“I did, Lex. Of course I did. But only because I want everything that happens to me in this life to happen to me with you by my side. When I looked around the waiting room tonight, I saw my family — but not all of them. You’re my family too. I don’t know what that looks like yet, but I know it won’t matter as long as you're there.”
His words should have moved her. Instead anger surged through her chest. “You’re making it all seem so easy.”
He shook his head. “If anyone knows family isn’t easy, it’s me. But when it’s hard is when family counts most. Why won’t you let me be there for you when it’s hard?”
“You’re acting like this is the only thing between us. It’s not, and now I know for sure it’s not.” The lawyer in her was aware of the change in her voice, the subtle shift from woman to prosecutor.
He blinked. “What are you talking about?”
“I had an investigator assigned to the MIS case. Imani wanted to either clear it from the roster or move forward with it, and we needed more information to do either of those things. It took the investigator awhile to come up with a recommendation, but tonight he gave me one.”
“We’re crossing the line here,” Nick said. “The line we both said we wouldn’t cross.”
“We don’t have a choice,” Alexa said. “Not anymore.”
“What did he find?” Nick asked. “The investigator?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” she said.
“Then where do we go from here, Lex? Tell me how this works.”
“I need to hear it from you,” she said.
He hesitated, then held out his hand. “Give me your phone.”
“What?”
“Give me your phone,” he said.
She handed it to him and he walked across the room, fished his own phone out of his pocket, and put them both in the microwave in the kitchenette.
He turned to her. “I’ll tell you anything that won’t hurt my family.”
She thought of Julia in the hospital, of the baby named John Thomas. “It will all hurt your family.”
“I’ll do my best to be honest,” he said.
She thought about all the things she wanted to know. The investigator hadn’t made an airtight case, but there was enough to proceed with a formal investigation: flight paths for MIS’ plane that coincided with the murder of Yael Dohan after the Manifest case broke, contact with known associates of the Syndicate, a transnational crime ring that operated in cities all over the world.
And there was more. A lot more. Nothing that was damning on its face, but years of work with the AG had honed Alexa’s ability to smell smoke where there was fire. The information provided by the investigator pointed to a full-scale blaze, and that was without her own experience with Nick.
She’d needed him after the man who’d broken into her apartment tried to kill her. Somewhere in the back of her shock-addled mind, she’d known how it would look if the police came and found Nick there, if Imani found out Nick had been in her apartment at the time of the attack. The dominoes would fall and Alexa would lose her job.
She’d let Nick deal with it and chalked the decision up to shock, but she’d always had questions about how he’d cleaned up the mess, about the evenness with which he’d handled a situation that had shaken her to her core.
Those questions hadn’t disappeared, but in the end, there was only one thing she really needed to know. Only one thing that really mattered.
“Is it true?” she asked him. “Is MIS a murder-for-hire organization?”
He didn’t answer right away. “That’s not what I’d call it,” he finally said.
“Don’t argue semantics with me,” she snapped. “I’m a lawyer. Does MIS kill people for money?”
“Yes.”
She’d prepared herself for any number of reactions if the worst came to pass. She’d prepared herself to be furious, to be devastated, even to be clinical in her determination to be true to her job at the AG’s office.
But she hadn’t been prepared for the numbness that seeped through her body, for the utter lack of emotion felt in the wake of his words. Looking at him, she felt nothing at all.