Read No Returns (The Blankenships Book 6) for Free Online Page B

then seemed to crumple just a little bit lower. “You don’t understand,” she said, her voice desperate now, tired and sad. “You don’t understand how it was.”
     
    “Then tell me,” Zoey said. She touched Olivia’s hand with hers. “Help me understand.”
     
    “I just wanted them to go away. They were threatening me, trying to blackmail me. I asked the lawyers if they were right, if the will could be read the way they were saying.” She shrugged, and Zoey wondered if the story would dry up, but no. She knew this look, this sound. Olivia had a story to tell, and it had been tearing her up for weeks now. She wanted someone to know. She wanted someone to say it wasn’t her fault. “He looked at me. He said that he could take care of it, that he could make it all go away. And he just asked if I wanted that to happen.”
     
    “Who said that? Arturo?”
     
    Olivia was gone again, her eyes staring off into the distance.
     
    “Olivia?”
     
    “He said that it wasn’t my fault, that any mother would want to protect her children. He said that it was completely understandable.”
     
    “Who said that?” Zoey asked again, her voice a little less gentle.
     
    Olivia turned to see her, but something slashed down over her face, shutting off the stream of confession. “I’m sorry,” Olivia said. “I didn’t mean to disturb your morning. Please — at least make sure that Alexander lets me know when the services would be? I’ll show up and behave. I won’t cause any trouble.”
     
    “Olivia—” At hearing her name, the woman jerked as if Zoey had slapped her. “Let’s call the Commissioner. They won’t want to hurt you. They’ll want to find the person who actually hurt these people. The odds are that the same person who hurt Cindy and Arturo and Thalia — your children’s half-siblings — if it wasn’t the same person who hurt Claire, the odds are good that they were involved.”
     
    Olivia’s nostrils flared, and her eyes surged with anger, that hate and fury burning back through her expression as she gazed at Zoey. “You think I would hurt my own child?” Olivia all but flew to her feet. Zoey followed her, feeling her heart kick up into a higher gear from fright. “You think I would do that to my own baby girl?”
     
    “No, that’s not—”
     
    “You think that I would ever do anything that would end with my sweet angel lying in the street, dying in the arms of a stranger? You cracker bitch, you can fuck yourself right back to hell.” Olivia’s accent came out thick and strong then, and her anger was clearly tearing her apart. Zoey dodged it as best as she could and nodded.
     
    “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m truly sorry. I didn’t mean to insinuate—”
     
    “We’re done here,” Olivia said, as if Zoey were standing in her own living room. After a moment, she gathered up her purse and swept out of the penthouse.
     
    Zoey settled back down on the sofa after a moment, her head in her hands. A dozen voices seemed to be shouting in her head, all screaming for prominence. Voices chastising her, telling her that confronting Olivia at all was putting herself in danger, and what in the world had she been thinking? Voices asking if she had believed the woman at all. Voices telling her that she wasn’t a lawyer, and she wasn’t a cop, and she should have told the police more, told them what she suspected and walked away. She was putting herself in danger, and no more mothers should bury daughters this week.
     
    But all of that was speaking out of fear. She’d gone to school for journalism, and she’d fought for career breaking stories and making a difference. It was dangerous, sometimes, but it was necessary. It was important. History was full of writers — journalists — who’d made a difference, who’d shown the world what it could look like if people worked together. That was what she’d always wanted to be, what she’d taught herself to be. She couldn’t turn