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CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

ASHER

“ H ere, you do it,” Karlin ordered. Her fingers shook as she tossed Bajwa’s office keys to Asher.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said mildly, unlocking the door and ushering her inside the inner office confidently, like they belonged there.

Her nervous energy was kind of adorable, but unfortunately, he didn’t have the time to tease her about it. They’d searched the Senera compound for two hours already and had found nothing but some somewhat troubling financial reports and a few lab documents with potentially manipulated data.

He’d told Karlin that this was all about building a case, and that was true. But the reality was that it would be a whole lot easier if they found something super solid instead of a bunch of standard-fare misdeeds.

Not that the afternoon had been a total loss so far.

He’d gotten to see the big lab where Karlin spent most of her days, and the brief tour had given him even more appreciation for her intellect than he already had.

Had they been back in high school right now, there’d be zero chance a girl like her would have ever given him the time of day. The fact that she seemed to be catching feelings for him despite their differences made him all warm and giddy inside.

Clearly Reilly, Cameron, and Ben had been on to something. Meeting a nice girl was a whole lot easier if you could impress her with your private security expertise. He should have really gone with that angle long before now.

“Let’s dig,” Karlin announced, reaching over to yank open one of Bajwa’s desk drawers. “If there is such a thing as a smoking gun in this case, I think it’ll be here.”

Asher nodded and started riffling through a stack of papers, trying his best to shift the pile back into the correct order as he went. “I think you might be right. But like I said, Bajwa’s past doesn’t necessarily mean he’s our big bad. We need to stay open to other possibilities.”

“You mean all the ones we haven’t found anywhere in this building so far?”

He tightened his jaw. “Yep. Keep looking.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence as they continued to search through Bajwa’s belongings and paperwork.

They couldn’t get into his computer, but fortunately, the man seemed stuck in the eighties.

Stacks of printed reports, old emails, and tidy folders full of various invoices filled several filing cabinets and covered every surface.

“Does your office look like this?” Asher asked as he skimmed yet another insanely boring document.

Karlin snorted. “I’m more of a minimalist. I truly don’t understand how he can work in here.”

“You’d die if you saw my brother Cam’s office, trust me,” he joked. “At least Bajwa seems to have something resembling a system. Also, note the lack of scattered garbage.”

Karlin made a face. “I’d like his system better if I had any idea what it consisted–”

She raised a sheet of paper to her face, her eyes roving over the words.

“What?”

He dropped his own stack and sauntered up to read over her shoulder.

“No way,” he said, realizing what she held. “May I?”

She handed over the document, her blue eyes lighting up as she smiled. “Emails from what seems to be a very close friend of Bajwa, with a very official FDA, government-issued email address.”

“Hinting at very illegal strings being pulled with his fellow regulators,” Asher finished. “Okay. Maybe not a smoking gun–I can imagine how Senera lawyers are gonna spin this–but it’s good. Really good.”

“Find more. I’ll fire up the copier,” Karlin ordered, striding through the door and back to the anteroom where Bajwa’s secretary, Mayim, usually sat.

Her office was immaculate down to the last detail, but hopefully, she wouldn’t be paying too much attention to the copier’s paper supply or its print history.

A half-hour passed as they worked. Asher dug through the papers, gathering everything with the same FDA email address and a few others that were potentially suspicious.

They’d be sending all of it back to FBS, and he was confident his brothers and the rest of their team would be able to cut through the noise.

Karlin copied each document, stuffed the copy into a folio, and carefully returned the originals to Bajwa’s office, where Asher tried to put them back more or less where he’d found them.

“Okay, I think those are the last ones,” Asher called through the door to Karlin. She said nothing, but he could hear the whine of the copier as she worked.

Her nerves had apparently melted away completely as she focused on what she had to do. He could imagine her over in her laboratory, getting equally lost in some experiment, hours passing as she tipped chemicals into beakers and measured data in tiny lines of neat handwriting.

He loved her passion for what she did, and he hated that Senera’s actions threatened to take it all away from her. And he would do anything he could to make sure they failed.

“Be there in a sec,” Karlin called out at last.

He tapped his fingers against the smooth metal of the nearest filing cabinet. They had only checked the top three drawers. May as well check the bottom one while he waited.

He pulled it open and scanned the tabs. Fortunately, these were more traditionally organized, and the labels were typed rather than handwritten. They were names, male and female. Probably nothing, maybe just–

Halfway through the drawer, there was a name he knew.

“Woah. Woah. No way.”

He yanked the file free just as Karlin strode back into the room and headed over to him, standing mere inches away as she tried to see what he was holding. Not even the scent of her shampoo could distract him at the moment, though, not after what he’d found.

“Look at this,” he said excitedly, waving the file in the air. “I never got all of the details, but I know this name. I know this case.”

“If you’d stop waving it around like a lunatic, I could see–”

Karlin’s words fell away as she read the name on the tab.

She clasped a hand to her mouth.

“Hey. Hey, Karlin, are you okay?” Asher asked, but it was like she didn’t even hear him.

She yanked the file from his hand and dropped it onto the desk, as though the papers might scald them if they touched it any longer.

Her face had gone white, and her eyes were filling quickly with tears.

KARLIN

Karlin stared at the file in horror.

The name on the label made it impossible to look away.

“Amira Gorsky,” she said at last, swallowing the lump in her throat as she willed herself not to cry again. She’d spilled far too many tears in front of Axel already. And this time, she had no right to cry.

She wasn’t the victim.

She was one of the perpetrators, and villains didn’t get to cry.

Axel’s brow wrinkled in confusion, but he didn’t reach for the file. He was clearly waiting for her to explain what about it had shaken her so much.

She’d been so stupid.

How could she have thought that he wouldn’t find out she was on that trial?

That she was partly responsible for an innocent woman’s death?

She’d signed off on it. Sure, she’d been scared, and there were a whole bunch of reasons for that, right down to the bad childhood sob story.

But she’d still put her name to paper, and someone who would otherwise be alive was now dead.

“Are you going to report me? To the police?” she asked, unsure of why she’d asked, or how she expected Axel to understand. Her logical mind didn’t seem to be working in order.

Panic was pressing into her from all directions, drowning her, choking her.

This had all been a huge mistake. She’d asked Forge Brothers Security for help, but if Axel did what he was legally supposed to do, she’d succeeded in nothing more than signing her own arrest warrant.

She could go to jail.

Senera wouldn’t protect her, they’d made that beyond clear.

No, it was worse than that.

They only had this file in the first place as a form of insurance, she was certain of it.

She’d bet her life that it contained evidence against her, probably carefully curated to shield them as much as possible.

The more she thought about it, the more it made sense.

The whole thing had been designed from the start to place her as the scapegoat if it ever became necessary.

For all she knew, they were doing the same thing right now.

Maybe her name was somewhere on the papers that permitted Destiny and Cora to join the current cohort. Maybe the secrecy and lies ran even deeper than she’d thought.

She could go to jail.

She should go to jail.

That part, she could handle. It was the rest of it that she couldn’t bear. John would suffer. Her patients would continue to be put at risk.

And Axel would hate her.

That might have been the worst possibility of all.

“What? Report you?” he asked, looking more confused than before. “You need to calm down and explain to me what on earth you’re even talking about.”

He reached out to her and pulled her into his chest.

She wanted to pull away. She didn’t deserve to feel his warmth, not after everything she’d done. He had to be crazy. She’d all but told him that she’d committed a terrible crime, and his first reaction had been to cradle her in his arms.

It was enough to set the tears flowing all over again, as desperately as she wanted to stop them.

“Sweetheart, please. You’re scaring me.”

She could feel his breath whispering against her ear as he spoke, his words gentle and full of so much trust, trust she was about to destroy. But she had to do it. Even if it made him hate her.

She had carried too many secrets for too long. The burden had become unbearable.

“Amira Gorsky’s death was my fault,” she said at last, pressing her eyes shut, though she could see nothing but the deep green of his shirt. “I’m the reason she’s dead. I took her husband’s wife away. I took her daughter’s mother away.”

Her body was wracked with fresh sobs.

“Shh, breathe,” Axel said, still stroking at her hair, still holding her, as though her confession hadn’t just irreparably destroyed every reason he cared about her.