“I hate Lake Havasu,” Ed says.

“Me too.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Which is?”

“What will my recommendation say?”

“That you were steady, reliable. Loyal. That you stayed up to date on modern security and surveillance technologies. That you were someone I could count on, that my father could count on when he was alive.”

Ed laughs. He’s looking at the glass wall behind Cole as if there’s a punchline spray-painted on it.

“What’s so funny?” Cole asks.

“You’re firing me because you’re afraid I hurt her feelings.” Ed’s mirth has been replaced by stone-cold anger. “After my years of service to this company, you’re firing me because you’re afraid of how something I said made that crazy bitch feel. And if that isn’t the most limp-wristed, candy-ass—”

Ed falls silent as soon as Cole rises to his feet, fists planted on the glass desk in front of him. “I’m firing you because I’m sick and tired of your belief that the hundreds of Africans you and my father killed during secret drug trials is somehow less of a blight on humanity than what I’m trying to accomplish with Zypraxon. I’m firing you because you can’t take orders from a gay man, and you’re worse at taking them from a woman.”

“Your sexuality has never had a damn thing to do with my opinion of—”

“Thank you. My limp-wristed candy ass will take that to heart.”

“None of us should ever be taking orders from her, Cole. Especially not you. That’s the point.”

“The point of your shitty, insubordinate attitude, perhaps.”

“You took responsibility for her when you shouldn’t have because you let the psycho formerly known as Dylan Cody fuck your judgment. In more ways than one. So now, you’ve set up an untenable situation where she’s out in the world doing whatever she wants, exposing this company to God knows what risk, and you sit here lecturing me on my attitude!”

“I’m not lecturing you on anything. I’m retiring you.”

“Because I pointed out the recklessness of your actions.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes. I’m retiring you because if you had your way, Charlotte Rowe would be a prisoner for the rest of her life, and her life wouldn’t last very long because of it. I’m retiring you because you’re the last vestige of a depraved heartlessness with which my father ran this company, and I want you and it gone. And I’m retiring you because I’m determined that by the time my reign here is over, my limp-wristed candy ass will have murdered far fewer innocent people in the name of science than you and my father did during your long, sweet time together.”

Ed’s smile is slight and coy. “Not all of those people were killed in the name of science.”

Cole feels the anger coursing through his veins turn into something icy and solid that seems to slide earthward from the pull of its own sudden weight. He hears wind rushing through a clearing fringed with haggard pines, feels the echoing memory of a fiery pain shooting up the side of his nose and forehead from the spot where one of his front teeth was knocked out.

The only way to keep the evidence of these memories from his expression is to remain completely still, and so he does, even though Ed’s smile is growing wider.

“I know who you’re referring to.” Cole feels as if his voice is coming from someplace far away, propelled through his body by the breath of his father’s ghost. “They weren’t innocent. Neither are you.”

“Are you actually threatening my life?” Ed asks without a trace of fear.

“You have thirty more seconds with me. If you want to negotiate, do it.”

“Twice my severance.”

“Fine.”

“I want to keep the Benz.”

“No problem.”

“And one other thing,” Ed says.

“I’m listening.”

“I want you to repeat something after me.”

Cole just glares at him.

“Are you ready?” Ed asks. When Cole doesn’t answer, Ed starts slowly toward the desk. “I, Cole Graydon, put my father’s billion-dollar legacy at risk because I finally found a man who could violate me like I had no value at all, thereby distracting me from the fact that I’m too damaged to have what anyone would describe as a normal human relationship, even by limp-wristed, candy-ass standards.”

“Get out before I cut the brake line on the Benz.”

Cole’s alone once again, only now the emptiness of the surrounding offices doesn’t feel liberating. It feels vulnerable to infection by his memories.

Memories of what his father did years ago.

For me, he thinks against his will. What my father did for me.

The sharp smells of untended soil and pine work in concert to drown out the stink of fear-fueled sweat. The fiery face pain, the eye above his knocked-out tooth that’s still watering long after the tears have stopped, and the gentle feel of his father’s hands coming to rest on his shoulders as they watched the drug go to work. His father’s confident whisper. “Remember. No matter what happens to you, you will always be my boy.” Together, these memories are like echoes in his blood.

He’d much prefer the memory of being defiled, willingly, on the office floor by a man who was later revealed to be a con artist and a psychopath. But that memory feels remote now—a strange irony, given how well Ed just highlighted the connection between the two.