Manhattan: In Love with the Infamous King

Chapter 10

Alex POV

One by one, they each fell asleep. They decided to stay in Nolan's living room tonight. I don't argue. What would I even say? Once I am sure the last of them is asleep, I get up and wonder if I should just take the elevator down and leave. They already know who I am, it's only a matter of time before they track my ass down again.

I make my way to the edge of their balcony while taking in the views of the city. There is no way in hell that I will be able to sleep here. I mean, who would be able to? With the exception of, hopefully, Phillip, the other people in this place are killers. I guess I am one to talk. Not sure if it's because of the beautiful view or the heart to heart from earlier, I am just in my head space, thinking and analyzing over and over again, asking myself the same question. Is this worth it? But I know it will be, I just need more time.

There are days like these ones when I can be at the top of the world and feel this crushing emptiness, wondering when that day will be when all of this will be like a bad dream. Part of me wants to scream at the city from where I am, asking someone, anyone, everyone. Why me? I can feel my emotions build up, for the first time in I don't know how long.

Seeing Nolan come out from the living room, I turn back to my view of the city and take deep shallow breaths. I have already made it this far. He asks if I am thinking about jumping and I almost give away a dark laugh, but I hold it together in my response to him. I can tell he wasn't expecting that type of answer. I feel a blanket on me and I take it to wrap myself in it. He doesn't say anything more as we stand in this comfortable silence.

Before I know it, I am in his bathroom reaching into his first aid basket. What kind of man lets his hand bleed out? Doesn't he feel it? Does he feel anything? After I find all the things that I need, he leads us to sit down on the bench by the window opposite his hed.

Softly grabbing his hand, I see the glass from whatever he grabbed. Wonder what pissed him off to this extent. Carefully picking the glass from his hand, I feel his stare at me.

"What?" I finally say softly without taking my attention away from his hand. Just a couple of small pieces then we can bandage this up and I can leave. Parts of my hair fall to my face and I'm about to bring a hand to put it behind my hair. Before I get to it, his one good tucks it behind my ear for me, causing me to stop and look up at him. His hand doesn't stay there, but he catches my eyes.

"You're still wearing the necklace." He states with no emotions. I just nod as I look back down and pick out the last piece, but it's a little deeper than the others. When I finally get it out, I put down the tweezers to bandage his hand and wrap it up. "How did someone like you end up working for Louis?"

"Someone who didn't have a lot of choices." My voice is dull as I wind down a little. His room, although it would probably look uninviting to people, the bareness of the open space provides me comfort.

"How good are you?"

"Good enough." Standing, I grab all of the stuff I had grabbed and took care of it. Emerging from the bathroom, I come into the living room to see Nolan coming towards me.

"Stay in the room." Men like Nolan are probably used to girls fawning over them, but that's not going to be me. He has hard features that define his sharp jawline. When he smiled at me in the grocery store, he has two large dimples on his cheeks. His white skin is clear and his dark green eyes compliment his long black lashes. That pitch black hair is shorter and usually a little messy. I'm not blind, I know he's attractive.

"I'm good." With my weary tone, I know he catches the drift. It doesn't help that he's a gang member and I think we all know what their reputation is like. With Nolan, it feels different. It's almost like he couldn't be bothered.

"I wasn't asking." His frigid voice makes me almost roll my eyes at him. Maybe that voice can get him whatever he wants with everyone else, but I wasn't raised with a silver spoon in my mouth. We don't always get what we want. I lift my eyebrow to see if he is serious on forcing me to stay in his room. What would the others think if they knew? Someone like him isn'y attracted to someone as plain as me, so what is he trying to do?

"And is there a reason?"

"Because you can't sleep." How does he know that? Geez, this is frustrating. It's like he's reading my mind, always having one up on me. This is definitely a foreign feeling to me and I am not a fan. "Sleep in here. No one will bother you."

"Why do you do that?" I let out a hard sigh at this.

"What?" I stare at him hard before I shut my eyes and run my hands through my hair. s**t. That's a tell tale sign about my feelings. How did I just.. He looks amused? Concerned? Never have I ever had someone I couldn't read before, yet he.. he..

"Nevermind. The view of your balcony is fine." As I close the door behind me, he turns around towards his bathroom and heads in. I let out a breath I didn't realize I was holding in there. That's weird.

Nolan POV

Alex walks out of here as she is insistent on not sleeping. It doesn't bother me one way or another, so I walk into the bathroom to take a nice hot shower. The problem is that I keep finding myself thinking about her. How she got her eyes to be that cold and distant. If she is cold. How good her shot is. How Louis met her.

Did I just wonder if she is cold? Why the hell do I care if she is cold? She could freeze her ass off out there so long as she doesn't leave the penthouse and disappear. We still need that program and I'm not about to give it up now that we are so close. But I still have this constant nagging at the back of my mind. It's f*****g freezing out there. She's going to catch pneumonia. Damn it. I finish my shower quickly, and put on some large sweats and a t-shirt before grabbing a pair of sweats and a thick blanket from my closet. That security program better be worth it, at least that's what I tell myself.

She pulled up the sofa to the edge of the balcony to sit, but she has her legs up to her chest as she faces the city. I turn off the tv in the living room as I see the other three are still sound asleep. The oven clock reads 3:14 AM. I shake my head at this idiocrasy as I head out there and she notices me entering the balcony once again. I toss her the paint of sweats to which she catches immiediately. Giving me a strange look, she reluctantly puts them on.

"Thanks." I get in front of her to lay the blanket over her. She's conflicted. Even she knows this isn't how I usually act, but if she's going to become one of our own, we take care of each other. I hate to admit it, but when I saw how casual the other laid up in the living were, I knew they had accepted her as one of us. It looks like she needed convincing, but she's not the only one. I sit down beside her. At first, she says and does nothing, but then she pulls the blanket to share. So she is capable of caring. Good to know.

Though we are sitting in comfortable silence, every now and then we would catch each other peeking. Her body was pretty tense when I first say down, but I can feel now that her guard lowered at least a little as her back falls back into the couch.

"My father was a d**k and I wanted to be twice the man was, so I started my own gang." She veers in my direction with softer eyes as I start to answer the question that everyone answered earlier tonight. "He tried to kill me, but The Whisper shot him down just as he was about to. I built this place for people who didn't have a chance in the real world." I turn to her so she knows I am serious. Though she hasn't shown us her full potential, I have a feeling this isn't the last we will see of her.

"You didn't have to.."

"No, but it's fair." They all shared something, even Alex, though I finished hers for her.

"My foster father used to beat us. He preyed on the young girls in the house. We lived in a large farmhouse in the countryside, so nobody really knew. When the authorities found out, he took off. I ran away in the chaos and Ryker found me."

Ryker. Why does he irritate me so much? I mean I was annoyed with him before, but his name coming out of her lips makes it venomous. Part of me wants to break him down and tear him limb from limb. We don't say anything else for awhile as she stares off and I do the same.

"You're exhausted."

"I'm fine." Her soft voice comes out again, but this time it's genuine.

"When's the last time you slept?" My tone comes out softer than normal too. How did that happen? I don't match other people's tones, they match mine.

"Last night."

"No, when's the last time you slept?" I emphasize because I know the feeling. That tired and cold look in the eyes is from the lack of sleep, real sleep. She has that same distant look, so I know she knows what I am talking about. The tossing and turning at night keeps you awake because you think about everything all at once. You "wake up" and it's almost you're haunted.

"I don't know." Alex lets out a soft sigh as she tucks her hair behind her ear and tighten her hold on the blanket. "Maybe never." That hit me harder than I thought it would. How does she do that? She's the splitting image of whatever soul I have left.

"We're going inside." She doesn't move and I wasn't asking. I stand up and she stays in place, so I lift her up bridal style and though I anticipated resistance, she doesn't. Alex is unfazed as I carry her back into my room and put her on my bed. "If you're not going to sleep, at least be warm."

"Why do you care?" She's right. Why do I care? If it were any other woman out there, I would have gotten out there nor give her my clothes to wear. What is with me lately? I don't know the answer. All I know is there's that feeling in the pit of my stomach guiding me to do.

"I don't, but if you're not going to sleep, then at least we can go through the plan for next weekend." I head to my office and grab my laptop and a spare laptop for her along with the physical file folder for Duval. If we have to trust her to get us out of there in the event things go south, we only have a week to train her, to trust her instincts. When I come back, I had her the laptop and the file, to which she stares back at me questioningly.

"You trust me enough with that?"

"I trust you enough. And I have been working on this for the last couple of hours and I couldn't get through it. We need a new set of eyes." She nods and grabs the materials from my hand and sitting upright on my bed, facing the window.

"The Duvals?"

"Heard of them?"

"Just whispers about a possible s*x trafficking ring emerging in the city." For someone who is out of the game, she sure is up to date with everything.

"We don't make deals with people who exploit women and children. They're trying to buy a surplus of weapons before the ring starts." She nods her head as she takes in the information I handed to her.

"This one." Alex hands me a photo of Lily Duval, Keegan's wife. I'm told she is a trophy wife and all she does is call her friends and travel the world on her husband's money.

"What about her?"

"She is running the show." I pick up the documents relevant to her. There's no evidence of that. Opening my laptop, I find all my information on her, but again come up with nothing.

"Why do you say that?" I finally ask Alex when she starts digging deeper into the business side of things.

"The phone numbers." She hands me Lily's call records and turns her laptop screen to me. I still don't see it. "How many times does Kennedy call and text me in a day?" She finds her phone and gives it to me. I run through her messages. She gets it at least twice a day. I run through Lily's phone records again. None of the numbers have been the same for the last two years.

"Her friends are from around the world. They are just not close." I explain to her.

"No, these numbers belong to a pre-paid number. If you were looking at them statistically speaking, she has no other person call her more than once. But if you look month to month, you see she has exact times when she picks up a phone call, they're just not the same number." She bites down on her bottom lip as she digs through more of Lily's documents.

"You don't think it's a coincidence."

"I don't believe in coincidences." She looks hard through another set of documents. "Here, take a look at this." I take a close seat next to her on the bed.

"January 1. 0914. 0957. 1022. 1134... February 1. 0915. 0958. 1023. 1135... March 1. 0916. 0959. 1024. 1136." The list continues the exact same way for every day and month for the past two years. In each month, she started her meeting exactly one minute after the month before.

"She's smart. Nobody would think about the times of each date. And nobody would bat an eye because it's not at common start times. We are programmed to think about times in terms of on the dot, 15, 30, 45. She made it so those times looked random unless you put the months together side by side."

"How sure are you? Is there anything besides the phone numbers and times that would lead you to believe that she is leading this ring?" She hesitates for a second as she sorts through the documents into piles before handing me a photo.

"Look at the body language between Keegan and Lily. It says on the file the marriage was arranged, but they point their legs together or try to face one another. It means they have some sort of relationship or mutual respect. And look at Keegan's projects, there is no way he would be able to pull this off without help." I look over Keegan's projects and Alex is right. With my past exchanges with Keegan, even I thought it was astonishing that he could pull this kind of deal off.

"The deal." I realize as Alex puts together the pieces for us. "Keegan wants to make a deal that he won't bring the ring to New York in exchange for our protection and weapons at the port. If we take that deal, he wins because he was never in charge. He won't bring the ring, but Lily will." That's what's been missing this whole time. The deal was too good to be true. f**k.