Page 69 of Prohibited

“What if I need to use the lavatory?” Now she was grasping at straws–practical as they may be.

“There’s a chamber pot under the bed. Let go of the door.” He gave her a look of warning that was so intense, she couldn’t help but drop her hand at once. And she immediately hated him for it.

“You- You terrible– You hypocrite,” was all she could think to say.

Without so much as a final look, he closed the door and immediately turned the lock.

Though she knew it was futile, she immediately ran to the door and yanked on the handle. Then she pounded the door with her fist and shrieked once before she slammed her teeth together and forced herself to calm down.

Stupid, stupid men.

Chapter twenty-four

Alex

The building was in ruins.

The Crystal was gone, buried somewhere beneath the rubble where most of the building had caved down inside of itself. All that remained was a charred skeleton, the frame of the building that rose above the rest of it. A grim memorial to everything buried beneath.

With a cold sort of detachment, Alex nudged a piece of blackened rubble with the tip of his Oxford shoe, envisioning all of them buried beneath it.

Just looking at the charred remains of the building made the burn on his arm throb. He gritted his teeth.

Rage kept leaping through him like forks of lightning, coming on in waves as he prowled around the perimeter of the ruins. The fire chief was walking alongside him, talking, but all Alex could do was nod and pretend like he was listening.

“--an accelerant, definitely arson,” the man was saying. But Alex alreadyknew that.

“How soon can we enter the premises?” Alex said, interrupting whatever else the man was saying.

The fire chief gave him an incredulous look. “You want to enter–?”

“Yes,” Alex said. “I want to see what can be salvaged.”

The fire chief didn’t even try to hide his look of disbelief as he glanced at the ruins of the building. “I– Maybe a week?”

“A week.” This wasn’t at all what Alex wanted to hear.

“The fire may seem like it’s burned down,” the fire chief explained with barely contained patience, “but the ashes can still be hot enough to reignite. We’re going to need to monitor the situation closely.” The man hesitated. “So far, we’ve discovered the remains of at least one person in rubble.”

An alien feeling of anxiety prickled in Alex’s belly. “And it’s likely too early to tell who.”

“We’re working on it,” the fire chief said, scratching his chin and looking troubled. “As for the other properties… there were five bodies discovered outside of the candy shop on Peoria. No further casualties so far discovered at any of the other three properties.”

The math made Alex so furious he wanted to vomit. Five of his properties, gone. Burnt to ash.

They exchanged a few more words and then the chief left, leaving the rest of the fire crew behind. Alex was going to have to deal with such a mountain of paperwork and so much haggling with the insurancecompany that he was certain he felt years of his life falling away, just thinking about it. And who the fuck had died?

And it would be a week or more until he found out if any of the hooch had been spared by the fire, though it seemed less and less likely. At the Crystal, it was obvious from where he stood right now that the floor had been burned away, everything had caved inward and downward. He didn’t even want to begin calculating the financial loss all of this was going to cause him, or he was going to fly into a rage that would end in the murder of the first person he could get his hands on.

Walter Stanley. Walter Stanley. Walter Stanley.

It was more than time to deal with Walter Stanley.

The heavy, deliberate tread of feet, preceded by the smell of Lucky Strikes and a certain aftershave, came to him as he stood there. A sort of calmness settled over him. A certainty. They would get this handled. They would get it handled thoroughly.

“Took you long enough,” he said, though he didn’t turn to look at Ryan. Rare though it was, he was far too distracted to feel especially affected by Ryan’s presence.

“I had to wrangle our guest,” Ryan said. Though it was a hot day he could swear he still felt the heat of Ryan’s body as he drew up next to him. Alex turned his head a little so he could see Ryan’s expression out of the corner of his eye.

---