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MARISELA

S ometimes life fucked you in the ass with a cactus.

And then, sometimes, it was nice enough to remember the lube.

Either way, I was tired of bending over.

Which was why I decided to embrace this particular cactus and see if I could force it to bloom.

A life gives you a lemon, squeeze lemon juice in someone’s eye type of situation.

Except, instead of a lemon, I had a girl on the verge of a mental breakdown. And instead of a cactus, we had a bag of evidence belonging to a dead man. I wasn’t entirely sure what I could make out of either of those. At least not yet. But I sure as hell was going to make something.

I raised a hand, stopping Emily’s insistent prattling before she gave us both a migraine. “I’ll take care of everything. All you need to do is relax and breathe. Do you understand?” I dipped my chin, knowing that stress would have her mirroring my actions and nodding along with me .

She’d shown up on my doorstep last night, a large garbage bag in one hand and a tremble in the other. Thirty minutes later, she’d given me her life story when all I’d really wanted was a clue as to how to use it.

I had that clue now. In fact, it had been staring me in the face all along. I’d just been squinting too hard to see it. Or rather, to see him . And his connection to my shadow man.

As it turns out, my assistant had a stalker of her own.

Someone who’d been breaking into her house and leaving her gifts.

Someone clever enough to hack into our software and unintrusive enough to blend in.

Someone obsessed enough to kill her date and send her the guy’s belongings.

Someone who I’d recently learned had more going on behind all that tech talk and fake charm.

I wasn’t blind to the transgressions within my company, even if there were times I pretended to be.

I noticed the way he looked at her, found every opportunity to pop up at her desk.

But I’d assumed it was an innocent office fling.

And honestly, I didn’t care who my employees fucked—apparently neither did Tate—as long as their work got done.

After all, I would be the first one to hear if it didn’t.

But then I realized Elliot Walker wasn’t just some lovesick IT guy. He wasn’t a random hire either. He was a mole, and my assistant was meant to be the carrot that kept him on task.

Of course, this was all conjecture. A case of having a thousand-piece puzzle dumped out in front of me while I did my best to guess the picture without the luxury of seeing the box. However, my gut told me I was right.

Dr. Lambert never wanted Emily Shaw. He said it himself. But he did want to use her. And unfortunately for my assistant, I had no choice but to do the same.

I excused myself from the parlor, telling Emily I was going to grab her some hot tea to help with her nerves.

Took a sharp turn down the hall and pushed my way inside Tate’s home office.

Searching through all the drawers in his desk before moving on to the powder room.

I quickly swung open the medicine cabinet door, and that’s where I found it.

The orange bottle stared back at me from the shelf, the label peeling off and the expiration date barely visible anymore.

But I knew better than anyone else that those little numbers were more of a suggestion than a steadfast rule. A way to keep health care privatized and ensure the rich got richer. And I had just as much a hand in it as the rest of them.

Prescott R&D didn’t care about curing diseases, only about treating the symptoms .

It was our business model, what kept our consumers coming back for more.

The sicker they were, the more money we made.

A cash grab spun to look like a humanitarian effort to prolong life.

Big pharma didn’t care about life, though. None of us did.

That wasn’t to say we didn’t want our customers alive .

Dead men couldn’t pay their premiums. But at the end of the day, the general population was talked about in numbers rather than names.

And numbers were as replaceable as the EpiPens hospitals tossed out by the millions each year.

Not because they didn’t work but because that was what the label we’d slapped on the side told them to do.

Because that was what regulators enforced, much more strictly than actual patient care. Supply and demand, demand and supply.

The truth was, you might have had to adjust the dosage to account for the decreased efficacy in these expired pills in front of me, but they’d still do the trick. Usually kicked in faster since the outer coating broke down the longer the medication was sitting there.

Was it safe? No, not entirely. But that was because there was no profit in making it safe. Not when we could focus on new and more expensive, instead of improving the viability of what already worked. Generics didn’t line pockets but brand names and patented devices sure as hell did.

After Briarwood, after seeing what happened in our boardrooms, the side effects that were swept under the rug and the toxins that were fast-tracked out the door, I avoided pharmaceuticals as a whole.

But none of it seemed to stop Tate. He’d pop Xannies like they were Tic Tacs and wash it all down with a fifth of whiskey.

And right now, I was thankful he did.

I swiped up the bottle. Twisted off the top and poured three of the white tabs into the palm of my hand. Using a shaving razer and the lip of the vanity to crush them into a fine powder before stirring them into Emily’s tea.

I wasn’t drugging the girl. I was keeping her calm so I could handle everything that needed to be done. Including grabbing the passport I’d had doctored for her, packing our bags, and booking our flights to Spain.

Leaving the country wasn’t the smartest thing to do when your husband was missing under suspicious circumstances. But I had family there. I would claim I was seeking comfort, squeeze out a few tears for the cameras. One hand wiping at my eyes at the same time the other reached into their pockets.

After all, there was nothing men loved more than a damsel in distress. It was just another mask I’d have to wear. Another part I’d have to play, another ego I’d have to stroke until everyone got what they thought they wanted.