Page 24 of Inside the Maelstrom: Part Two
“Doesn’t matter as long as he ends up in pieces,” I muttered, and Aviva flopped down on the couch, right across my body. I held her tightly in my arms, and she rested her head over my heart. Otto tilted his head so he could kiss her.
“They’ll come around, Viva,” he whispered. “They're just shocked.”
Well, if they were shocked now, they were going to have a heart attack when they realized the full…uniquenessof our situation.
Sampson hung up the phone and came to sit at the other end of the couch. “The PR firm said we should get ahead of the press. We should bare our souls in an interview before the hearing, and ensure ours is the only narrative that gets heard.”
Well, shit.
Chapter14
Evan
For fuck’s sake, if I found one more girl weeping in the alley behind the apartment, I was going to go mental.
“Get the fuck out of here,” I growled, and the girl shook where she stood.
She thrust a letter at me. “Please, just give Hendrick Kenley this letter. I can’t believe he married a nobody. We had something special.”
Yeah, I bet they did. Apparently, Hendrick had ‘something special’ with half the socialites in fucking New York.
“No. Now fuck off.”
I turned on my heel, walking down the alley away from the front of the building. Fucking paparazzi were everywhere, and it was goddamn disgusting. I looped back around the next street over, heading into Central Park. I wished I could bring Chaos with me, so we could walk through the park together, but she was holed up in the apartment like a prisoner.
I headed toward the Alice in Wonderland statue—which was where I was going to meet my contact—keeping my head down and avoiding people. Blending in. It was what I did best. It was why I was good at security; it was why I’d been good in Spec Ops. Well, that and good aim. But compared to the likes of Hendrick Kenley, I was bland.
Average.
Had I met Aviva in a bar, I wouldn’t have picked her as out of my league. I would have tried my hardest to get her number, taken her on a series of predictable but socially normal dates, and then probably made love to her on the third date.
I knew that I would never have seen her really shine though—not the way she did when she was baiting Hendrick, or when Otto was spoiling her. Or that fire inside her when Sampson challenged her. She really came alive in those moments, and she was fucking beautiful.
Otto’s mother had pulled me aside and basically grilled me to make sure I wasn’t some kind of predator trying to take advantage of a younger, more vulnerable woman, but honestly, I was as far from a fucking Casanova as you could get. My last girlfriend had been three years ago, and that relationship had lasted six months before the guilt of missed dinners, forgotten date nights and not being able to share this huge part of my life had gotten too much for me, and I’d broken it off.
The woman before that had left me. Guarding Sampson and having a committed relationship hadn’t been a viable combination. Until now.
Someone whistled, and I spun on my heel to see Buck leaning against the White Rabbit. I smiled as I walked toward my old friend.
“You were almost late for a very important date, mate.”
Buck’s Australian accent was both jarring and endearing. I wasn’t sure how he got away with that, but man, the women loved it. Okay, maybe I wasn’t so sad that Chaos wasn’t here to meet Buck.
“Sorry, man. Getting out of my fucking apartment is worse than getting into a drug den in Columbia. Everyone’s the same amount of coked up too; those fucking paparazzi never sleep.”
Buck slapped my back. “Well, your boy is big news.”
“Hendrick Kenley isn’t my boy,” I answered instinctively, though I guess now, they all were. Whatever Chaos was creating over there, it looked a lot like a family. If I was honest with myself, we’d been a family for a lot longer than Aviva had been around, but we’d had no heart. Now we did. “You’re not wrong. Wish they’d get over it already though.”
Buck snorted, and pulled out a normal-looking, spiral-bound Hello Kitty notebook. Nothing more suspicious than two grown men exchanging a big yellow envelope in a public place. “Let’s go sit. Lots of shit to get through, plus I have another appointment in ten minutes with a hot little number who just found out her husband was fucking the next-door neighbor, Ivan.”
I winced. That was rough.
We sat on the bench, and Buck handed me the notebook. “So, you didn’t give me much to go on. No name, no age, no date? No fucking chance. But, just so you know I’m actually the duck’s nuts at this job, I think I’ve found him. Emphasis onthink. Not like I can confirm it against anything, right?”
I screwed up my nose. “The duck’s what?”
“Concentrate, mate. So, I paid a nice girl named Nurse Flora—and by paid, I mean tossed her some cash with a healthy side of blackmail—to hand over the exit interviews of male patients for the last five years. I figured if it was more than five years ago, your girl is going to be shit outta luck anyway, you know? Didn’t she just get married? Why’s she chasing some crazy fucker anyway?”
