Legacy (Sociopath Series Book 2)(33)
“You can wait outside until your office is suitably prepared, and you’re furnished with the usual company package.”
“Oh. Okay.” She rises gracefully, her taut thighs doing all the work.
No more early morning Pilates classes for you, princess. You’ll be too busy praying to a God who doesn’t exist for sleep. Dignity. Mercy. Better shoes.
Cleopatra f*cked up, didn’t she? Fucked up and then killed herself when there was no other option. I respect that kind of dedication to one’s personal cause.
Cleopatrassistant and I are going to get on just fine.
***
I promised Gwen an office. Tuija’s office. Yet I don’t trust anyone but myself to empty it, and until now, I haven’t seen the need to do so. I could ask Leo, of course, but the last time she went into that office, she found something she didn’t like and shot me.
Those in favor of avoiding this, please show your hands now…
…Good. Well. Here goes a waste of a whole f*cking afternoon. I made sure Tuija practically lived in her office, and here’s my long-due ride on the karma bus; I now get to sort through about three dozen half-used designer lipsticks and a wardrobe full of business casual for Babylonian whores.
Correction: actually, Harvey gets to sort through it. I trust him—I have to, he’s my head of security. Or at least I trust him enough to let him sort through all this crap while I check emails from the velvet couch Tuija used to sleep on half the time. Two birds with one smarmy stone.
“You want me to try this stuff on as well?” he huffs, brandishing a garish set of red lingerie in my direction. “Or is this yours?”
I glare over the top of my iPad. “You got me. The heels are mine too.”
“And here was me thinking you kept this damn mausoleum because you missed her.” He flattens his lips, smiles without humor. “Sir.”
“Maybe I do miss her. Nobody f*cked up a Starbucks order quite like Tuij.”
Harvey piles a load of silk shirts up and then sits cross-legged on the floor to fold them, before placing them in boxes. “You want this taken to a thrift store?”
“No.” I swipe away a load of deleted emails with my index finger. Goodbye, time-sucking f*ckface advertisers. Rot in digital hell with Viagra spam and thinly veiled incest porn. Gwen should have my company account login by now; this is the last time I’ll have to do this myself, and thank God for that. I don’t get this crap in my personal account. “Have it sent to storage. Tuij’s family might want it, or something.”
Her family think all her belongings were at her apartment, which they cleared months ago. I didn’t tell them about the office stash because I didn’t want them to get in here only to realize how much time she spent at work. And if I’ve come in here a couple times late at night, it’s only to escape work. To find space in my brain when the atmosphere in my own office was crippling, and my Leo was nowhere to be found in hers. She has a habit of being busy that is useful in its commercial subterfuge, but annoying in the face of her absence.
The quiet in here is still welcome solace. It’s a relief to escape the images flashing across my office TV screens; I thought rationalizing them to Gwen would help, but it hasn’t. My brain just spits Posner’s words back at me every time they come up: stay away. So here I am, pretending to be interested in clearing out my inbox when I’m mostly picturing the state of Leo’s chopstick scratch, playing her yelps over and over in my head like some kind of lullaby. They soothe me.
Then it occurs to me that Jamie Perkins’s screams probably soothed—or titillated— Blood Honey, and there’s a whisper of nausea rising like smoke in my belly, irritating capillaries and heating soft tissue. It’s not because I don’t understand him; it’s because I do. I lost my temper at Leo when she drew similarities between me and this careless butcher, but she’s right.
Fuck.
I do not want to know this. It means that I was wrong. I’m so rarely wrong.
“You know,” Harvey goes on, “I have about twenty other team members who could be doing this while I get on with all the shit I’m supposed to be doing.”
“You don’t need to watch Gwen right now. Fliss updates me hourly and she’s just waiting by her desk.”
“No, but I’m supposed to be installing the bugs on her phones and going through her emails.” He finishes with the shirts and scowls at the mess of heels beneath the desk, discarded randomly as if Tuija herself just kicked them off.
“Leo already tapped her phones.”
“Well-trained, isn’t she?”
“She has her own interests to preserve. And she’s not shy about them.” Ashamed, perhaps. Once. But I’ve dragged her far beyond that and she doesn’t seem bothered enough to climb out of the gutter; you can still see the stars from the gutter, scarlet as they are in our coal pit of a love affair.
“Sir?”
When I glance up, Harvey holds out an elegant scrapbook with a purple suede cover, the kind rich college girls buy just to trash. This one is evidently well-kept, its thick fibers unblemished by mucky hands or lack of care.
I take it from him. Flick through. It’s a grotesque catalogue of cut-out images from various magazines and websites: Tuij and I on red carpets. At charity balls. Staged “intimate” moments from our earlier years, where I’d hold her close and pretend to be enamored while trying not to retch at the stench of her unsubtle perfume. The pages, thick and luxurious as they are, are well-fingered and smell faintly of glue.