Legacy (Sociopath Series Book 2)(22)

I’m about to leave for story time when my cell rings.

Leo calling.

Leo, as it turns out, has already called me twice.

I smile into the receiver. “You’ll never guess how many clothes I’m not wearing.”

“Have you heard anything from the office?” There’s a haunting vacancy in her voice; cold and breathless, as if someone just punched her in the gut.

“No. What’s happened? Did something break?”

“Finn called me. They found another body, Aeron. Another one of his.”

It’s like every light fitting in the apartment plummets to the floor. Just darkness, just smashed glass, just the steady thump of my pulse amid wreckage.

“Jesus. What do they have?” I grip the cell tighter. This is the problem with not having an assistant: there’s nobody at Lore Corp with the responsibility—or indeed, the balls—to call me out of hours. I rely on email, and there are already about seventy-two new ones in my inbox. Such is the pain of having a company that actually functions when I’m not in the building, as much as I’d like to pretend otherwise; I’ve created a monster that eats morals and shits money. “Did Posner contact the office?”

“No. Nothing like that. Finn says we got a tip off about the crime scene, and our teams are headed down there. Nobody’s got anything right now.”

“Good. Good. Listen—”

“Aeron,” she croaks, “I am not okay.”

“Sweetheart.” I heave a great sigh. “There’s nothing to be scared of.”

“I’m not scared. I’m not…it’s hard to describe. I haven’t eaten anything in like, two days. I can’t keep doing this.”

“What do you need?”

She goes quiet a second. Gulps. “Will you come over? Please.” And there’s the fear, twisting her tone into layered knots and tempting me like it’s the cherry on top of a goddamn sundae. “I know it sounds stupid, but I really don’t want to be alone right now.”

“Okay. Okay. I need to make a call, but I’ll be right over.”

“Thank you.” She exhales in relief, though it’s shallow.

I probably need to put on more clothes now, huh?

Posner picks up after a good seven rings, right around the time I’m trying to fasten my shirt buttons.

“What do you have for me?” I ask.

“Nothing. You know—” Footsteps. Curses, a whole echoed wall of them, then static and finally, silence. His volume drops. “You know the feds are all over this now. I’m just a grunt.”

“What about later? Can I just get an outline?”

“I like having a job, Aeron. Paying bills, clothing my kids, pizza on Saturdays. That kind of thing.”

Posner took a strange liking to me after our meeting in the hospital. I was suspicious at first, but seems to me…he thinks I’m secretly nice. Once he’d interviewed Leo and realized what a terrible accident we’d had, regardless of whether he actually believed that part, he came to believe that I’d forgiven her—he waltzes into my boardroom every now and then and sees evidence of this very fact. It appeals to the last bone in his body desperate to repel cynicism, and who am I to deny a man a little hope? It doesn’t hurt him to have a friend in the business of news, that’s for sure. And in case you haven’t noticed, my “friends” always happen to be in places like the White House, or security, or NYPD Homicide.

“I could pay those bills,” I say cheerily.

“I don’t take bribes, asshat. Bribes also get me fired.”

“Then you could come work for me.”

“I’d rather bite my own hands off and shove the stumps in salt.”

We’re both chuckling, though I don’t know if it’s because he could never say this stuff in my boardroom, or because me being an asshat CEO is just so humorously cliché. Let’s go with a cynical cocktail of both.

I sit down on the bed to pull fresh socks on. “What do I have to do to get inside this?”

“Nothing. Stay away from it.” He lowers his voice. “I’m serious—report what you need to, whatever, but on a personal level? Stay the f*ck away.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Pigeons, Aeron. Cupcakes. Rainbows,” he says in a monotone voice, and then hangs up.

In the words of Gwen Cooper, who may or may not be full of shit: well, that clears that up.

What the actual f*ck?





SIX YEARS AGO

Leo




Aged 18

Home, NYC



Lies are not bricks, and so you cannot build a house with them. Yet it seems my mother has tried.

It was bad enough when I discovered she was divorcing Dad for having an affair, not because they’d grown apart, like she’d said. It was also bad when I found out, around the same time, that we had no money except what Dad sent over, and it would mostly dry up once I went to college, leaving Mum up crap creek without a paddle. Those things made me feel awful. But this. This. Oh, this.

I am so not equipped to build a house back up. I’m just a scientist. I don’t know how.

I’ve been hiding in my room since I pushed Mum to confess about The Inheritance—or rather, the lack thereof. Somebody died and as a result, we got paid, but not in the traditional sense. The legal sense. The morally right and true sense. I keep pacing about just to burn off nervous energy, as if wishing the world away would crack these walls, peel off the paper and smash off the plaster and raze this sorry excuse of a home to the ground. So what if it has a pool and a state-of-the-art kitchen? None of it will ever be ours.