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A pair of fluffy balls on a string, tied to a stick. A cat toy – an appropriate one if you consider that the girl has spent the last few weeks jerking a string around our balls so all three of us would dance for her amusement.
“She likes it if you wave that around,” Mackenzie calls from behind the desk.
Not Mackenzie. Claudia. I rub my temple. They really do look a lot alike, at least based on my memories of Mackenzie. This is one serious mindfuck. I stand up and wiggle the balls around. Queen Boudica launches herself from the floor and somersaults through the air to grab them. She rolls onto her back and attacks the balls with claws and teeth.
“This is a very suggestive toy.” My own balls twinge with secondhand anxiety as the cat sinks her claws deeper. Claudia nods, but her attention is focused on her battered old phone with the sparkly case – the one I remember Mackenzie using in second grade. Claudia must’ve found it in Mackenzie’s room. I’m surprised she’s managed to keep an iPhone running for so many years, although judging by the way she bangs it on the desk and swears at it, she’s losing the battle.
Claudia tosses the phone at the wall in disgust. “I hate this. I hate sitting here doing nothing. We should find Eli.”
“I know where he is.”
“Enlighten me.” She leans across the desk, knitting her fingers together and managing to look both stern and desperate. Fuck, she’s stunning. My mind goes to a bad place, where I bend her over the desk, my fingers curling around her hair as I pound into her—
I shake my head, trying to force aside all the bad things I was thinking before I acted on my filthy instincts and turned this conversation into a porn film. “Fuck no. Eli needs to be alone right now. He’s safe where he is.”
“How do you know?” Her eyes flicker with concern. “Whoever shot at us knocked out Tiberius, and you’ve seen that guy – he’s terrifying. All they have to do is follow Eli to wherever he’s gone and riddle him with bullets.”
The image of it turns my stomach, but I’m not giving up Eli’s secret, not after everything he’s already lived through this week. My gut churns with guilt. For three days I sat on that swing while Eli poured cider down his throat and spilled his heart into the desert sands, hating myself because I woke up each night with soaked sheets after dreaming of the girl I was supposed to hate. Eli’s girl – Mackenzie Malloy who’d had his heart and cock in a vise since he was eight years old.
Now Eli knows the truth. He knows that all this time when I was pretending to be his friend that I thought about nothing else but tasting the secrets of her blush-pink lips. It doesn’t matter that she’s not Mackenzie – it matters that Eli is my friend, and I fucked him over.
Thinking about Eli’s hurt expression when he walked in on Claudia and I makes my dick go soft. I wander around the office, peering at the objects decorating the shelves and the leather-bound books on history and economics. My foot brushes a box on the floor, shoved into the corner behind a chair. It looks as though Queen Boudica has chewed the corner of it. “What’s this?”
She shrugs. “Malloy had that hidden in the panic room. I tossed it over there because it was taking up space. It’s just a bunch of business papers and shit. I don’t understand any of it.”
Curious, I flip through the papers. The police searched his office as part of their investigation into Felix’s death. They found all his paperwork in order and made no mention of a secret panic room. I wonder if he’d shoved this box inside to hide its contents. The thought drives me to look harder at the papers.
They seem to be mostly related to the Malloy Supplements laboratory in Brawley, reports from his team about testing new products, FDA paperwork, labeling requirements…
A word leaps out at me. John Marlowe. My father’s name.
I pull out the stapled pages and study them – it’s a copy of a contract between my father and Howard Malloy. My father was offering a large sum of money – greater than the amount he’d placed in my trust fund – to secure a shipment of something called ‘deer antler velvet’ from a New Zealand supplier. It’s dated eight months before Felix’s death.
The contract is stapled to a series of lab reports and test results. I flip through them, jumping between the tables and pie charts. According to the report, this antler velvet – the soft fuzz that covers the bone and cartilage of a deer’s antler as it develops – is used in some traditional medicines. But in high quantities, it has benefits as a performance enhancer and to improve endurance. The report calls the antler velvet a possible ‘miracle’ drug for athletes but warns that it contains high levels of a particular hormone that could cause harmful side effects and would need further testing.
I’ve never seen this before. It’s completely different from the evidence presented in court. No one ever mentioned deer antler velvet. As I read more and the picture emerges, my veins heat with rage.
That bastard.
“Noah?” Claudia moves around the desk. Her hand lands on my shoulder, sending a shockwave through my body. I clench the paper so hard I tear a hole in it.
“I’m going to kill him,” I choke out.
“Who?” Claudia whips the paper from my hands. Her eyes widen as she reads, understanding dawning in her icicle eyes. “Shit, Noah. This is about your brother.”
“I’m going to wrap my hands around his neck and choke the life out of him,” I growl.
“Noah, what’s going on?”
“Howard Malloy designed the drug that killed my brother.” My whole body shakes with the need to destroy him, to tear his flesh from his bones, to make him feel the pain I’d lived in ever since Felix died. “And my father paid for it. He funded it. And when it went wrong, he and Malloy worked together to cover it up.”
Claudia
I stare at the paper in Noah’s trembling hand. John Marlowe funded the production of the drug that killed his own son?
That’s insane.
It makes no sense. What about the very ugly, very public court case? Malloy Supplements had the best lawyers in the business – why didn’t they just bring up Marlowe’s involvement from the onset? Why was he keeping these papers hidden away… unless it was in Howard Malloy’s interest not to have Senator Marlowe’s involvement known. But if they were working together, why would Marlowe hire Brentwood to have Howard and his family killed?
