Forever With You by Laurelin Paige
Hadn't left the managers office? So help me, if Alayna had told Penny to say that she wasn't there to teach me some sort of lesson… "Do me a favor, Dawes—go up there and check, can you? I called the office directly, and was told she wasn't there."
"Sure thing, boss. But I'm telling you, I've had my eyes on that stairway door all day, and she hasn't come down. I haven’t even gone to the bathroom. There’s no way she snuck by me."
That made me feel better, marginally.
"Then she'll be up there," I said, more for myself than him. "And when you find her, make sure she calls me immediately." So I could wring her neck.
I wasn't even going to consider what it meant if he didn't find her.
When neither Alayna or Dawes had called within ten minutes, though, I knew there was trouble. I texted Jordan, told him to put a trace on her phone. He texted back two minutes later.
Her phone’s at the club. What's up?
I was starting to type a reply when my phone rang. Dawes. Not the one of the two that I'd wanted to hear from. Not the one that would relieve me of this worry. I silently prayed that Alayna was being stubborn, sending me a message through my hired hand, and pressed Accept.
"I swear she didn't leave. Her things are still in the office, and even if she decided to go out of the fire well, we have a guy watching the door outside, and he hasn't seen her either. He hasn’t left his station even once, he said. You can have Jordan verify, we all stay logged into this GPS app on our smart-watches..." He was talking a million miles a minute, so fast I could hear him sweat through the receiver. I tuned out of his babbling.
Only one piece of information was relevant—he couldn't find her.
"Obviously one of you fell asleep on the job," I roared. "Who was she working with last?"
"Gwen Bruzzo. The blonde."
At least Dawes was sharp enough to know that. "Keep looking for her. If you're so goddamned sure she didn't slip out, than she’s got to be somewhere in the building." I clicked End and immediately called Gwen.
“Alayna hasn't come home, and I can’t get ahold of her."
"And you've tried The Sky Launch?" She knew there was reason to be worried, it was in her tone.
"Of course I tried the club first. Her things are still there, but she's not. You know she goes nowhere without her phone, in case something happens with the kids. Was she there when you left? Did she say anything about going anywhere?" I tried consciously not to sound as frantic as I felt, but I was sure I failed.
I was frantic. I was finally starting to understand how Alayna felt.
"Oh!" Gwen exclaimed. "Lee Chong gave her a key to next door! She went over there to measure and visualize and scope out the space again. She was still there when I left. I'm sure that's where she is now. Probably lost track of time. You know how she gets."
Thank God.
Relief poured over me like a hot shower.
"Yes. I'm sure you're right. I do know how she gets. Thank you for telling me."
I was still shaking when I hung up the phone. I leaned across my desk, both palms flat on it to hold me up, and took a couple of deep breaths to calm my heart. Of course that's where she was. I knew I was being paranoid.
She was Alayna. Passionate, eager, focused. Obsessive. All the things I loved.
And why wouldn't she lose track of time? I myself had told her to go fixate on her new project, pushed her there. I'd been such an ass, and there she was, an angel, doing exactly what I told her to.
I had to make it up to her.
I stopped in and told Payton I was leaving, then grabbed my keys and went down to the garage, not bothering to call for a driver. I was eager to get where I was going and didn’t want to wait for him to arrive. On my way to The Sky Launch, I stopped at a small grocery store that I knew usually carried Alayna’s favorite flowers—alstroemerias. She always said you had to love the way they lasted so long, a full week. Sometimes two. They were the kind of flower that knew how to survive, and she found that to be one of the things that made them so beautiful.
It was how I felt about Alayna—her ability to survive was one of the things that made her so beautiful.
The store did have some fresh bouquets, and I grabbed the best of the bunch of the tiny flowers and continued on my way to the club. From the time I'd parked, got inside and started up the backstairs, I had planned a whole scenario in my mind. First I would surprise her. Apologize. Grovel. And since the event space was empty and there weren’t cameras over there, perhaps my groveling would take a physical form.
I hated fighting with Alayna. But I did love making up.
The stairwell leading up to the manager's office was not the main stairway for the club. It was generally only used by the staff, though, when the club closed and people were trying to exit quickly, patrons would often use them to exit onto the street. Those were the only places that the stairs led—to the administrative offices, which were located on the hallway on the second floor, to the club on the first level, and to the street.
The only other place you could get from the stairs, was to one back door entrance to Lee Chong's event space. The locked door looked almost like a closet at the end of the hallway, and to the best of my knowledge, it only existed to meet fire codes, offering another way for people using that part of the building to exit, if needed.
It was convenient, actually, for Alayna and her plans, that the door existed. It was one less thing that would have to be added during renovations when she truly got her project underway. She would be able to oversee work without having to go far from the office and give workmen unobtrusive access to the alley so as not to disrupt business as usual.
The door was ajar when I got there, which was fortunate, because there was no other way I would be able to get in if it hadn't been open. Though I did swallow back the urge to be irritated at her carelessness. If I could walk in so easily, so could any other patron who decided to wander past the administrator offices.
But I hadn't come to reprimand. Quite the opposite.
I pushed the door open farther, and stepped inside. I remembered to shut it behind me before looking for her. The lights were on, if dimly so, so the rest would be easy, but the space took up three floors. She could be anywhere.
I debated between searching silently and calling out for her, finally deciding on the latter so as not to startle her.
"Alayna?" My voice echoed through the large empty room, sounding back at me with hollow vibration.
She didn't answer.
I scanned the room, my eyes settling on the upright piano near where I’d come in. There were two shot glasses on top of it. I crossed over to them, picked one up and sniffed. It smelled like tequila, Alayna's liquor of choice.
But it wasn't like her to take shots while she was working, not since the first time I'd seen her on the job so many years ago, anyway. But that had been a special occasion. The celebration of her graduation.
I called out her name again, then listened carefully. The lights that were on didn't illuminate the entire space—just the edge of the first level. It was possible that I couldn't see her in the dark shadows. But maybe I could hear her. I told myself again, not to be irritated. Maybe she wasn’t ready to talk just because I was. That didn’t change the fact that we needed to.
After listening for several seconds, I actually did hear something—a flapping sound, like one object tapping against another.
I followed the noise across the room to the opposite side of the space and found a service door, this one completely open, lightly banging against the side of the building from the wind.
My heart fell into my stomach as I crossed the threshold and stood outside in the night. I looked down the side of the building in both directions. Sure enough, the space was completely out of sightline from any of the cameras or guards that I had stationed on The Sky Launch. This door was completely unseen by any of my men. By anyone at all.
"Fuck!" I took the bouquet of alstroemerias and banged it agai
The flowers were battered and destroyed when I was done with them.
Throwing the ruined bouquet to the ground, I quickly ran back through Chong's area toward the offices. Whoever had come in, whoever had followed Alayna into the event space, had to have entered through The Sky Launch. I went straight to the security room, where the cameras fed footage to the televisions, and was surprised to find, not only Alan Dawes, but Jordan already there reviewing the tapes.
"When you didn't respond to my text," Jordan said, "I contacted Dawes to see what was going on with Alayna. He filled me in. We are currently looking at that stairwell to see if she somehow slipped out without us noticing."
I quickly updated them with what little information I had—what Gwen had told me, what I'd seen in the space next door. Jordan sent Dawes to go look through Chong’s property, in case I'd missed something, in case she was somewhere on the third floor and hadn't heard me calling out for her.
I knew that she wasn’t, but he wasn't doing any good standing behind Jordan looking at a TV screen.
Jordan changed his search from the back stairwell to the front doors, hoping to find someone suspicious or someone we recognize as a suspect enter.
I watched over his shoulder while I called everyone we knew—my sister, Alayna's brother Brian, Chandler, even my mother. No one had seen her. No one had heard from her. Each no made my stomach drop a little further, made my mouth a little drier, made the sweat on my brow increase.
One thought echoed through my head, over and over, on a loop—I didn’t protect her.
I’d failed to keep her safe.
Penny, the manager on duty, came in to see if she could help and stayed to be another eye on the videotapes.
"Anything?" I asked after I ran through my entire contact list.
Jordan was stoic with his rundown. "We aren't having any real success. It’s damn near impossible to collect data with this many people—looking at the cameras and matching ID records. If it were a normal business day, this would be a different story."
"What do you mean, a normal business day?" I asked Jordan.
"The job fair. The place was chaotic." he answered.
"Record attendance," Penny said cheerfully, not seeming to understand what that was the last thing I wanted to hear. “Quite a coup. All our hard work paid off.”
"Who the fuck authorized a job fair on the premises?" I shouted, nearly ready to tear my hair out.
Penny swallowed visibly, finally starting to notice I wasn’t as excited as she was about the increased presence in the club today.
"Alayna did, sir. Months ago."
"We talked about it last week, or the security team did," Jordan said. "She hadn't planned to be in attendance, so we didn't make any adjustments to how to handle the day."
My legs suddenly felt like they couldn't hold me up anymore. I backed up against the wall, hoping it would keep me from falling to the ground.
She wasn't supposed to be in attendance.
Of course she wasn't. She wasn't back at work yet, not officially. She'd only come in because I'd sent her. I’d pushed her into danger with my harsh words, and my shame over the journals. This was my fault. All of it, my fault.
Jordan spun around on the rolling office chair to face me.
"When do you want to call the police?" He was earnest, but on task. Thank God I could trust him to keep his head about him in a crisis.
I ran my hand through my hair and closed my eyes tight. I didn't want to make the wrong choice. It was almost ten-thirty. She'd been missing, by my count, for almost five hours. If the police even took me seriously at this point, with such relatively little time having passed, it would only be because I had my name and my money behind me.
It was a big if.
And did I want to spend the rest of the night trying to convince them to look into this when I could be scouring the city? Was sitting in a station where my time was best spent?
"Not yet," I answered, hoping it wasn't the wrong answer. "They won't let me help. This whole thing is about me. This is personal. Whoever did this wants to hurt me for something I did in the past. I’ll figure it out faster without being babysat by some smug detective who will just want to ask questions like whether she was having an affair."
Any good detective would want to focus on the fact that we had a fight the last time we'd seen each other too.
The thought of that made me want to throw up. What if those were the last words that…?
I wasn’t going to think it.
But someone with a badge would think all kinds of things, the wrong things.
"I'm going to get my man on these tapes then, an expert in tech who can maybe give us a fuller picture of what’s happening than we can see. We’ll do fingerprints on those shot glasses and a full sweep of the event space, check out where our prime suspects were this afternoon." Jordan had a whole list of marching orders to give to his team.
"Okay. Alright. That's good. That's all good." I pushed away from the wall knowing what I needed to do, my own task separate from Jordan's. "I'm going to go work on this from my end. Text me when you find something."
I sped the entire way to my destination. I parked in a handicapped space, barely even remembering to take my keys with me when I left the car. When I got up to her floor, I didn’t give a single fuck that it was nearly eleven at night, that I might wake up everybody in the building. I hit the buzzer three times, then pounded on the door.
Celia finally opened it, standing there in the same robe she'd been in days before when Alayna had come to tell her off. She was the only person who could help me, the only person who could see what I might have overlooked. And for that, she looked like a goddess waiting to deliver her benevolence.
I pushed inside, grabbing onto her so desperately I almost tipped us both over. "Find her," I begged, my voice raw. "Find my wife."
19
Alayna
The first thing I became aware of again was the spinning of the room.
No, the room wasn’t spinning—I was spinning. Spinning so fast that it made my insides spin too. In my belly, then up through my sternum, up, up…
I was going to vomit.
I sat up a little, because I’d been lying down, and with my hand covering my mouth, I looked for a place to throw up as the saliva filled my mouth and my stomach jumped.
“Here, you can puke in this,” David said, and suddenly there was a small plastic trash bin under my face, just in time to catch the contents of my stomach.
My body shook violently as I retched, over and over. After I’d emptied everything in me, the waves of nausea kept me leaning over the bin. I dry-heaved until my throat was raw, my stomach cramping and clenching.
David held my hair up out of my face the whole time, sweeping away the strands that fell loose while I heaved, and even though I felt like I was on the verge of a seizure, I was conscious enough to think, how nice of him to do this for me. It would suck if he weren’t here. Wherever here was.
Except...
Where was I?
And how did I get here?
Still bent over, I tried to figure out what the last thing I remembered was before this moment. I’d been at The Sky Launch. In the office. With Gwen and David.
No, no. There was more.
I’d gone to the space next door. Lee Chong’s space. I’d heard a noise behind me, and when I turned, there was David. Which was weird because I thought I’d let the door shut behind me. It must not have clicked all the way.
“Oh, it’s you,” I had said then, relieved to see him instead of some creepy stranger. Hudson’s threat from the past was really starting to make me paranoid. “I thought you’d left.”
David had two shot glasses filled with amber liquid in his hands. “I got caught downstairs with old faces,” he’d said. “I thought we should toast to all your success before I left. For old times’ sake.”
I’d
But people made mistakes.
I knew what David was and who he was. He wouldn’t be inappropriate around me, not any more than I could handle. He was likely trying to make sure I knew he didn’t have any lingering feelings. Or he wanted a chance to clear his name. Both of those were natural impulses. And after the way we’d parted, the way I’d chosen Hudson over him...
I’d met him as a confident man, and left him looking at me like a kicked puppy.
I’d owed him a toast.
But how had a simple round of shots gotten me this hungover, sick as a dog, lying in a strange cot in a strange room, while early morning sun streamed through the single window?
I was sure I could figure it out if my head didn’t feel like someone was using it for a kickdrum.
I sat up a little more, done with the vomiting for now, and propped myself up on my side with my elbow.
Letting go of my hair, David wiped at my mouth with a damp washcloth. “You’re coming out of it now,” he said. He was sitting on the edge of the cot next to me. How long had he—had we—been there? He set the rag over his thigh, and bent to the floor to pick up a water bottle. After unscrewing the cap, he handed it to me. “Here. Drink this. It will help.”
I took the bottle from him and sipped carefully, trying to process his words. All my thoughts were sluggish and incomplete. Why was it so hard to think? A single realization bubbled to the surface.
“You gave me something.”
“Sorry. It was necessary. You wouldn’t have come otherwise. You’re too far under his spell.”
I shifted my eyes to look at his quickly. Too quickly, because there were two of him for a second. When he came into focus, I saw that he was dead serious.