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Ding!
The soft chiming broke into her reminiscing, and for a split second, she couldn’t think of what it meant or where she was. When the elevator doors parted, she shook herself to attention and disembarked into the gray-and-black marble lobby.
Her heels made a clipping sound that echoed up into the high ceiling. Ordinarily, she didn’t go around outside of her home or her lab without security, but she had wanted to come into Rhobes’s territory by herself to show she wasn’t intimidated by him.
Besides, he wouldn’t do anything really nasty here. Cameras were everywhere.
Her blond security detail, the one she was fucking, was waiting for her just inside the revolving door, this time in a black suit instead of a military uniform. And as he looked over at her, his eyes made a quick up-and-down that had nothing to do with bodyguarding and everything to do with what he anticipated doing on the return trip to Walters.
Would he have wanted her before the glow-up? she wondered. Without the money?
The answer to that didn’t matter to her any more than he did.
With a strong arm, he opened the static exit to the side of the rotating one, and as soon as she was through, another man in a black suit opened therear of the SUV they’d rented from a local security company. As she crossed the concrete sidewalk, she imagined the small-town girl who was underneath the gloss schlubbing it to the vehicle. C.P. was proof that destiny was engineered, not a passive reception of some star-given series of calamities.
“Where to, boss,” the driver asked as her door was shut and the two security men got in the front seat. “You said change of plan?”
She looked out her tinted window, at Pharmatech’s giant glass penis of a skyscraper. “The airport.”
“No meeting at Anderson, then?”
“No,” she replied. “I’m rescheduling that. I’ve got work to do back in Walters.”
Settling back against the plush leather seat, she got out her laptop. Her hands trembled as she composed the email to Gus, forcing her to delete and start over one out of every five words. Good thing it wasn’t a long communiqué.
Besides, he would be excited by the news.
They had their patient one.
Rhobes, in all his arrogance, had been right about one thing. It was time to put Vita to the test, and the drug was her fucking baby, too.
After she sent the email, she got her assistant on the phone. “I need my lawyer. Now. I don’t care where he is on vacation.”
THIRTEEN
BACK AT C.P.’Ssubterranean lab, Daniel was having a bag of saline, a B12shot, and a blood panel for breakfast. Not exactly Wheaties, but in his condition, the three-course meal was definitely for champions. Or someone who wanted to have enough energy to tackle a flight of stairs at more than a snail’s pace.
As he lay back in the hospital bed and stared at his bony ankles and his thick socks, he considered the merits of buying a new pair of pants. Like, sweatpants. $19.99. From Target. When he hadn’t been sleeping, he’d looked them up on his phone—but felt like he was cheating on QVC.
And it’d seemed like a waste of a twenty-dollar bill.
“What is?”
He glanced past his floppy pant legs at Lydia. She was sitting forward in the chair she always sat forward in, her elbows on her knees, her worried face pinched like she had a spike in the center ofher forehead. Next to her, the built-in desk with its computer and rolling stool was a doctor perch waiting for a white coat. Undoubtedly, the vacancy would be filled soon enough.
“Daniel?”
“Ah, nothing.” Had he been speaking out loud? “Your head hurts, doesn’t it.”
Her brows popped. “I’m sorry?”
He pointed to the nape of his neck. “Tension headache, right? I can tell by the way your jaw is twitching, and you’ve got that pale thing going on.”
With a flush, she eased back and rolled her shoulders. “Oh, I’m fine. Really.”
At which point, theJeopardy!theme started playing.
Closing his eyes, he cleared his throat and said weakly, “Lydia…”
