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Gemma and Blair text back GIFs of laughing. The last time I roped him into doing face masks with us, I put his thick black hair in short little pig tails that looked like horns, making him live up to his old nickname as the school’s dark devil.
I vow to tell them everything—including that I’m sort of with Fox now. As soon as we find the answers he’s looking for to prove his parents murder, then I’ll do the whole introduce him to my friends thing. The thought of Fox meshing with the rest of my friends almost makes me laugh. Despite being my oldest friend, he’s totally different from everyone else’s vibe in our social circle.
Putting my phone down, I tune into what Fox is talking to Colton about. He paces behind the couch, phone pressed to his ear while he rubs the back of his neck. It makes his t-shirt ride up, but I drag my attention off his body to focus. I don’t know if it’s good news or bad that’s making him pace.
He catches me watching and sighs, switching to speaker phone and holding his phone out. “Repeat that.”
“It’s definitely a shell company. They bought out Nexus Lab eleven years ago,” Colton’s voice filters through the room. “I dug up financials and it lines up with the growth Nexus Lab has had in the last decade. It wasn’t until this shell bought them out that they became a national supplier.”
Fox and I exchange a look, his expression matching mine as my brows pull together.
“So who owns that?” I ask.
“That’s the kicker.” Colton uses a light and joking tone, but I sense he’s as displeased by what he found as Fox. “SynCom is traced back to a bigger company called Stalenko Corp. It’s rumored to have Russian ties. I’ve heard some chatter about them in different hacker circles on the web in the last couple of years.”
Startled, I blink, turning to Fox. “Russian ties—like the mafia?”
“Yeah,” he says gruffly. “Probably. It makes sense, how easy it’s been to build a small pharmaceutical research and development company up into what it is today from the shadows. Direct supply chain if they’re flooding the market with the drugs from the source, either dealing on the black market or maybe using their hold on such a large piece of the market pie to drive up the costs to legitimate buyers by astronomical amounts.”
My eyes widen. “They’d also have access to control how much is made and where it’s sent to.”
“Cartels are probably pissed they didn’t think of it first. Now the Russians have spent ten years building a nice little nest egg for themselves right alongside the opiate boom. Who needs to worry about product when it can be cooked up synthetically in a lab and be twice as potent.”
Blood pounds in my ears. I’m vaguely aware of Fox ending the call with his brother as my head swims.
Criminals.
That’s who my parents are working with. Working for probably.
All of Dad’s smiles and his deep belly laughter and all the ways Mom used to be completely different flash through my head. They used to love their life and Holden and I back when they were a bright-eyed scientist and a cop with a moral code. Where did that go so wrong?
“Maise.” Fox catches me by my shoulders with a worried expression. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I think…that was a lot to take in.”
His mouth flattens to a grim line as he rubs my upper arms. A chill skates down my spine. “I know.”
“How is this our lives? How are my parents working for a shell corporation with Russian ties?” My throat gets scratchy and hot when I consider that I still have my parents, even if they’re secretly evil lapdogs for a foreign mob. He doesn’t have any of his family left. “None of this is fucking normal.”
“That’s the point.” Sighing, he pulls me closer and I lean my head against his chest as he rubs my back. “It makes it so much easier to manage an empire and carry out illegal business when they can pull strings through powerful business people with good public standing. No one suspects an ambitious woman with two high-achieving children and a husband who upholds the law in the middle of the country compared to a thug packing heat doing business in the middle of the night. It’s how the most powerful crime families operate now. They’d probably make Forbes for their damn innovation and advancements wherever they’ve dipped their dirty hands to operate their puppets from the shadows.”
I take comfort in his touch, melting against him. His heartbeat drums beneath where I rest my head and I listen to it, allowing it to center me with each deep breath I take to clear the dizziness.
Wanting to forget for just a second, I lift my head and seek him out. He meets me halfway, our mouths crashing together with a burning intensity beneath the kiss. His fingers tangle in my hair, cupping the back of my head as he holds me so tight I’m almost breathless. I press up on my toes, chasing the exhilarating feeling of his kiss with a desperate edge.
Fox rips his mouth from mine and cups my face, gaze bouncing back and forth as he meets my hooded eyes. I swallow back the wild woman I almost let take over.
“It’ll be okay,” he says in a strained tone.
I really hate that my parents could turn on their friends like this because of their own greed. Whatever the extent of their involvement is, they allowed it to poison everything in their life, all for the sake of the power it gave them, even if it meant people died for them to get ahead. It fills me with this urge to act and I follow the impulse.
“We have to go down there,” I say.
“If they’ve got their people watching the shipping place, they probably have them on this, too.”
It’s not like him to want to be cautious. He’s a take action type of person.
“We’ll be careful.”
