just friends,” she added with some surprise.

  Two months ago she would have described him as her partner, full stop. No friendship, no bond but that of two people paid by the same organization to perform a job together, all the while knowing without the shadow of a doubt that he'd take a bullet for her.

  “Yes, friends,” Chris repeated in a strange voice.

  He was looking at her as if she'd suddenly grown a second head, of course. The Elizabeth he had known didn't do friends. While understandable, his confusion didn't help her cause: William was angrier by the second.

  “Anyway, he saw me working on Will's issues in Miami earlier and offered to help.”

  “You were in Florida today?” William cut in at the same time as Jack asked: “You're going somewhere with it?”

  Chris saved her the bother of answering either:

  “Of course she's getting somewhere, but the unwritten rule in our field is: shut it until you can prove it.”

  •

  Saturdays had become an issue.

  Usually he'd spend them at the office, but after a week of issues and delays, six months away from his biggest launch yet, the perspective of sitting behind the glass desk one second before Monday nine o'clock made him want to scratch his eyeballs out.

  The apartment was also a no go. There was a good chance Beth was either absent – she had been out a lot within the last three weeks – or in, and giving all of her attention to Christopher Sanderson, her friend.

  Given a choice, Liam preferred her gone.

  He had never minded silence or solitude – he needed both to concentrate on his work, to lose himself in his mind and come up with solutions – but being purposefully overlooked was downright lonely. Tonight would be soon enough for that brand of torture.

  Instead, he made his way home.

  It was definitely no Upper East Side penthouse, but Liam had every reason to be proud of the two stories of brownstone above the florist. He'd earned every square inch of it.

  Back in college, somewhere around the winter of his second year, his group of friends had talked about spending the break down in Vegas, a luxury he wasn't likely to be able to afford at the time.

  That wasn't exactly true. Of course, he could have dipped into the trust fund Michael Dawson had set up in his name, but as that wasn't going to happen until a cataclysm of the magnitude of Ragnarok, he shrugged and declined the invite.

  No one insisted or made him feel inferior for his want of money, but that night, when they got to the flat they shared close to campus, Jace offered his help.

  It hadn't sat very well with Liam at first.

  “Calm down, mate, I'm not about to give you a thousand bucks. I work way too hard for my cash.”

  That had to be true, because Jace didn't come from nearly as much money as one would assume from the extravagance he indulged in. Liam had met his parents, had seen their detached picket fenced in the burbs. They were wealthy, but he imagined neither could very well have handed Jace his Porsche as a birthday present.

  At the same time, though, Jace wasn't exactly working. He could more often than not be found killing zombies in front of his 47” plasma screen when Liam came back from his shift at the Dive.

  He hadn't asked questions. If his best friend was into anything illegal, he didn't want to know.

  “Don't look at me like that either; I don't deal drugs or whatever you're imagining. I invest.”

  His heartbeat instantly returned to its usual rhythm as he took that in. Of course he invested. No one who'd attended one econ study group with Jace Warden would have doubted that. Liam would have jumped to that very conclusion if anything had indicated that he earned enough money to put away.

  “My dad's given me an allowance since I was six. He upped it depending on my grades. Used to be two dollars a week; by high school it was twenty.”

  Liam nodded; even his father had done exactly that since he'd been dumped on his doorstep.

  “I saved about half of what he gave me in a cookie jar under my bed. When I was fourteen, the girl who lived next door was getting pretty big in our school, selling her handmade jewellery. She was a senior, but her junk was all the girls in my grade talked about. One day, when her family was around for dinner, I asked her about her plans after graduation. Would she create a website and sell her things online? She was off to college but it did seem like a good source of income to add to whatever her parents were giving her. She said she'd do it if she had the time and the money. I offered to pay for the website and take care of the ordering for a cut of what the online sales were doing.”

  It sounded like mini Jace wasn't a whole lot different from the nineteen year old version in front of him.

  “As I provided the funds – about eleven hundred dollars – and also gave a lot of my time, we agreed that I'd own forty-nine percent of the company. The adults helped us write the contract very professionally, as a joke of sort. Three of them were lawyers, so it was all legal and they were very supportive.”

  Jace's smile was so broad; the bomb he delivered wasn't entirely unheralded: “Her name is Lucy Ann Brooks, so she called her brand Lucky Bee.”

  “Shit.”

  Brooks had been the jewellery diva for years. She wasn't Cartier or Tiffany, but every kid who couldn't afford to throw ten grand on a bracelet wore LB.

  “I've been hooked to finances since the day I banked my first quarter of profits. But going back to what I was offering: I can take what you're normally putting away and add it to my next purchase. No one can guarantee the outcome of that kind of investments, but I haven't lost a cent yet. If worst comes to worst, I'd give you your deposit back; if I make money, you'll get more. ”

  After three semesters cramming together, Liam trusted him, so he went to the bank and withdrew two out of the three thousand to his name. Nine months later, Jace returned sixteen.

  At first, he'd doubted him, reasoning that his friend must have overpaid him out of generosity, but one look at the books did show that the numbers added up.

  Liam had little else to do but bow to the master, pack for Las Vegas, and hand over every cent he could spare to his best friend's care.

  The house he bought outright straight out of college wasn't his because of his sheer hard work; it had certainly been part of it, but his success rooted in his unfaltering
faith in Jace's ability to sniff out a promising start up and carry it out of the shadows.

  His place wasn't much, though; mismatched lamps, second-hand furniture, and the dreadful wallpaper he had meant to change. He knew he'd outgrown it, but was unwilling to sell. It was the one proof that he'd made it at twenty-three, while his older brother had gotten a mortgage with daddy's deposit.

  It was good to remember that, despite his current state of mind, his life, all things considered, was alright really.

  He surprised himself by grabbing the dusty, long ignored acoustic guitar and strumming a few chords after putting it back in tune.

  “How about you bring it back to Beth's and play your serenades there?”

  “Whoever is after me isn't going to think I live here forever if I never stay long enough to make a cup of coffee, Jack.”

  He understood the bodyguard's concern, though; it had been five weeks since the car crash. It was too long. An incident had occurred every month since October without fail.

  But unlikely as it may seem in Jack's point of view, he liked to think that whoever had meant him harm had given up. They couldn't have had much of a reason to start with; Liam didn't go around pissing dangerous people off.

  “It's not going to go away, boss. A guy who finds his wife in bed with someone else will eventually see reason, but let's face it: a person so pissed off he hires professionals to commit a cold blooded murder isn't going to just up and change his mind.”

  But who could possibly be that aggravated? Better yet, who could benefit from his death? He had written no will, which meant his sperm donor would inherit his wealth. As much as Liam despised the guy, he knew with every fibre of his being that he wasn't behind this. Besides, the man was loaded. The money he had wouldn't be more than a drop in a very large bathtub.

  “I wasn't expecting the detective to find much,” Jack ranted, “But what's killing me is the lack of results from your private investigator.”