Page 45 of View from Above

The wall she’d constructed to keep herself together lost its bricks, one by one. She couldn’t be strong anymore. She couldn’t protect herself from the emotions she’d denied for the past month. Joy Leonard had murdered her father and then gone on a killing spree, targeting Mallory and her mother. All for the one thing Mallory had prided herself on living without: Roland Kotite’s legacy.

Virginia Green, Angie Green, Payton—they’d all paid the price for that pride. She wasn’t sure she could ever forgive herself.

Fluorescent lights above forced her to close her eyes as they wheeled her into the service elevator. The stretcher jerked and bounced, aggravating the pain in her shoulder, but it was nothing compared to the pain that would only be healed by time. “Where is he? Detective Nichols.” Her voice warped through the oxygen mask. “Where’s Payton?”

“They just got him downstairs. You’re only a few minutes behind.” The EMT at the head of her stretcher increased the pressure on her shoulder wound. “Just relax, Ms. Kotite. You’re doing great. We’ll get you both patched up in no time.”

Her chest constricted until it felt as though her ribs had broken all over again. She gasped for oxygen with no relief. Hands fisting in the thin sheet covering the stretcher, Mallory tried to sit up to catch her breath.

A strong grip forced her horizontal, and white dots peppered across her vision. “Shit. The bullet must’ve nicked a lung. It’s about to collapse. We need a chest tube! Move, move, move!”

The pain spread until she was sure her chest was about to fold in on itself. Elevator doors parted, and they were moving again. Her head swam. She would’ve fallen off the stretcher if it hadn’t been for the straps across her hips and stomach. The bullet had punctured her lung, and they were nowhere near the ambulance or the hospital.

She wasn’t going to make it.

She wasn’t going to get the chance to apologize to Payton for overstepping the carefully built boundaries he’d set between them. She wasn’t going to feel the softness of his sheets again or wake up to an assault of gut-wrenching kisses at the back of her neck. She wasn’t going to get to tell him she loved him, too.

“Heart rate’s dropping.” The EMTs circling the stretcher became nothing more than dark shapes with loud voices. They were running now, but her time was up. Heaviness pinned her to the stretcher as one of the techs wedged his knees on either side of her. Their outlines shifted as though they’d teleported from one place to the other. Or had her mind started slipping? “Ms. Kotite, can you hear me?” His voice seemed too far away now. He notched his gaze higher toward someone near her head. “We’re losing her!”

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t think. The stretcher jarred as they slammed through the glass lobby doors of her father’s building. Not his. Hers. As much as she hadn’t wanted anything to do with him or the inheritance, she couldn’t deny where she’d come from anymore. Not unless she wanted to admit she and Joy Leonard had more in common.

Another stretcher and a grouping of emergency personnel came into view, clearing for the briefest of moments. Rich blue eyes settled on her, and Payton stretched his hand out as she passed. The darkness dragged her under just as her fingers connected with his. “Payton.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“We’re losing her!”

Three simple words had haunted his nightmares for the past month.

Payton stepped off the elevator onto Kotite Litigation’s penthouse floor and surveyed the damage. The fire sprinklers had ruined most of the drywall, furniture, and carpet in the building, but the marble floors would stand the test of time. Construction crews worked in sections to restore the building responsible for so much pain, death, and blood.

The bullet wound that’d cracked his sternum ached in remembrance of the last time he’d set foot in this place. Hell, he couldn’t even imagine what’d it all meant for Mallory. No return calls. Text messages left unanswered. He’d lost count of the times he’d tried to get a hold of her. Funny enough, it seemed their positions had reversed from the onset of the investigation into her father’s death.

Heading up the half set of stairs, he rounded down the long hallway leading to Roland Kotite’s former office. Moisture and the onset of mildew clung to the back of his throat as he caught sight of the lean brunette pulling Cabbage Patch Dolls from the shelves with her uninjured arm. She set each one carefully inside the row of boxes she’d lined up on her father’s large oak desk where a shrine had once stood. The sling held her shoulder in place as her formfitting jeans and T-shirt revealed a hidden strength he’d never imagined possible before this case started. “Place looks good.”

Stiffness infused her neck and down her spine. “It’s coming along.” Mallory turned rich brown eyes to him then scanned the rest of the office that’d stood as a source of constant intimidation for her as a kid. Other shelves had been emptied, knickknacks piled in one corner with another collection of boxes. Smoothing the hair of a doll that freakishly looked like her, she set it in the bottom of a box, her back to him once again. “Trooper Wells told me Joy Leonard pulled through a couple weeks ago. She was sentenced to life without the chance of parole. That’s good news.”

“Yeah. She’ll have a blast in Washington Corrections. From what I’ve heard, she’s already earned herself some time in isolation.” Payton leaned his shoulder into the doorjamb, more aware of the distance between them than ever before. “I’ve got Wells looking into anything that can tie her to the other three serial cases we worked. Joy isn’t talking, but we’re fairly certain you and your mom are out of the woods.”

Mallory turned back to the shelf, reaching for another doll. “Thanks for letting me know. She’ll be glad to hear it.”

“How is she?” he asked.

“Still a little shaken up. She checks all the doors and windows a little more carefully now, but she’s alive. If Trooper Wells hadn’t gotten there when she did, my mother would’ve died from an overdose of Midazolam. Which I’m sure was Joy’s intention from the beginning. Did they ever find out how she got her hands on a sedative like that?”

“Yeah.” He wished Lucille Kotite hadn’t been involved at all, but without her, they might not have learned Mallory had been taken in the first place. “We were able to trace the drug back to a dentist who’d reported a break-in in which a batch had been stolen just before your father’s death.”

“Oh.” Mallory didn’t look at him, didn’t even seem to care he’d tracked her down.

“What’s your mom going to do now?” he asked.

She smoothed an invisible wrinkle from one of the doll’s tops. “I’m not sure. We were able to sell the house and the vacation homes, cash out the investments, and rework the trust funds. She’ll be a lot happier in a smaller home on her own terms. Nothing that connects back to my father.”

“What about you?” Payton slid his hands into his jeans.

“What about me?” For the first time since he’d walked in the door, she slowed. The bruises and lacerations she’d sustained had healed, leaving little evidence of how close she’d come to dying, but the memories would stick with him forever. Watching the EMTs restart her heart at the scene, sitting beside her bed as she recovered from a collapsed lung for weeks, memorizing every break in her skin for hours, every twitch and shift of her closed eyes.

Payton diverted his attention to the floor to counter the rising flood of helplessness attached to those weeks of unknowns. “After everything you went through, don’t you deserve some peace of mind, too? I mean, getting my dad’s life insurance enabled me to set both my mom and me up for a good long while.”

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