Colt makes a cooing sound like I’m adorably amusing. I roll my eyes and push my fingers through the damp hair curling over my forehead.
“There was a warrant for impound out on your car and your bike. Two more popped up after I took care of the first one. I dropped a little present in their reporting system that’ll crawl for any others and scramble them. You’re welcome.”
It figures Richard is trying to flex his power now that I’m getting closer.
“Thanks. I found something new. Jacqueline Landry skipped out on her normal schedule and when I traced her, she turned up at this remote address. It was another warehouse, looked shady as fuck. There was a logo on the place. SynCom.”
“Maybe a meeting?”
“That’s my thought. I sent it to you. See what you can pull on it? I’m thinking it’s some kind of silent investor Nexus Lab doesn’t want anyone to know about. Maisy confirmed it’s connected when she told me Jacqueline’s paychecks are paid through this company instead of the public front.”
“Oh?” Colt’s tone goes light and teasing. I can clearly see the kind of expression he has right now—grinning with his tongue stuck in his cheek while he spins around in his stupid fancy gamer chair. “Your little flower is playing ball now?”
I grunt and he chuckles. I haven’t told him yet about how things have changed for me, but he’s always teased me about her, especially when I found her on Instagram before I came back to Colorado. Staring at her photos for hours was so I could learn what I needed to, but he always thought it was more. Now I realize he was probably right. Asshole always sees through people, picking up on what they don’t want found out.
“She’s…yeah.”
Luckily he lets it go instead of picking at it because he’s a nosy bastard. The conversation jumps around for a few minutes while he gives Maisy’s phone the same treatment he’s given to mine and the Crows, making it untraceable. The water shuts off in the bathroom.
I trail off mid-sentence, gaze zeroed in on Maisy walking out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam. She’s wearing one of my t-shirts again and I fucking know she’s not wearing anything underneath because my wildflower likes her freedom. Her damp hair falls around her shoulders and she shoots me a crooked grin that makes my pants feel tighter with just one look. God, she’s heaven and a curse wrapped into one perfect girl.
“Fox?” Colton prompts when the silence has stretched for a minute.
“Uh, yeah.” Shit, what was I saying?
Maisy circles behind me on the couch and wraps her arms around my shoulders, giving me a kiss when I angle my head toward her like a moth to a flame, unable to focus on anything but her. She hums into it and I can feel the curve of her smile.
“Is that your brother?” she murmurs when we part.
“You’ve got company,” Colt says knowingly. Fucker probably has the biggest shit eating grin right now. “Hey sweetheart. You sound hot. Tell me you’re hot.”
Maisy snorts, shooting me an amused glance as she comes around to sit next to me. I leave her be for a minute before giving in and dragging her onto my lap.
“Sure.”
She says it without any shyness, owning herself. My arms tighten around her middle and my love for her expands in my chest. I inhale and the corners of my mouth twitch up. She still smells like flowers and coconut, but now there’s something else.
Me.
After the shower and spending hours together, she smells like she’s mine. It sends a pleased jolt through me.
“Confident,” Colt says with a hum. “I like it.”
Her light laughter makes something tug with want in my stomach. “It’s not for you, sweetie,” she says slyly. “I do it all for me. Everything else is bonus points.”
“Oh, damn. I think I just fell in love. Marry me?”
A brief rush of jealousy flares, but I tamp down on it. My brother isn’t a threat, but I can’t help how possessive I feel about her—how possessive I’ve always felt around her. Maisy as a kid knew her worth and spoke out when she had an opinion, but as a woman her matured sense of self-assuredness is sexy as fuck.
“Sorry, Fox promised he’d marry me when he was nine. It was a proposal complete with a flower. You’ll have to get in line.”
All the air in the room feels like it’s sucked out. She remembered my promise to her?
My throat bobs as I swallow and absently stroke her thigh, inching my fingers beneath the shirt and finding nothing but her warm skin. I squeeze a handful of her ass and nuzzle my face into her neck, trailing kisses and fighting the urge to leave another mark to claim her. I can’t help how tactile I’ve become with her around, like I have this constant need to touch her in some way.
Colt makes a distressed sound like he’s fatally wounded.
“So, he’s told me you’re his foster brother.” Maisy leans toward the phone. “What was he like?”
I slide my lips together. If things were different, she wouldn’t need to ask because she would’ve been with me. I never would’ve been separated from her. I picture it for a second, like I have many times, what it would be like if we remained close friends. How we’d have our first kiss by the tree we loved to climb as our friendship grew into something else.
“He was a grumpy little shit,” Colton says with a chuckle. “Definition of doom and gloom. It was hilarious. Spill the tea, girl. What was he like before all the angst got to him?”
Maisy launches into a story about the time me, her, and Holden swindled our entire block out of money on our lemonade stand racket so that we could buy a video game we wanted, a plan I masterminded. I huff out a laugh. It was my idea, but she’s the one who organized us and brought all the customers in. Her whole body moves as she tells the story animatedly, her golden eyes lit up with fondness at the memory.
As they talk, I stay quiet, listening to the girl I never stopped loving and the first friend—family—I let in past the thorns stabbing into my heart meet each other. The way it makes my heart thud catches me off guard.
Colton shares another story of his own of the first time his parents dragged me to a Thorne Point high society party with their socialite friends and how he caught me sneaking canapés in my suit pocket.
It feels right that they’re meeting and sharing these halves of my life that make up the whole, like my shattered life is colliding back into itself to mend the broken shards.
“I’ll update you when I find out,” Colton says, breaking me out of my musings. “Later.”
The call ends and I stop playing, removing my hand from beneath the shirt she stole so we don’t get sidetracked again.
“He seems great,” she says, leaning against my chest as she curls up in my lap.
“Is this going to be a thing?” I tug on the material that looks way better on her than it does on me.
She grins. “Yup.”
The corner of my mouth lifts. Good. When she wears my clothes it makes something hot and possessive slot into place inside me.
Maisy gets up, collecting the stack of magazines she had in her bag and hooking an arm through her hippie style purse before coming back to the couch. She splits the stack in half and nudges it toward me.
She settles in the corner of the couch with her own half, tucking her bare toes beneath my thighs while she leans against the arm. “What are we looking for?”
“Anything. I tried to look these up before online as PDFs to see if they talked about what they were researching, but I couldn’t remember what they had samples of.”
We work in a comfortable quiet as we begin scanning through the medical journals.
“Wait, I think this is it,” Maisy says after getting partway through her share. She sits up, shifting to her knees to show me the magazine article. “Right here. I recognize it from the stashed patent files you showed me in your garage. Do you have the photos from that shipping facility?”
Tossing aside the magazine I was reading, I pull the laptop closer and bring up the images I took when I posed
as an auditor assessing the company internally. I click through images of the shipping operation until she stops me with a hand on my wrist.
“The synthetic opioid! That’s it.”
“Looks like they didn’t get to file the patent paperwork and the company pushed forward with producing it in large quantities.”
Is this why my parents were killed? All over this drug?
“This is what they were shipping out,” she murmurs. “A lot of it. When you were talking to the manager, I thought it seemed weird that they were only shipping out this. And only, what, five guys loading it onto the truck?”
I make a low noise of agreement, my heart thumping at this new development. For years I’ve tried to remember what those hidden papers in the old garage said, but my memories were too foggy from grief. It’s been right in front of me this whole time.
Rubbing my jaw, I glance at her. “We should go back there to see if we can find out more.”
Twenty-Seven
Maisy
The shipping warehouse turns out to be a bust. We’ve circled the building twice, but after Fox lifted me onto his shoulders to peer in through a high window it became clear we were too late.
“It’s empty.” My shoulders droop. “Everything’s gone, like they cleaned house as soon as they finished loading the outgoing shipment.”
“I was afraid of that.” His grip on my thighs flexes. “Damn it.”
“We’ll figure it out. You have those pictures. We can use them hopefully.”
Fox sighs raggedly, lifting me down from his shoulders like I weigh nothing. His sharp jaw is clenched, a muscle quivering in his cheek. I reach up and smooth my thumbs over his face until his attention is back on me. He relaxes and lowers his forehead to rest against mine, hands finding my waist.
“Sorry,” he rasps. “I thought maybe we’d be able to learn something more after such a big break.”
“It’s okay.”
“Let’s head back. It looks like it might rain.”
Taking my hand, he leads me back to the low-hanging tree where he parked the Harley to hide it from anyone who might catch us here. He gets on and hands me the helmet before I swing my leg over the bike and take my place behind him. The leather of his jacket is cool to the touch as I slip my arms around him. Once the engine roars to life, we speed away from the mysteriously wiped shipping warehouse Nexus Lab used to distribute drugs they made.
We’re only on the road for a few minutes before Fox tenses.
“What is it?” I shout to be heard over the wind.
He angles his head back to surreptitiously glance behind us, then faces front again. If he’s uneasy, it can’t be good. I want to look back, but his voice stops me.
“Hold on tight,” he commands.
It’s the only warning I get before he takes a sharp turn onto a gravel cut through that connects to another lane. As we hit it, heading in the opposite direction from Fox’s warehouse studio apartment, I see it—the blacked out SUV tailing us.
My heart thuds loud enough in my ears to rival the growl of the motorcycle’s engine. I hold on tight as Fox weaves us through the roads. This isn’t like the last time he was followed, when we were in his car and had the cover of the more populated downtown area to get away. This time there’s only long stretches of road surrounded by foothills and random warehouses in the shipping district.
Behind us, the SUV revs its engine as it speeds up, keeping hot on the bike’s tail. Fox curses and takes another route. My fingers are sore from how tightly they’re clenched in his leather jacket. We whip around corners and fly down roads, climbing up higher into the mountains where the motorcycle maneuvers faster than the SUV can.
When we finally lose the tail, Fox spends another twenty minutes taking us on a winding path, still not fully relaxing. We eventually make it back to his place. My limbs are stiff when we climb off the bike. His big rough hands help me by removing the helmet. He tugs me into his chest, locking his arms around me in a hug.
“Close call,” I murmur, slipping my hands into his open jacket.
“Too close.” He squeezes me tighter. “Come on. We have to see what your parents had on their computer.”
As we take the stairs up from the garage, the clouds open up with a heavy rain that pounds the gravel lot outside, quickly creating puddles and rivers. Fox shrugs out of his leather jacket and pushes a hand beneath his muscle shirt, lifting it as he chases an itch. The downpour creates a white noise amplified by the metal roof and the large industrial windows that wrap around the second floor.
We return to our spots on the couch from earlier and I hand over the flash drive I used to copy the hard drive of the computer in my parents’ home office. Fox plugs it in. My phone vibrates with a text and I pull it out of the back pocket of the cutoff shorts I changed into before we left for the shipping facility.
“It’s Holden,” I say when Fox shoots me a curious glance. “He’s just checking in. Wants to make sure I’m okay.” I run my fingers through my hair and give him a sidelong look. “You know, since it’s my first time running away and all.”
He snorts. “You’re eighteen, not eight. I don’t think they call that running away anymore.”
“Semantics.”
While Fox gets everything set up, I text my brother.
Maisy: I’m all good [peace sign emoji]
Holden: Where are you though? I hit up Thea because I assumed that’s where you went and she said she hadn’t seen you.
Maisy: I thought about it but she’s been busy with her own stuff, I didn’t want to dump more on her. She should just enjoy being married and focus on her bakery right now, not letting me couch surf.
Holden: So where are you then?
Maisy: Safe. That’s all you need to know. Keep me posted on if Mom and Dad seem like they’re going to send out a search party because I’m being “over dramatic” [eye-roll emoji]
Holden: Actually I overheard them last night. They didn’t know there wasn’t music playing on my headphones when they were talking. They were acting kinda weird and Mom said she didn’t think you knew anything and wasn’t worried. She’s sure you’ll come around before things get out of hand.
I bite my lip and tell him thanks, tossing my phone onto the couch.
“Everything good?”
“Yeah.” I scoot closer. “Holden’s going to keep an eye on my parents and let me know if anything is up.”
He nods while clicking into files from the copy of the hard drive. “Looks like there’s a backlog of financial records and they kept track of meetings.”
“That’s good, right? Maybe there’s a suspicious payout, like you said. Follow the money.”
“Yeah.” Fox’s thick dark brows flatten over his stormy blue eyes. “Jesus, this says they met with the mayor at the time to bribe him to overlook Richard taking that other guy’s place as chief. There’s more, too. Mostly at that steakhouse, but sometimes random addresses.”
I lean in to see what he points out on the computer screen. Seeing the proof of how deep the deception goes fills me with disgust. The steakhouse is known to be a hotspot for lucrative business deals and meetings amongst the power players in this town, but to find out they were doing stuff like this right out in the open doesn’t sit right with me. I had no idea any of this was happening.
“This is like insurance. They keep track of it so that if they were ever caught, they could bring down the whole house with them.”
Fox murmurs in agreement. “Whatever is going on, I think it funded a lot of the wealth in this town behind closed doors. Nexus Lab wasn’t as big back then, but since it’s grown to be one of the top producers in the last ten years, anyone connected got richer.”
I slip my hand into his when his shoulders go rigid. He holds it like a lifeline and I want to take away all the pain he’s carried.
Anyone who cooperated got richer, but people like his parents wound up dead. Could they have been trying to stop whoever was pulling the strings an
d blow the whistle on the whole thing?
“Do you think they did it to anyone who didn’t play along? What happened to your parents, I mean?”
“Maybe. It’s likely, but I…I’ve only been looking for anything connected to my parents.”
“Hey,” I say softly, encouraging him to turn his face to me. When he meets my gaze, my heart aches at the lost look in his eyes. “It’s not your responsibility to solve everything. Whatever we find, we can send it somewhere. Like a tip line. But you’re not a superhero, okay? Don’t feel bad because bad things happen in the world.”
His jaw works, but he nods, then tugs me closer. I climb into his lap and shield him from the computer by winding my arms around his neck for a hug. His strong arms band around my waist like a vice and slowly the tension in his body bleeds away while we sit there comforting each other. I comb my fingers through his thick hair and he leans into me with a rumble that vibrates in his chest.
We stay like that for a long time.
My heart feels heavy after going through what was hidden under the same roof I lived by my own parents. The deeper we dig, the more corruption and deception we find. It unsettles me that my parents had a hand in what we discovered.
Lies, bribery, death. All of Ridgeview is soaked in blood and it shakes me to my core that my parents are at the center of it all.
Colton calls Fox two days later with more answers. While he answers the call, I get a text. Grabbing my phone from the coffee table, I find a message from Thea and the girls in our group chat with a photo of Thea, Blair, and Gemma making silly faces.
Thea: We miss your face!!! Holden said you got in a fight with your parents. We’re staging another jailbreak kidnapping and demand girl time. We’ve got your back!
A pang hits my chest. I want to go be with them. On any other normal day, I would be, but I’ve been sucked deep into this world Fox exists in, one that lurks beneath the bright surface. I can’t drag my friends into this mess. Thea went through a scary situation last year and I won’t be the one to put her in danger again. And while Blair and Gemma are total strong badasses, this isn’t their problem either. It’s mine and Fox’s and it goes back ten years at the start of all of this mess.
Savage Wilder: Dark New Adult High School Bully Romance (Sinners and Saints Book 4) Page 23
