Back To The Start Box Set: Five Full-Length Novels by Aly Martinez
“Oh God!” I cried, burying my face in Pete’s coat until the pounding stopped.
“Shhhh. He’s gone. I’m calling Jude now. I’ll have him meet us at my hotel.”
I nodded, unable to form a coherent response.
He passed me a mini bottle of water from the seat pocket in front of him and lifted his phone to his ear. “Here. Drink this and try to take a deep breath.”
Doing my best to keep the panic at bay, I obeyed.
Cool. Wet. Refreshing.
It wasn’t until I finished the bottle that I discovered another adjective to describe it.
Chalky.
Jude
“A week? You’ve been here a few months and you’re already putting in for vacation?” Leo laughed.
“Does it count as a vacation if I take Rhion with me?”
He gave me a side-eye. “Depends. You going to be lounging on the beach?”
I chuckled. “It’ll be January.”
With his elbows on the desk, he folded his hands together and rested his chin on top of them. “It’s LA.”
I laughed and leaned back in my chair. Then I became serious as I said, “She wants to get Val and go back to the beach house. It’s got a lot of memories with her mom. I think it’d be good for her, but I need more than a weekend off to take them.”
“You pay for your own expenses while you’re gone and I won’t count it against your vacation time.”
I smiled. “Perfect.”
“Besides, I like seeing her happy. And, not going to lie, it doesn’t hurt that you are too. I’m not sure if you brainwashed her or what, but she doesn’t even seem to care that you’re an ugly bastard. I’ve considered taking her to get glasses.”
I laughed in a short burst. “Right? It’s the damnedest thing.”
“I’ll sign off on whatever you need. Fill out the paperwork and leave it on my desk.”
We both pushed to our feet, and I extended a hand in his direction. He clasped it in a firm shake.
“Thanks. I appreciate it,” I said at the same time my phone started ringing in my pocket.
“Go ahead and take that. I’ve got to get back to work anyway. Listen, you come back with a tan, we’re going to have serious problems.”
I chuckled and headed to the door, lifting my phone to my ear as I answered, “Levitt.”
“He’s going to kill her!” a man’s voice roared across the line.
My whole body went on alert as I froze in Leo’s doorway. “’Scuse me?”
“You need to move. Call the cops or whatever the hell it is that you do, but you gotta move now.”
“Who the fuck is this?” I barked.
His breathing was labored as the sounds of a horn blared in the background, but I would never forget for the rest of my life the three crystal-clear syllables filtering through the line.
“Apollo!”
The blood in my veins suddenly burst into flames. “You listen to me, you piece of shit—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Save it for when Pete Higgins isn’t about to kill my sister.”
Confusion warred with rational thought. “The fuck are you talking about? How’d you get my number?”
“More questions I’ll be happy to answer after you get in your goddamn car and help me get her back.”
I turned to Leo and found him watching me intently. I snapped, pointed to the monitor on his desk, and mouthed, “Rhion’s apartment. Now.”
He arched an eyebrow but did as I’d asked.
I moved around his desk so I could see the screen.
“Get her back from where?” I asked absently as Leo scanned her apartment, my anxiety growing with each room.
“He took her! I knew something was wrong when I didn’t see any of you with her. I made an approach in the garage, but I lost her. Listen to me. I’m tailing them. I’m probably about four car lengths back, but I don’t think he’s tagged me.”
I barely heard his words over the blood roaring in my ears as Leo clicked on the final room in her apartment.
Empty.
Just like my chest.
Apollo Park
Perception. Is. Everything.
People aren’t one-dimensional characters. We’re complex creatures. With feelings. Compassion. Morals. And the lack thereof.
To some, I would forever be the villain.
But even the darkest shadows require light to exist.
I spent a lot of years hating my sister.
At first, I hated her because she got all the attention.
And then, years later, after Pete Higgins had forced himself on me for the first time, I hated her because she didn’t get any of the attention. I got every single bit of it. Rhion slept soundly in her bed, night after night, not a fear in the world. Meanwhile, I spent most of my adolescence listening for the click of my bedroom door opening every time my father went out of town.
My first memory of Pete was him straightening up our apartment the night my mother died. As my father’s assistant and best friend, he was such a fixture in my life that I never thought anything of it. Of course he was there that night. A tragedy had happened. Only, in my memories, there were no cops that would later flood the place. It had only been him and me as he righted upside-down tables and washed one martini glass while the other lay shattered next to one of my mother’s shoes on the balcony. No. That realization came much later in life, after I’d learned how evil the man truly was.
It had always been amazing to me how people could share the exact same childhood and come out with such radically different experiences. Rhion once told me that some of her fondest memories were of when we’d been young. Meanwhile, for me, it was a hell I still struggled to forget on a daily basis.
When I became a teen, I started acting out. Lying. Making up shit, silently wishing someone—anyone—would read between the lines and actually hear my cries. They never did. By the time I hit seventeen, I was a ticking time bomb. I had a lot of shit to work through, and that didn’t get addressed until I went to jail. Yeah, God was looking out for me the day I took my father’s car keys. It wasn’t a drunken joy ride the way my public defender claimed at my trial; it was a failed kamikaze mission. Though, regretfully, I never made it to where I was supposed to meet Pete.
Eventually, I broke, dressed in a prison jumpsuit at the county jail, revealing to my father years of abuse at the hands of his dear friend. He told me to stop making up stories to save my own ass. It was the last time I saw my father alive.
I wished I could say I’d been devastated to hear that he’d passed away. And maybe I’d get there one day. But, at twenty, when my prison counselor pulled me into his office to let me know he was gone, the abused little boy inside me celebrated.
That is until I found out he’d left Rhion everything.
I didn’t care about the money. Well, that’s not completely true. Money was fucking great. But that wasn’t why I lost it. My father might as well have painted a bull’s-eye on her back.
Rhion wasn’t like me. She didn’t realize that the world was full of horrible people. She’d been raised in a bubble where skinned knees and broken hearts were her only worry. She was a dreamer with rose-colored glasses. Satan himself could stare her straight in the face and she wouldn’t recognize him. Rhion was not equipped to play in the same league as a money-hungry monster in disguise like Pete.
The moment that will was read, Rhion was as good as dead.
I tried to warn her, but she wouldn’t believe me. She’d been preconditioned from a very young age to believe that I was the bad guy.
So I became the bad guy.
The day I saw her at that charity event with security hovering all around, it hit me.
If Rhion was afraid of me, she’d surround herself with people who could protect her.
I’d never forget the pain on her face as I wrapped my hand around her throat and told her that I’d started the fire. It was for the best, but it shredded me all the same. Mainly because she’d bought
After that, keeping tabs on her was relatively easy. She bought the apartment beneath Guardian. Public record. So I rented the apartment over Murphy’s bar. I got with some buddies I’d met in jail and had them teach me everything I needed to know about becoming her shadow. A hundred-dollar security camera aimed at both the entrances of her building and I was in business terrorizing my sister so he couldn’t get to her.
Jude Levitt was the one complication I couldn’t figure out. It freaked me out the night I saw him walk into the bar. I didn’t think twice about following him in. I knew he was the disgraced first responder from the fire, and I feared he was working for Pete. I used the last of my inheritance from my mother’s estate running background checks on him, not satisfied until I knew every single detail of his boring-ass life. While I was doing that, I kept a close eye on him and my sister. It didn’t take long to see that she loved him.
And, as I followed behind Pete’s car as he drove Rhion to God-knew-where, knowing he would kill her before ever giving her the money back, I prayed that Jude loved her too.
Jude
I charged out of Guardian, Apollo still talking in my ear, and went straight to the emergency stairs. My heart slammed against my ribs as my gut turned rancid.
What the fuck had she been doing in the garage in the first place? She never left her apartment without me.
As I ran down the stairs, I heard an entire percussion section’s worth of pounding behind me. Step for step. Never faltering. Never slowing. It wasn’t until I pushed through the final door to the garage that I realized Johnson, Lark, and Alex had followed me down. The angry snarls on their faces mirrored mine.
The garage was empty, but a small trail of blood on the ground screamed so loudly that it was almost deafening.
I froze, volcanic lava brewing inside me. I had no idea whether I could trust Apollo or not. He was known for his head games. And he could have very well been playing one with me now, but the only thing I knew for certain was that Apollo Park was never far from his sister.
Climbing into my Jeep, all the guys piling in behind me, I barked, “Where the fuck are you?”
Rhion
“Did you put something in that water?” I slurred to Pete as I weaved my way out onto the balcony of my father’s old office. I hadn’t been up there since Pete had shut the location down, having opted to run everything remotely from New York.
It was freezing, but I was too numb to care. I should have been scared, considering I’d narrowly escaped my brother, Jude wasn’t anywhere in sight, and I now held the strong belief that I had been drugged. But my sluggish mind was a little too slow on processing all the facts to allow my fear to kick in.
“Just a little something to relax you after that horrible run-in with Apollo,” Pete said before taking another sip of the amber liquid he’d been holding against his swelling face since we’d arrived.
I tsked. “You shouldn’t have done that. Jude is going to be piiiissed.”
“I’m not terribly concerned with Jude, Rhion,” he snapped.
I laughed and swayed toward the railing. “You should be. He’ll probably hit cha again. Make the other side of your face match what Apollo did to it.” I made an eek face.
Though, if Pete’s glare was any indication, it wasn’t a good one.
A knock at the door tore his attention off me.
“Oh thank God,” he breathed. “Here. Hold this.” He placed his drink in my hand and rushed through the empty office to the door.
There, a young guy in a bicycle helmet was holding a brown folder.
“Please. Please come in. I just need to grab my wallet and you can be on your way,” Pete said, motioning him inside.
The guy’s gaze jumped to me, and I offered him a friendly smile and a finger wave as a gust of wind hit me on the back, sending me stumbling forward several steps. I caught myself on the door and grinned proudly as I lifted Pete’s drink in his direction. “Look at that. I didn’t spill a drop.”
Pete sighed and looked at the guy. “You’ll have to excuse, Rhion. She’s been drinking since we arrived.”
“No, I haven’t!” I laughed.
Bicycle dude flashed Pete an understanding smile.
Whatever. What was the old saying? If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I shrugged and tipped the glass up to my lips, gagging when the whiskey hit my tongue.
Pete and the man—who I would like to note was wearing pants so tight that I assumed he had to have them surgically removed at the end of his messenger shift—both stared at me in disgust.
“Anyway,” Pete said, handing the guy a wad of cash. “Thank you so much for your expedited service.”
When Tight Pants McGee finally left, I offered Pete his glass back and asked, “How much longer until Jude gets here?”
He waved the drink off and scoffed as he began rifling through the papers, haphazardly discarding them to the floor. “Never if I can help it.”
“I told you to stop saying shit about…” I trailed off when a thought breached through the surface of my intoxicated fog. “Wait. Did you tell him we came here instead of the hotel?”
He kept his head down as he started ripping pages in half.
I walked over and snatched a paper from his hand, my tongue so thick that I could barely form the words. “Pete! Did you call him?”
He looked up at me, his face dark and malevolent. It was more than an expression; it was as if his entire aura had changed.
I stumbled back a step, nerves swirling in my stomach.
“I want my phone back,” I rushed out.
He jammed his hands into the pockets of his slacks. “That’s not going to happen.”
“W-what’s going on here?” I stammered as my pulse quickened. My loopy mind finally cottoned on that something was truly wrong.
“Well…” he drawled. “I brought you here after the run-in with your brother, fearful that, if we went back to the hotel, he would follow us. You were a wreck, and while I had my back turned, you swiped my legally prescribed medication.” He revealed a pill bottle from his pocket and shook it in my direction.
My eyes flashed wide as I stumbled back a step.
And then back another because my feet couldn’t keep up with my body’s attempted retreat.
“Then…much like your poor mother, you chased it down with some alcohol. Surely you remember the rest.” He grinned and pointedly looked down to the drink in my hand. “I, of course, had no idea you took the pills. And the bike messenger can attest to the fact that you were drinking.”
My mind was barely keeping up, but as a wave of understanding hit me, I suddenly couldn’t focus on anything else. Very slowly, I repeated, “I want my phone back.”
“Sorry, sweetheart. You left it in the car.” He strolled toward me.
I threw a hand up to stop him. “Bullshit. You left it in the car.”
“That’s not what my driver will say.”
A sick sense of betrayal began to spiral out of control until it finally broke me. Throwing the glass across the room and shattering it against the wall, I darted toward the door. Which, admittedly, wasn’t very fast, seeing as my legs felt as though they had been filled with lead.
He ducked and covered his head to avoid the falling glass, and then an unlikely laugh sprang from his throat as he stepped in front of the door. “Ah, yes. And then you became violent after seeing the lackluster business earnings from last year.” He waved a hand at the papers on the floor. “You always did have your father’s temper. Sandy will attest to that.”
I blinked as my heart came to a screeching halt. “Sandy?”
With a disturbing smile and a more frightening laugh, he said, “Money is a powerful motivator, Rhion.”
“Oh God.” I covered my mouth.
“Oh, sweet, naïve girl. You seriously thought Sandy cared about you?”
Every disgusting word felt like the tip of a knife dragging over my skin.
He continued. “Now,
I hadn’t had a will before the fire. I’d been twenty-two years old, with nothing but a closet full of clothes, and for the six weeks after my father had died, I had been grieving. A will had been very low on my list of priorities. It wasn’t until after the fire that I made one, and only so Apollo wouldn’t get anything if something happened to me.
“You…you started the fire.”
He laughed and placed his hand over his heart. “Me? No. But I happen to know a fantastic arsonist should you ever need one.” He winked. “So, as you can imagine, Jude Levitt has been a pain in my ass since long before he was trying to get in your pants. But, luckily, it all worked out. Seeing as how you gave me everything anyway.”
I swallowed hard and shook my head with vigor, my vision trailing half a second behind. “I only gave you control,” I choked out.
“You should really read things before you sign them, Rhion. It’s just a good business practice.” With long, malicious strides, he marched toward me. “You didn’t actually think I’d spent my entire life kissing your father’s ass to walk away with nothing? I’ll be damned if I’m giving it back now.”
“Wait! Stop!” I cried.
I kept shuffling backward, my arms outstretched—the only barrier I was able to use to protect myself. My foot hit the threshold to the balcony and I stumbled, but I somehow managed to right myself before hitting the ground. Pete continued to advance on me, and seconds later, pain exploded in my spine as he rammed me into the railing.
Jude
“There he is!” I growled, pointing at Apollo, who was standing in an empty parking lot, smoking a cigarette.
My car hadn’t even come to a stop before Johnson slung his door open and jumped out, aggressive steps carrying him over to Rhion’s brother.
After throwing my car into park, I wasn’t but a second behind him.