Max tried to keep his head down while at the same time walking with the confidence of a man who was doing just fine, thanks. The concerned half-second glances he got as he dragged himself through the corridors of Carressa Industries told him he wasn’t selling it, though. After sleeping poorly for the last two weeks, then not sleeping at all the last three days, he guessed he was starting to look like he did shortly after he’d killed his father—sullen, withdrawn, slightly unhinged. He figured the sunglasses he wore didn’t help; if anyone asked, he would say he’d had an eye exam. Yes, it was an obvious lie, but still better than putting the dark circles rimming his eyes on display for everyone to see.
He need to at least make an appearance at the office—not because he cared about the minutiae of Carressa Industries’ business dealings, but to check on the people there and make sure they were recovering from the bombing. After giving assurances the building was still structurally sound, authorities had closed off a huge chunk of it in and around the explosion’s epicenter while employees tried to commence with work as usual. He and the board decided to pack all the displaced folks into temporary offices on the lower floors. It wasn’t an ideal situation for healing and moving on, but it was the best of a bunch of bad options. Michael assured him he didn’t have to go in—or shouldn’t go in, given what a goddamn wreck he was—but he did. These people were his responsibility. And in a way, the bombing was his fault.
Anyway, he had time. After he’d received Val’s cryptic text that she had “something important to do” and would be late meeting him at the hospital to take Lydia home, he’d decided to hell with it and took their daughter home by himself. Thank God for Jamal, who’d shockingly opted to keep working for them. Otherwise, Max would have to leave the twins with Danielle, and though she’d saved Lydia’s life, she still didn’t seem completely stable. Then again, neither was he.
So after a handful of caffeine caplets and a few shots of Scotch to ease his nerves, here he was at work, trying to make other people feel better while he himself felt like something worse than shit. Max walked into the area populated by the folks in Accounting, where Nihan Shah worked before being killed in the bombing. He spotted a coworker he knew had been close with Nihan.
“Hi, Leslie,” he said as he approached the petite woman with thick glasses as she plinked away on her keyboard. “How are things?”
She looked up from her computer and flashed him a friendly smile. “Oh, hi, Mr. Carressa—Max, I mean! Didn’t expect to see you around here so soon. How’s your daughter?”
Behind his glasses, he flinched. Why did she have to ask about that? Great, everybody knew about his problems. This visit wasn’t about him. “Lydia’s recovering. But how are you holding up?”
“I’m getting on, thanks for asking. I miss Nihan every day. They’d better bomb the shit out of the terrorists who did this. Otherwise, things are okay here. Everybody’s pulled together to support each other. It’s nice to see. Have they found out who’s responsible for the toy store collapse yet?”
“No.”
“If I were you, I’d sue the shit out of that store—”
“Okay, well, it was nice talking to you, Leslie. I’m glad you’re doing all right. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Thank you, Max. I’ll send up some prayers for your little girl.”
Max faked a quick smile and hurried away. He snuck into an empty bathroom, yanked off his sunglasses, and splashed water on his face. Bloodshot eyes stared back at him through the mirror. Jesus, Michael was right. This had been a bad idea.
Pull it together, Max. You’re a goddamn adult. Other people have suffered just as badly—some even more so. Stop acting like a fucking baby and do your job.
Mopping up his face, he put his sunglasses back on, took a deep breath, and marched to the new area for Financials, where DeShawn Joy had worked. At the threshold he stopped, distracted by a desk repurposed as a memorial to DeShawn.
“You are always in our hearts,” one hand-drawn banner read, next to a fresh bouquet of flowers and a picture of DeShawn, arm in arm with his wife. Max had done several walk-throughs of the area and seen this desk, but someone had replaced the picture of the finance guru standing alone on a beach with one of him and his wife at a party. In the end, our love is all we really have, Max remembered he’d said at the memorial service. It’s the only thing that will never die—
He nearly jumped when someone touched his shoulder. Spinning around, he saw DeShawn’s supervisor, Vincent, standing next to him with brows furrowed in concern.
“I’m so sorry about your daughter,” Vincent said. “It must be hard on your family, after everything you’ve been through.”
Max’s throat tightened. Shit. “I—uh, how are things here?”
Shrugging, Vincent replied, “Good as can be. This Christmas season is so bittersweet, you know? It’s supposed to be a happy, festive time of year, but it’s hard to harness that holiday cheer when it seems like we’ve had one tragedy after another lately. How’s Michael, by the way? Is his arm all healed up yet? I heard he might have a big scar.”
“His arm is actually—it’s—” Gone. His arm is fucking gone. Max choked on his own words. Suddenly his mouth was too dry to talk. Swallowing hard, he forced out, “Excuse me. I need to go check on something.” He pushed past Vincent and practically ran to the elevator, mashing the button to the new top floor, where his temporary office resided.
He couldn’t do it anymore. Not that long ago, he’d excelled at hiding his true feelings and putting on a mask to suit whatever event he needed to perform at. Even when he’d been racked with guilt after killing his father, he’d held the façade together most of the time. But watching the yellow hyena hurt his family and tear his marriage apart was too much. It’d been a mistake to let people see him like this. He’d grab his work computer, then extricate himself. Maybe go home and stare at the walls for a while.
Max made one last stop at his secretary’s desk, propped awkwardly against the wall next to his makeshift office. Light throbs of pain began pulsating on the left side of his head—the seeds of a migraine beginning to grow. Yet another reason to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Taking off his sunglasses so he could rub the bridge of his nose, he asked Nadine, “Got anything for me before I head out the door?”
“Yes.” Through bifocals secured around her neck with a lanyard made of festive beads, she read from notes she’d scratched on a pad. “The board meeting’s been rescheduled for after the New Year. Charlene would like to talk to you at your earliest convenience about the Quality Foods and Boston Scientific acquisitions. And Roger wants your opinion on next quarter’s proposed portfolio; he e-mailed it to you this morning.” She looked up at him over the rim of her glasses, and her face turned motherly. “But I’m sure all this stuff can wait. I’m so sorry about Lydia. How are you and Val doing?”
He responded to her question by staring at her for a long time. Honestly, he didn’t know how to answer. Val wouldn’t talk to him, and he wouldn’t talk to her. Why did everyone keep asking him about his fucking feelings?
Nadine’s motherly expression faded. Her cheeks grew a shade redder as she realized his icy silence was all the answer she’d get.
He slipped his sunglasses back on. “I’m taking my computer and going home,” he said, then walked into his office before Nadine could try to comfort him anymore.
Collapsing into a plush rolling chair he’d salvaged from a damaged conference room, he took a few breaths to try and calm himself. God, he was tired. Very, very tired. With weary eyes, he glanced at the couple pictures on his desk—one of him and Val on their wedding day, the other of him, Val, Lydia, and Simon at the park. He looked at those pictures often, to remind himself why he bothered coming to work at all, or even went on living for that matter. His eyes lingered on the image of Val gazing lovingly at him on the beach where they’d married in Fiji. Had she been cheating on him then with that piece-of-shit cop? She’d said it had been when she and Max weren’t together, but he didn’t know what to believe. Maybe if she’d told him about it before he had those fucking photos shoved in his face, he’d be more willing to take her word for it. She was the one who ranted they were always watching them, so why wouldn’t she assume they’d know about her affair, and use it against her? And why did she have to sleep with the man who tried to beat him to death, and then shot him? How could she not care about that?
Gritting his teeth, he knocked the photo facedown on his desk. Eventually she’d give him some excuse, say she was sorry, and he’d forgive her, like he always did. He was a goddamn fool. His whole life he’d let people take advantage of him, and now it was his wife’s turn. He couldn’t live without her, and she knew it. Balling his hands into fists, a familiar rage growing in his gut, he knew he had to get out of there before he blew. He should grab his computer and go—
Where was his computer?
Max sat up and looked around his desk, then did a lap around his office. No computer. What the hell?
He stomped back out to Nadine’s desk. “Where is my laptop?” he said, harsher than he should have. His nerves felt frayed to their breaking point.
“It’s not in your office?”
He growled, “If it was, why would I be asking you about it now?”
She frowned and looked at him with wide eyes, nervous to be around him for maybe the first time ever. He’d never been so coarse to her, but he couldn’t help himself. His self-control was slipping by the second. “I’m sure no one’s been in there since you’ve been gone…” she said. “I’ll call security.”
As Nadine dialed, he ran a hand through his hair and sighed. Calm down, Max. It’s not her fault. A rival company could have exploited the recent chaos and stolen his computer to access Carressa Industries’ proprietary information, though he’d never seen such a blatant act of corporate espionage before. That stupid laptop also had one of only two copies of his stock prediction computer program on it—
Shit.
He ran back to his office, unlocked a desk drawer, and jerked it open. The backup disk was gone.
“Fuck!” He grabbed the orphaned keyboard off his desktop and slammed it into the ground in an explosion of plastic squares. Why would anyone steal his chaotic mess of code? It wasn’t even close to working.
“It’s a black Alienware laptop, signed out to Maxwell Carressa…” Nadine was saying over the phone as Max stormed out of his office again. She eyed him with a touch more nervousness. She must’ve heard him slamming things.
“Is Aaron in today?” he asked, ignoring her conversation in progress.
“Just a moment,” she said into the phone, then put her hand over the receiver. “Aaron Zephyr?”
“Yes, that Aaron.” Jesus, was he speaking Greek today? He needed to talk to somebody, anybody. Count Doctopus would understand.
“You…haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“Aaron’s been missing for three days. His wife filed a report.”
Max stared at her slack-jawed as a wave of dread washed over him. Not Aaron, too.
“I’m sorry, Max—”
He left before she could offer any more words of pity. Aaron—gone. Val—gone. Anyone he got close to—gone or maimed. This was his life now. Back to bleakness.
Max hurried to the stairwell and jogged up five floors to the cordoned-off section, barreling through the police tape until he reached the husk of his old office. He sat down in his original chair, charred from the explosion. If he’d been sitting there that day, which had been his plan before going to lunch with Aaron, he’d have surely died. A bitterly cold breeze raked against his face through the shattered window that used to be one wall of his office. At the remains of his desk, he yanked the bottom drawer open and spilled the contents onto the floor, then found what he was looking for—a pill bottle filled with OxyContin. He didn’t know why he kept it around…No, he did—he kept it in case he ever needed to go numb, or wanted to try to leave this world again. He’d tried many times to kill himself, and it never worked. But if his purpose in life was to have children with Val, maybe fate would finally let him go.
Twisting the lid off, he dropped two pills in the palm of his hand and tossed them in his mouth. He closed his eyes and sat back, letting the familiar bitter taste linger as the medicine dissolved on his tongue, remembering how it had given him the strength to face the day once upon a time, without Val—
But every time he’d turned to drugs for solace, he had regretted it. Would this time really be any different?
What the hell was he thinking?
He sat up and spit the pills out. He gave up too easily; that was his problem. Max pushed himself up from the chair, poured all the pills in his hand, and threw them out the window like confetti. He had no idea how to solve any of his problems, but falling into a drug-fueled haze wasn’t the answer. He had his children, he had his sister, and he had Michael. Oh yeah, and Toby. He’d get Val back from wherever she’d gone, no matter what she’d done. She was his, and he was hers.
Not happy but no longer completely despondent, Max left the building, returned to his car, and headed back to the condo. He’d go home and try to sleep, clean himself up a little bit, then go find Val and bring her home. If she was dead set on finding Eleanor, he’d help her—for real this time. They’d do it together. As a united front, they were unstoppable.
Speak of the devil.
As he stopped at a red light in a busy intersection, something yellow from across the street caught his attention. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his eyes, worried for a moment he was hallucinating. But no, there she was—Eleanor, the yellow hyena, in the flesh, wrapped in a gray jacket and standing at the intersection across from him. And was she looking at him?
She knew he’d be there, at that moment. Val was right—Eleanor was like them. She could see the future, and she was using her ability to kill people and tear his family apart.
Cold fury prickled across his skin at the same time hot anger flooded his veins. Eleanor needed to die.
He punched the gas, tires squealing against the pavement. Let them throw him in jail for vehicular homicide, he didn’t care. He should be in prison for killing his father anyway. At least then he could say he rid the world of two monsters.
Aiming straight for the yellow hyena, he made it halfway across the intersection before a truck T-boned his car, slamming him to the side in a shower of metal.