Fixed Forever by Laurelin Paige

Author:Laurelin Paige
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Paige Press LLC

As Alayna had requested, we spent the next day and a half going over the video files of the interviews conducted with possible suspects. While I paced the room and tried not to succumb to drinking all the scotch in the loft, Alayna sat stoically, taking feverish notes about the men and women describing the heinous crimes of my past. This was the vulnerability that I hated most—feeling out of control, like a spiraling fall into black nothing. She'd known vaguely about my games, but never in this precise detail. She’d certainly never experienced the horror of listening to it from the victim's side.

Somewhere in the midst of the terrible confessions, I had an epiphany—it hadn't just been Alayna I’d been protecting by keeping all of this from her. The letters, the danger from my past—I'd also been protecting myself.

"That wasn't the man I married," she'd say occasionally as the worst stories were told, seeming to know that I needed comfort, and it helped, but still—by the time we were ready to meet with Celia on Sunday evening, I was tense and on edge.

Other than the occasional reassurance, Alayna had been oddly quiet for the most part, whether processing all she'd seen or letting me have my space, I wasn't sure. But on the ride to Randall's bar, she became herself again, anxious and fretting and full of questions.

"Why did we choose Randall's? We don't usually go there." She twisted her fingers together nervously, the very definition of wringing her hands.

"It was a random point between our location and hers," I answered, not mentioning that Celia and I had gone back and forth on this matter. She had wanted to meet on her turf, I had, obviously, wanted to meet on mine. The office, her hotel, The Sky Launch—all locations were suggested and dismissed, finally settling on using an app that found meet up spots at an equal distance between two points on a map. Randall's it was.

"She knows why we want to see her?" she continued to fidget.

"No." I was terse.

"Then why did she agree to meet us? That doesn't seem like her. To walk into a situation without knowing what she was dealing with? That seems highly suspicious. Doesn't it?" She was working herself up.

I stilled her hand, wrapping it in mine and caressing it with my own, an attempt to calm her. "I suspect that she thinks that I'm going to discuss business with her,” I said. “She wants me to let her and her husband purchase equal shares in Werner Media so that our three-point alliance no longer favors us."

"Of course she does," Alayna huffed indignantly. "Did she really ask you that directly? Or are you just guessing?"

"She asked directly. She said that if I don't let her buy shares, they will find them somewhere else. That was a few weeks ago." It seemed so much longer in the past. I had barely thought about it with everything else going on.

Alayna pulled her hand away from mine brusquely.

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