"You're sure it's Brock?" Jayden glanced to Lucas as they both sat on the couch in Jayden's living room. One hand reached to pull out his cellphone, but he didn't look at it yet.

"Positive," Lucas said without hesitation.

"Why?" Jayden wiggled the phone in his hand and planted his elbows on his knees.

He'd been all ready to believe it was Foster. The guy was always open about being a homophobic asshole, and Jayden had walked into that meeting half ready for Cox to straight up admit it. Throwing shade at Rutherford had been Jayden's way of forcing a reaction in the room, especially as Rutherford was so level-headed, but how had Lucas zoned in on Brock Covington among all that ruckus?

Could Lucas have got it wrong?

"I couldn't tell you his motive," Lucas said. "But he loathes you. It's personal for him, and the letters you were getting were personal, too. He also wasn't able to hide how he felt when you accused Rutherford. It's Covington, I guarantee it."

Jayden grit his teeth, then turned his attention to his phone so he could pull up a delivery app. "Pizza? Sushi?"

"Anything."

Jayden nodded and scrolled through the options, then ordered enough for two from a nearby Thai place, then put his phone away. "I guess Brock's been around since the company started to grow. Maybe he thinks it's his baby or something."

"I think he knows damn well that you have the power to fire him if you really put your mind to it," Lucas murmured, "and was hoping you hadn't thought of it yet. That was the thing that made him look daggers at you. I would suggest he wants the CEO seat."

"But Westwood..." Jayden trailed off as he put two and two together. "Westwood'll be an interim CEO," he surmised, "and then Brock gets to step in without it looking like they fired me just to promote him."

"But because you're fighting for control of the company, you must have figured out just voting them out, sooner or later," Lucas added.

"So instead they kill me. Mom gets my shares, but Mom doesn't want to run the company. She'd be happy to leave the board as-is, and there would be no further threat to Brock's future intentions." Jayden pushed his hands through his hair and huffed. "Really? Is it worth it? He'd get to be CEO for like five years at most before he retires."

"If he chooses to retire. It's not uncommon for people to remain as CEO well into their seventies or eighties, right?"

"I guess," Jayden nodded slowly. "But when Mom goes, her shares..." He blinked.

Lucas frowned at him. "What is it?"

Jayden hopped out of his chair to pace the room as his brain whirled at top speed. He could almost feel the possibilities colliding, logical connections forming faster than he could follow them, and he had to wait for them to be done before he could see the whole picture.

"Okay, so if I'm dead, Mom has my shares. Then Mom dies - natural causes, direct action, whatever - so then the shares have no biological heir to go to, and unless she leaves them to a beneficiary in her will, they revert to the board. The company owns its own shares after that, and they can choose to allocate ownership as they see fit."

"So they get to make themselves massively rich and make sure their families inherit your father's business," Lucas said, his eyebrows climbing as he spoke.

"Right!" Jayden snapped his fingers as he continued to pace. "But Stanhope never had kids. Westwood isn't an inside director. Rutherford has survived both his children."

"Which means the shares will get folded right back into the company again when Stanhope and Rutherford die."

"And then Covington or his kids get even more of that pie," Jayden said. "Holy shit, this is one seriously long-term plan."

"And if they're willing to kill you for it, they might also be willing to kill your Mom in a year or two." Lucas' gaze darkened.

"We have to stop him!" Jayden started toward the door, determined to do... something. He didn't know what, but maybe if he marched right back over to New Jersey he could confront Brock and make him confess on the spot.

Lucas' hands closed around his shoulders and Jayden staggered to a halt. "Stop," Lucas murmured.

Jayden whirled to face him. "Lucas, he wants to kill my mom!"

"Right now," Lucas countered, "he wants to kill you. First we make sure that Alan has his copy of the audio. Then we work out how to tie Covington to the assassination attempt and the death threats."

Jayden wanted to argue. He wanted to fight Lucas on this so damn hard. He wanted to scream and shout and call Brock out to his face.

But Lucas was right.

God damn it, he was totally right. They'd gone in there to find out who wanted Jayden dead, and then to formulate a plan to use that data wisely, not to run off half-cocked and screw the whole thing up.

"Besides," Lucas said dryly. "You just ordered dinner."

Jayden huffed and felt his shoulders sag. "Okay. So how do we tie Brock to all this?"

"I'm wondering if that's the wrong question," Lucas mused.

"How so?"

"What if your dad didn't die of natural causes?"

Jayden felt like the carpet just got pulled out from under his feet. He swayed, and Lucas' hands caught him before he lost his balance completely.

"You think he was murdered?" His voice was faint, distant.

"I think we need to look into it," Lucas rumbled.

Jayden didn't even notice Lucas steer him to a seat, or sit him down in it.

What if Dad was murdered?

"Oh my God," he breathed.

By the time dinner arrived and had been inspected by the guards on the door, Jayden wasn't convinced he was hungry any more. He'd dug out an electronic copy of his dad's death certificate, but that was all he had.

Lucas fetched plates and set the table while Jayden languished in a chair there, and Jayden watched him move around and then pull takeout containers out of the delivery bag and separate them onto plates.

"You'll need to request a copy of the medical examiner's findings," Lucas explained as he sat and tipped rice onto his plate. "See if they noted anything untoward on the body that could've indicated..." he waved a fork in a circle. "Anything."

"Reasonably, it would have to be a chemical though, right?" Jayden finally forced himself to sit upright. "You can't trigger a heart attack without either a chemical or physical agent. There weren't any marks on him, so he wasn't electrocuted or hit."

"Then we're looking at a toxin that wouldn't show up on the autopsy," Lucas reasoned.

Jayden nodded slowly, and his brain span up again, like a hard disk being switched on. He dished himself out some rice and green curry, but his head was filling with chemicals and formulae. "I don't really think there are any these days," he mused. "Everything shows up on a mass spectrometer. What it'd need to be is something so unstable that it's broken down by the time the lab gets a sample, or... Or a protein that naturally occurs in the body anyway. Something like that."

"And is there anything like that? Something Covington would know how to produce?" Lucas neatly stacked empty cartons back in the bag before he began to eat.

"Not really. Not any more. Not that has a useable vector. Like... Hydrogen cyanide would do the job, but it's a liquid that boils just above room temperature. It'd be next to impossible to get it into anyone. Or other means would take so long that he would've been sick for weeks before he died. I mean, there's potassium chloride, which directly stops the heart, but that would need to be injected, and it'd leave potassium in the bloodstream for the autopsy to pick up."

"Okay, but it's possible then that the autopsy wrote off the presence of potassium as a natural event, right?" Lucas asked. "And that brings us back to needing the full autopsy report."

"Right." Jayden pulled his cellphone and Googled one-handed while he ate, then tapped a couple of links and filled out a form they led him to. "Apparently all I do is email the Chief Medical Examiner's office," he explained once he was done. "They'll get back to me."

Lucas nodded and was quiet a while, but then he sat back in his chair. "Unless the ME lied."

Jayden paused his eating. "What now?"

Lucas shrugged. "There's always the possibility that someone as wealthy as Covington just paid someone else off to overlook a toxicology report."

Jayden said nothing to that. It wasn't anything he really wanted to consider, and it took this from murder to conspiracy super fast. But then if Brock's plans really were unfolding over the course of years, maybe conspiracy wasn't out of the question.

That meant identifying the ME and going over there for a chat, then relying on Lucas' lie-detection skills, and accepting that Covington would bump people off and get away with it just because he was rich.

Was that really Lucas' impression of all rich people?

Was it what Lucas thought of Jayden?

Uncomfortable at that train of thought, Jayden buried it and returned to eating. "Okay. We get the report, we talk to the ME, then we take it from there. Meanwhile how do we watch Covington?"

"We put a PI on him," Lucas countered. "You have reason to suspect him now, so if you wanna start watching him we're gonna need someone with a PI license. We tail him, find out who he's in contact with, see if he mails you any more letters, and we get proof at every step of the way. If we catch him dropping anything addressed to you into a mailbox, we hand that to the cops. We don't wanna be sitting around on stakeout twenty-five hours a day anyway. I hear eating subs and pissing into soda bottles gets real tiring after the first few hours."

Jayden snorted at the mental image. "You know what else gets tiring after a few hours?"

Lucas eyed him.

"Uh huh." He smirked a little.

The tips of Lucas' ears turned pink. "Shit, you don't ever stop, do you?"

"Not if you don't wanna..." Jayden let his grin unfold, and he ate his next forkful as suggestively as he possibly could.

Nothing helped the noise in his head go quiet like a good, hard fuck.

Lucas sucked his lip and shook his head in faked despair, then pulled his phone out and began to tap away at it, thumbs moving swiftly over the screen. "Okay. I'm gonna email the office, get them to hire a PI to put on Covington. You'll have to authorize the spend, so I'm copying you in. You want me to copy Alan in, too?"

Jayden mulled it over, then gave a quick nod. "Yeah, I think it's better to keep him appraised rather than spring anything on him later down the line."

"Agreed."

Jayden ate as he watched Lucas work, and he allowed his gaze to roam over those broad shoulders to the way his shirt strained to hold his biceps in. There was no way anyone could look at Lucas and not see what a huge, powerful beast he was, no matter how he dressed himself, and he was all Jayden's.

Jayden blinked.

Lucas was his, right?

He cleared his throat. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure." Lucas kept typing.

"Are we, like..." Jayden gestured between them both with his fork. "Are we exclusive? Like, this isn't an open thing we've got here, is it?"

Lucas paused in his typing and raised his head to look directly at Jayden, his expression neutral. "Do you want it to be?"

"Exclusive?" Jayden coughed softly. "Yeah. Yes, I do. Is that... That's not a problem, is it? I literally only just realized I hadn't asked, I'd just kinda assumed..."

Lucas smiled slightly in that gentle, dry way he had. "It's exclusive, Jayden," he murmured. "I promise you that. I'm not sharing you with anyone."

Jayden let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding, then reached over and squeezed Lucas' arm. "Thanks. Sorry. I shoulda checked."

"No, it's a good thing to make sure of." Lucas looked down to finish his email, then set his phone aside and took Jayden's hand into his own. "How about we go into the bedroom and I can show you how unwilling I am to share you?"

Jayden's cock stirred, and he bounced right out of his chair.

"Right now," he demanded.

Lucas laughed and stood, then scooped Jayden into his arms.

"Right now," he agreed.