Attest (Centrifuge Duet Book 2)(5)

First, I start with the more official looking documents. There’s labelled blueprints for the houses of each of the targets named on the front of the folder, a detailed brief of their schedule for the month, and the approval for the manufacture and distribution of Centrifuge by SG & R Biotech. St. George & Ray Biotech. As serious as the situation is, I have to roll my eyes when I realise that the narcissistic wankers have literally named their pharmaceutical company after themselves. The pair of greedy egomaniacs aren’t even bothering to hide their involvement with the dangerous, so-called dementia curing drug.

Filling my lungs with air until my cheeks puff out, I hold it in my chest for as long as I can before it rushes forth in a gale of confusion and doubt. There’s just too much to wrap my head around.

None of this makes sense.

Why does she want me to kill these people? Surely if she can afford to pay off the guards and whoever else she needs to spring me from here, she can just hire a professional hitman to take them all out?

How does a woman who’s supposed to be dead come back to life?

Why isn’t Jax on her hit list?

What the fuck does this all have to do with Centrifuge?

I snatch the next pile from the concrete and flip through the pages. My gut starts to churn, bile rising into my throat as I scan through the pages and discover the answers to some of my questions. There’s photo after photo of Jax and Ms. Blonde Bitch embracing while they’re out to dinner, walking around the hospital where he works, and dressed to the nines at events. Various newspaper articles talk about the “new power couple on the block”. And, then there’s the love letters from Jax outlining how much he adores her and how everything he’s doing is so they can be together forever without his parents interference.

This is a classic case of infatuation gone wrong. Good, ‘ole Jax is leading this chick around by the nose. Fuck me, I’ve seen more cases than I can count in the pre-teens I used to teach. Girl meets boy. Boy uses girl to satisfy his sociopathic tendencies—you know the drill.

Charlie St. George warned me about these two and I failed to take note.

The thought of Amber’s dead uncle—a death that I’m supposed to be responsible for—sets a lump growing in my throat. I swallow hard, pushing down the guilt I feel over his untimely demise with it, and continue on my fact-finding mission.

Up next are a bunch of photographs. It takes less than ten seconds of flicking through them to cause the empty space that lives in my chest to fill with hurt. Amber and her children look happy. In every picture, her eyes are filled with contentment and a blissful glow emanates from her face. It kills me. Each night that I’ve spent in here has been filled with dreams of rescuing her from the life she’s been drugged into accepting, yet looking at her carefree image has me reconsidering whether she even needs to be saved.

I taunt myself for a minute longer, lingering on the portrait of the four of them—Jax, Amber, and their two kids—until the pain becomes unbearable and I’m able to channel it into anger. The black-haired devil who poses with my fiancée needs to pay. He deserves to live a life filled with torment for stealing what was mine. The life he currently leads, the wealth he currently hoards, the woman he sticks his cancerous dick inside each night—it all should have been mine.

And, in this file there has to be a clue that provides a way for me to take back what I’ve lost.

The door to my cell clangs when the baton of the guard doing his rounds is smacked against it. It’s the half hour warning for dinner time, letting me know that I need to get down to business. How long I have to study this information before B comes back is unclear. I’m going to need every second of it to find what I’m looking for in this twisted parole offering.

The remainder of the photos are labelled with the names of the subjects and the dates and times that they were taken. I arrange them chronologically, starting from the earliest and study them with an intensity that makes my forehead tight with confusion. Before me unravels a series of weekly meetings between the patriarchs of the Ray and St. George families at an exclusive men’s club in the city. They go on for months until Jax joins them and the easy-going feel to the meetings appears to change. He seems angry in every image, constantly pointing fingers and getting in the face of the other men. The appearance of his brother, Seb, soothes the rabid beast and the photos go back to telling a tale of comradery and precise planning.

Then they come to an abrupt halt two days before Amber’s “accident” and don’t restart again until six months later. This time the four men are joined by Judge McManus and another male who doesn’t appear on the labels or anywhere else in the file. Three meetings happen in the week before my sentencing, then there’s nothing. No more photos for me to scrutinise, no more housing blueprints, no more schedules, nothing except a document title “Conditions of parole”.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” I flip through the pages again, a desperate need for more information clawing at my throat. “There’s nothing useful here. Not. A. Fucking. Thing!”

I stuff everything but the parole agreement into the folder and toss it on my bed. The stark, black typeface on B’s agreement mocks me. I already know the supposed conditions—$3,000,000 to be set free from prison so I can kill seven adults and two children in order for a crazy bitch to run off into the sunset. It’s a death sentence for me—a death sentence for almost everyone involved, except for the two lovers.