Break Me

This is a work of fiction. Any names, characters, places, events, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

Break Me copyright @ 2015 by Evelyn Glass. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Book 4 of
The Blankenships
series

CHAPTER ONE

Everything felt vague and strange. Sounds echoed. Sensations were either too close and far too sharp or too far away to register other than minor irritations. Someone got her up to her feet and had her sit down on a chair. It was away from what remained of Cindy Walden, which was kind, but the stench of blood and fear was so thick on the air that she couldn
’t really get away from it. She found herself twisting her hands over and over, until the skin was sore, but when she stopped, she saw it all happen again. Two little hiss-pops, followed by Cindy falling, clawing at her chest like she could somehow pull out the bullets and knit herself back together.

Zoey retched again and again, until there wasn’t really anything left in her to throw up.

After a stretch of time, a police officer stood over her, asking questions. They were polite questions, and she tried to find the words to answer them, but she wasn’t sure if she was making sense. They wanted to know why she was at Cindy Walden’s apartment so late, if she knew if Ms. Walden had any enemies, and who the man was that she thought she’d seen. She noticed that, thought she’d seen. It was a hell of a story, wasn’t it? She found herself grinning without any humor. It was the plot to every bad detective story that ever happened. The pretty lady found standing over the body absolutely swears that she didn’t do it.

She heard Alex’s voice echoing outside in the hallway, and another man with him. Alex was roaring something, so tense as to be almost incomprehensible, and the other voice was trying to calm him down. She found her mouth stretching into a grin again, and almost laughed this time. She had a feeling that calming Alex down didn’t usually do much good, and it sure as hell wasn’t making a difference now.

He burst through the blue wall of uniforms, and was kneeling before her in a second, his hands clutching hers. “Luke, what the hell are your officers doing to her? She’s ice cold.”

There was a short man standing behind Alex, model handsome, but only about 5’5”. He had a dark Mediterranean tan to his skin, hair that was almost black, and stubble that made her think he’d been dragged out of bed to deal with his old friend’s girlfriend, and was not in a particularly good mood about it.

The man, Luke, turned away from the officer he’d been speaking with quietly. “They found her standing over the body, Alex, and they followed protocol. They’ve been trying to interview her, but she’s not making a lot of sense.”

“She’s clearly in shock,” Alex snarled. She found her eyes combing over him, looking for proof that he was there, really there, and going to stay there. “You had no right to ask her a damn thing without legal counsel present, or without her being examined by a medical professional first.” Luke started to sputter, but Alex turned all his attention back to Zoey. She liked that, she liked his eyes on her. It gave her something to focus on, something to see other than Cindy’s hands clawing at her flesh.

“Are you okay, princess?” His voice was quiet and low, incredibly intimate, even though they were surrounded by cops. But there was something dark in his eyes, now that she was looking at him closely. Something angry. At her? She couldn’t quite tell.

“He shot her,” she managed to say. “Right in front of me.”

“Do you know who he was?” Alex asked. There was a question he wasn’t asking. Whether or not it was something they already suspected, she thought.

“No. I saw his face, but I didn’t know who he was.”

Alex glanced back at Luke, who nodded. “Sketch artist is already on the way.”

“Are you okay to wait a little while, and then describe who you saw to someone?” Alex asked her.

Zoey closed her eyes for a minute, and tried to will the numbness away for long enough to draw a clean breath. “I need to,” she muttered. “They need to find him, Alex. What they did to her—” her gorge rose again, and she fought to control herself. He stroked her back lightly, and surreptitiously grabbed a trashcan from somewhere and slid it between her feet. She spat out the little bit of bile she’d managed to raise, and then tried to focus on her breathing. “I can do this.”

Alex settled on the couch next to her and pulled her into his lap. She could feel him vibrating with stress, and something more, and she had a feeling that letting him comfort her would mean as much to him as it did to her.

Luke—the police commissioner friend, she realized—sat down across from her. “Alex, are you going to introduce me to your new friend?”

She felt her cheeks redden just a little, and stuck out her hand. “Sorry. I’m Zoey Gardener.”

Alex gave her shoulder a squeeze as she grasped the smaller man’s hand. “He knows that,” he said. “He’s harassing me about my poor manners.”

“As seems only fair when I got dragged out of my house to come and let you into an active investigation scene where you shouldn’t have been in the first place,” Luke replied. His tone was completely mild and conversational, but there was more to his words, as evidenced by his tone. That was perfectly clear.

Alex’s hand squeezed tighter on her shoulder, tight enough that Zoey winced a little bit. With the hand that Luke wouldn’t be able to see, she gave him a light jab in the ribs to tell him to loosen up. His grip lightened, but she was fairly sure she’d see a bruise there in the morning. “I gave you a choice,” Alex said, the same conversational steel tone in his speech. “Me, or my lawyers.”

Luke rolled his eyes. “If you’d let me bring her down to 1PP, everything would be a lot easier, and we’d all be more comfortable. She’s not a suspect at this time, there’s no powder residue on her hands, there’s no consequence to her coming with us to talk in a comfortable office.”

“Absolutely not,” Alex replied, and Zoey had the feeling that they’d been having this argument for a while already tonight. “You will keep her name out of the media, for my sake if not for hers, and what the hell do you mean that there’s no gun powder residue on her hands? Did you swab her?”

The rage in his voice had crested, and was dropping down into low, cold tones that made Zoey shiver. Luke didn’t have a shred of shame in his eyes when he replied, “We asked her if she would like to decline the test, and she did not decline.”

“Did she respond at all?” Luke’s eyes remained firm, and she could feel that same rage burning through Alex, feel it ready to burst. “We’re leaving,” he said then, his voice as cold and quiet as when he’d ended the interview with Zoey in his office. He stood up abruptly, his hand around Zoey’s arm. “Ms. Gardener will be represented by Rodriguez, Rodriguez, and Martin. You know them, I’m sure. They pulled your ass out of the fire more than once.”

“Alex, come on,” Luke said, standing up quickly. Alex stepped away, hauling Zoey with him. She let him, because it was too much work to fight back, and all she really wanted right now was to sleep until everything had stopped.

“Not another word, Luke. Not one.”

CHAPTER TWO

She let him haul her through the uniforms and into the elevator, but in the confined space, away from the eyes that were trained to suspect the person they found over the body as the killer. But when the doors of the elevator closed, and his hand was still iron tight around her upper arm, she wrenched it free. It wasn
’t him she was mad at, so much as it was nauseating to be touched. She couldn’t shake the image of Cindy’s clawing hands out of her eyes. She couldn’t stop thinking about how terrified the woman must have been, dying alone, drowning in blood, her heart pumping air.

“What were you thinking, Zoey?” Alex snapped, and it was sort of funny. Not funny like to make her laugh, just funny in her tired and twisted head, because he had hardly said her name to her since they’d met. She’d gotten used to being his princess already, and that made no sense at all.

She brushed her hand over her forehead and tried to take a breath that made it past her sternum. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered that breathing shallowly encouraged the body’s fight or flight response, and that simply taking deep breaths could help to break the reaction down, help to settle the body’s reaction so that the mind could find some relaxation. Of course, taking the time to breathe deeply was hard, when Alex was actually glaring at her. “I’m sorry you’re upset—”

“Upset?” Her parents had always yelled. He wasn’t yelling. He’d gone completely cold, utterly businesslike. He could have been dressing down a subordinate for presenting him with incomplete paperwork, not addressing his girlfriend, who’d stood just yards away from a murderer. “I think that I passed upset sometime around when the driver called me on my cell phone to tell me that police had begun arriving at the building you’d asked him to take you to, and what did he want me to do. I think I left upset back in the dust when the cops turned me away from the scene, and I had to get one of my best friends out of bed in order to come and rescue you.”

That snapped her attention into laser point focus. “Rescue me? Are you serious right now?”

“I’m incredibly serious.”

She snorted as the elevator doors snapped open in the lobby. He reached for her arm again, and she jerked it away from him. “Don’t touch me. Don’t touch me, acting like I’m some weak little damsel in distress who needs the big strong man to rescue her from the big bad world.” She took two steps towards the front door before he picked her up, his arms winding easily around her waist and lifting her off her feet. She kicked him, feeling her heel land solidly in his thigh, but all he did was grunt.

There was a part of her that wanted to focus on the sex appeal of a man who could lift her without any really apparent physical effort, but she was mostly caught up in choosing whether or not screaming and clawing at his face would be an appropriate reaction at this moment. “Are you dense,” she managed to hiss, “or just being a stubborn ass?”

“I’m trying to protect both of us right now,” he said. “The front of the building is covered by the paparazzi. The back entrance won’t be much better, but David drove me over, and he’s used to dealing with insane people with cameras. He’ll keep your face out of the press.” He carried her through a back hallway and dropped her to her feet by a loading door.

“Yes,” she said. “Can’t have your new girlfriend connected to something as untoward as a murder. What would your society friends say?”

She reached for the doorknob, but before she could twist it, and dive into whatever awaited her, he turned her around, pulled her hard against him, and captured her mouth with his.

His kiss was absolutely vicious, his teeth grinding against hers, his hand winding in her hair and yanking her mouth back to the angle that he wanted. His free hand slipped down her front, caressing her mound hard through her jeans as he backed her up against the wall of the wide hallway. “Shut up,” he murmured. “I’m furious. I’m scared out of my mind. We are going to have a very serious conversation. But right now, just stop. Please. I don’t want to fight.”

“What do you want to do?” she gasped.

“I want to fuck,” he said, his hips grinding against hers. And yes, he really did, she could feel him hard and eager. “It’s better than fighting.”

She felt the spin in her body as the adrenaline swirled through her, eager and willing to be turned from the desperate need to run away to the urgent need to run towards. She wrapped her arms around her neck and pulled herself up to her tiptoes to get a better angle as she kissed him back, plundering his mouth with her tongue, until he pulled her back harder. He yanked her mouth away from his and then dragged his teeth down her throat, making her groan and grasp his cock through his pants, stroking him hard as he let out a bitter curse.

“If we don’t get into the goddamned car,” he snarled, “I’m going to tear another pair of your jeans.”

“Can’t have that,” she said, and let him pull away. He slammed the side of his fist against the door three times, counted to ten, and then yanked the door open. David stood there, facing the door with two open umbrellas. Alex put his head down and used the black nylon as cover as he stepped into the town car, which was parked just a handful of paces away. Zoey followed him. They tumbled into the car, and after just a moment, David was in the driver’s seat and they were in motion.

She reached for his hand, eager to take things up where they’d left off—it felt good to feel something other than the fear and nervousness—but his fingers didn’t close over hers. He stared out the darkened windows of the car as they drove through town, his mood having completely changed in the moments as they got into the car.

“Alex?”

“You could have been killed,” he said. “You could have died. I want you to think about how I would have felt if you’d died there.”

She choked off her first, phenomenally unhelpful response. “I didn’t die,” she said.

“You should have let me know that she was calling you. You should have told me.”

“You didn’t answer the text I sent asking what I should be packing,” she said, unable to keep the bitterness out of her tone. “Why the hell should I have wasted my time sending you more texts for you to ignore?”

The silence between them was cold and toxic. She sat there with it coating her skin, waiting for him to tell David to go ahead and drive her home and call it done. But he didn’t, and when they got to his building, he offered her his hand as they got out of the car. He didn’t say another word as they took the elevator up to the penthouse, but he didn’t let go of her hand this time, either. Inside, they kicked off their shoes, and then he led her straight to his bedroom. She expected him to fall on her, all hands and heat and need, but instead, he watched her, a coldness in his eyes that she hadn’t seen before.

Maybe that first night she thought, when he’d worn a mask. Certainly not since then.

“I want to play,” he said. “I want to play with toys. I want to tie you up and show you how safe you are with me. Are you game?”

His voice was as cold as his eyes, and it made her shiver. She wanted to go to bed, but it was likely that she wouldn’t sleep until she was completely exhausted. Let him play. Maybe an orgasm would tire her out enough that she’d be able to shake the image of Cindy’s clawing hands out of her head, at least for a little while. “Yeah,” she said. “Let’s play.”

His eyes flared, bright and hot, and he nodded, just once. He strode through the room, strong and powerful, and she let herself follow him.