Scandalous

But then yesterday changed everything. I’d sent my friends to Edie while I drove straight to Amanda. I’d turned the world upside down. I’d fought the waves. I hadn’t drowned.

I would never drown. Not when I needed to keep my kid afloat.

I knotted my hands behind my back, pacing the room leisurely, the joint still clasped between my fingers. “You know what I never understood, Jordi? How come you were so goddamn successful, when every company you’ve ever incorporated before ninety-seven failed miserably and went under? It was like you were fiscal poison. Everything you touched turned into shit. The growing list of companies you’ve founded and filed for Chapter 11 was the first warning sign. We all saw it as a red flag, but your track record after two thousand and three was so solid, my friends decided to overlook it. Well,” I shrugged, taking a hit of my joint, exhaling the smoke on a smile, “I didn’t.”

At first, I’d thought all I was going to find out about Jordan was the usual shit—money laundering and maybe a bit of tax evasion. Even his affairs didn’t strike me as too interesting. After all—he wasn’t even trying to hide them. But I’d found more. So, so much more.

Jordan’s teeth gritted so hard I could hear them all the way across the room. His face remained tense, holding onto the last shreds of his dignity.

“I went to a private investigator and asked her to find me everything there was to find about the massive success story that was Jordan Van Der Zee. The first thing I found out was that you may have gone to Harvard on a scholarship, but that scholarship wasn’t entirely kosher, was it? You had someone footing the bill for your education after the first year. The poor Dutch kid who couldn’t even afford butter and bread—your words, not mine. I wondered who could help you with such large sums of money and found the name. A shady McConman who lived in British Virgin Islands named Kaine Caulfield. Caulfield is such a peculiar name. Very Catcher in the Rye. Some would even say…fictional. I decided to dig deeper, especially considering you shouldn’t have known someone who’d lived in the British Virgin Islands. Unless…” I put the joint between my lips and fished a document from my back pocket, throwing it in his face with the rollie still in my mouth. “Money laundering.”

“This is preposterous,” he muttered, intending to stand up, but I pushed him back down to his seat with the tip of my shoe.

“Sit,” I commanded. “So, drugs, huh?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He flung his arms in the air, visibly shaking. He was losing it, and fuck if it wasn’t the best show in town.

Laughing, I shook my head. “I mean, I guess it could explain how you even got that far in your first company. Or how you put down some investment money when you opened your own firm three years after graduating.”

“This is hearsay, and if you continue this line of conversation, I will have to contact my lawyer…” Jordan started, standing up on his feet.

I pushed him back down again, not even sparing him a glance and walking over to his bar. “Finally we can agree on something. You should definitely call your lawyer. But not yet. You’ll ruin the surprise.”

I poured myself three fingers of scotch and downed them in front of his floor-to-ceiling window, turning on my heel to look at him again. I felt oddly content with fucking up his life. The only person whose feelings I worried about was Edie, who was about to part ways with her father, but hey, she didn’t need him anyway, and I was going to do her a favor by locking him up.

I was going to give her Theo.

“You know? I think I’m going to be the one to take your office. It’s plenty spacious. Luna will have a place to play when she visits me every Tuesday,” I mused, brushing my fingers along the giant canvas painting on the wall. A Dutch painter. Another Van Der Whatever. Waves crashing on the shore.

Edie.

“You’re leaving the company, Rexroth,” he said tiredly, but he didn’t mean it. Not really. I could see it in his eyes. The defeat. It had a color and a smell and a fucking taste. It was everywhere on his features, everywhere in the room.

“Save me the bullshit. You and I both know that time is money.” I polished off his liquor and dropped the remainder of the joint into the expensive glass. “So—drugs. They put you through school. Good for you. When my PI came to me with this information, I was surprised to say the least—a man like you, who fell in love so fucking hard with the glitz and glamour, wouldn’t be dealing with crackheads and drug dealers? Nah. You’re fancier than that, Jordi. That’s why you struck a deal with MNE Pharmaceuticals. They provide you with prescription drugs. Have been for twenty years now. Oxy. Ambien. Vicodin. Xanax. Valium. Codeine. I can continue, but you get the picture. You got them. You sold them through hundreds of salespeople you have carefully targeted and trained. You laundered the money through offshore companies, and that’s how you managed to invest in new companies and become the mogul you are today. But fucking up strangers’ lives wasn’t enough, was it, Jordan?”

His face was so white I thought he was going to faint. I didn’t help him when his legs failed him and he crashed on the floor. My shoes next to his face, the only thing he saw from his position.

“I dug even deeper,” I continued.

“Stop, stop,” he choked, spluttering saliva all over like a fucking pussy. I chose the exact same time to wipe his desk of the documents I prepared on it in advance, making it rain statements and pictures of him meeting with the CEO of MNE and checking big trucks full of boxes containing drugs.

“I was wondering about that pretty wife of yours.” My voice was velvet, almost soft. “I mean, Edie got her beauty from somewhere, and it sure as fuck wasn’t from you. My PI told me that your better half barely leaves the house anymore, which is sad, really, but also suspicious. And oh, so fucking convenient.”

He got up on his knees—shit, on his fucking knees—and crawled toward me. This had escalated so quickly, I couldn’t keep a straight face. Then again, I couldn’t exactly laugh at him, either. This wasn’t a joke.

“No. No. No. You don’t have any evidence,” he kept chanting, clutching my legs. I took a step back, repulsed with his eerie behavior.

“I clearly do.” I pushed one picture of him next to a truck at the pier in his direction with the tip of my Derby shoe. “You’re not the only one who knows how to use a goddamn printer.”

“Lydia didn’t…she never…”

“You fed her drugs. You messed with her prescriptions, didn’t you?” I asked dryly. He shook his head. Liar. I saw him, under me, and for the first time, it was without the screen of hatred. I saw the boy who wanted to get far and didn’t know how. Then I saw the greed. The gluttony. Everything that had ruined Edie’s life. I saw it and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that regardless of what we were—or weren’t—I needed to protect her from her father and his destructive lover, but even more importantly, I wanted them out of the picture. For good.

“Her tea,” I hissed. “Fuck, Jordi, you got some sick mind.”

“I can’t go to jail. I can’t.” He choked on his tears. “I don’t…”

“You can’t? Well, here’s a spoiler for you—the cops are waiting downstairs. Shit. Did I say cops? I meant FBI. Nope, wait, I think it’s both. But before I let you leave, you will sign three documents—one handing us Fiscal Heights Holdings in its entirety, one in which you give up custody rights over Theo, and finally, a third one handing over and destroying all your material about me regarding Luna. Your little friend, Val, I’ll take care of separately. Wash your fucking face, asshole. There’s a lot of work ahead of you. Now, go.”

I saw him ushered to the waiting cars. To the men in the sunglasses. To the person who had read him his rights.

In perfect harmony, Jordan’s head was ducked into the police car, his hands cuffed behind his back, when Val poured herself out of a cab behind them. She barely had time to straighten her scarlet come-fuck-me dress and fix her film-noir smile when I approached her.

“What’s going on?” she half-stuttered, half-begged for an answer, clutching at my sleeve. She looked up to me, and I saw Luna in her face. I wish I hadn’t. It would have made things so much easier. But essentially, Val was just a child. She proved it over and over again by trying to find a rich guy to babysit her.

And it was funny, how people viewed Edie as the kid because of her age, when she’d been nothing but a lioness throughout her short life.

“Your boyfriend just got arrested.” I shook her—and the spell of her Luna eyes—away from me.

“For what?” She followed me on her impossibly noisy heels.

“You name it. Follow me.” I started walking back into the Oracle building. She tried to keep up with my pace, stumbling her way behind me.

“What for?”

“To sign all the papers so I can get full custody of Luna.”

“Why would I give her to you?” She tried to laugh. Failed.

I stopped, turning around to face her. “Hey, remember when we first met? You were coked out of your ass, and shortly after the whole pregnancy revelation I had to throw you into rehab so you could get better and not fill my kid with enough drugs to grow a second head. And that was before I knew your side piece is the lord of drugs. Care to piss in a cup for me, Valenciana, dear?”

Her face drained of blood, and I could see how it seeped, slowly but surely. The fear. Val was using. Jordan provided it to her. She swallowed hard. I stepped aside, motioning with my hand for her to enter the elevator.

“Ladies first.”

She walked in, knowing exactly what was going to happen once we got to my office. “Shit before the shovel.”

“I LOVE IT WHEN WE get fucking vicious.” Dean lit a joint, sprawled on a settee in front of Vicious’ Olympic pool, throwing the unlit match in the latter’s direction. “No pun intended, asshole.”