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“This is preposterous,” he muttered, intending to stand up, but I pushed him back down to his seat with the tip of my shoe.
“Sit,” I commanded. “So, drugs, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He flung his arms in the air, visibly shaking. He was losing it, and fuck if it wasn’t the best show in town.
Laughing, I shook my head. “I mean, I guess it could explain how you even got that far in your first company. Or how you put down some investment money when you opened your own firm three years after graduating.”
“This is hearsay, and if you continue this line of conversation, I will have to contact my lawyer…” Jordan started, standing up on his feet.
I pushed him back down again, not even sparing him a glance and walking over to his bar. “Finally we can agree on something. You should definitely call your lawyer. But not yet. You’ll ruin the surprise.”
I poured myself three fingers of scotch and downed them in front of his floor-to-ceiling window, turning on my heel to look at him again. I felt oddly content with fucking up his life. The only person whose feelings I worried about was Edie, who was about to part ways with her father, but hey, she didn’t need him anyway, and I was going to do her a favor by locking him up.
I was going to give her Theo.
“You know? I think I’m going to be the one to take your office. It’s plenty spacious. Luna will have a place to play when she visits me every Tuesday,” I mused, brushing my fingers along the giant canvas painting on the wall. A Dutch painter. Another Van Der Whatever. Waves crashing on the shore.
Edie.
“You’re leaving the company, Rexroth,” he said tiredly, but he didn’t mean it. Not really. I could see it in his eyes. The defeat. It had a color and a smell and a fucking taste. It was everywhere on his features, everywhere in the room.
“Save me the bullshit. You and I both know that time is money.” I polished off his liquor and dropped the remainder of the joint into the expensive glass. “So—drugs. They put you through school. Good for you. When my PI came to me with this information, I was surprised to say the least—a man like you, who fell in love so fucking hard with the glitz and glamour, wouldn’t be dealing with crackheads and drug dealers? Nah. You’re fancier than that, Jordi. That’s why you struck a deal with MNE Pharmaceuticals. They provide you with prescription drugs. Have been for twenty years now. Oxy. Ambien. Vicodin. Xanax. Valium. Codeine. I can continue, but you get the picture. You got them. You sold them through hundreds of salespeople you have carefully targeted and trained. You laundered the money through offshore companies, and that’s how you managed to invest in new companies and become the mogul you are today. But fucking up strangers’ lives wasn’t enough, was it, Jordan?”
His face was so white I thought he was going to faint. I didn’t help him when his legs failed him and he crashed on the floor. My shoes next to his face, the only thing he saw from his position.
“I dug even deeper,” I continued.
“Stop, stop,” he choked, spluttering saliva all over like a fucking pussy. I chose the exact same time to wipe his desk of the documents I prepared on it in advance, making it rain statements and pictures of him meeting with the CEO of MNE and checking big trucks full of boxes containing drugs.
“I was wondering about that pretty wife of yours.” My voice was velvet, almost soft. “I mean, Edie got her beauty from somewhere, and it sure as fuck wasn’t from you. My PI told me that your better half barely leaves the house anymore, which is sad, really, but also suspicious. And oh, so fucking convenient.”
He got up on his knees—shit, on his fucking knees—and crawled toward me. This had escalated so quickly, I couldn’t keep a straight face. Then again, I couldn’t exactly laugh at him, either. This wasn’t a joke.
“No. No. No. You don’t have any evidence,” he kept chanting, clutching my legs. I took a step back, repulsed with his eerie behavior.
“I clearly do.” I pushed one picture of him next to a truck at the pier in his direction with the tip of my Derby shoe. “You’re not the only one who knows how to use a goddamn printer.”
“Lydia didn’t…she never…”
“You fed her drugs. You messed with her prescriptions, didn’t you?” I asked dryly. He shook his head. Liar. I saw him, under me, and for the first time, it was without the screen of hatred. I saw the boy who wanted to get far and didn’t know how. Then I saw the greed. The gluttony. Everything that had ruined Edie’s life. I saw it and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that regardless of what we were—or weren’t—I needed to protect her from her father and his destructive lover, but even more importantly, I wanted them out of the picture. For good.
