She didn’t need to look at the number. There was only one person who ever called. Kyle had cost her all her other relationships. Not that there had been many. A few women and men she referred to as friends. Her mom had been useful from time to time.
Now there was only the man on the other end of this call, the one who sent her out to do the bidding of her bosses.
“Hello?”
“I’d like to know why I’m hearing rumors about Drew Lawless buying Genedyne.”
Fuck. She felt her jaw tighten. She’d wondered why the tech billionaire had visited the day before. He’d shown up with his wife and kids and disappeared into the hospital room Kyle was sharing with Greg Hutchins. Lawless wasn’t in her group. The truth of the matter was Lawless wasn’t big enough to be welcomed into the Consortium, even if he hadn’t been an uptight Boy Scout no one trusted. But he was big enough to do some damage. “I suspect Taggart called him in. Or Hutchins. He’s done some work for Lawless’s company over the years, and he’s still friends with Lawless’s brother-in-law. I suspect he’s trying to save Noelle LaVigne’s work.”
“But we wanted to quash LaVigne’s work. It isn’t in our best interests to have the price of helium go down at this time,” the deep voice said.
“Then we’ll have to find another way because I seriously doubt Lawless can be convinced to change his mind.” Her own brain was working, putting together the hows and whys. “I’ve heard he’s putting a lot of money into quantum computing. Having access to cheap helium will help enormously until he can figure out how to make the systems work at a more reasonable temperature.”
The fact that quantum machines still only functioned at near absolute zero was a drawback Lawless would love to solve, and apparently he meant to do it by buying himself a tech think tank and all of the research ever done under Jessica Layne’s name.
“I don’t like it and neither does the board. LaVigne found Madison Wallace’s research and released it to the public. Do you understand what that means?”
It meant that somewhere down the line a whole bunch of people might not die from cancer or need ridiculously expensive treatments. Still, he was overreacting. “So our medical groups should get right on that.” She sighed. “I know this has been a clusterfuck of a week, but at least Layne won’t be a problem anymore. I’ll ensure we have a few of our people embedded at the new Genedyne so we can keep an eye on anything coming down the pipeline and perhaps discredit the research we need to.”
“See that you do. I’ll call you in a few days with a new assignment.”
The line went dead, and she slid the phone back into her pocket.
The Taggart kids were coming back, sodas in hand after what must have been a visit to the vending machines. They’d picked up a friend.
Mae Beatrice Vaughn. Such a silly name for a whore. She actually looked way better with all those bruises. It was unfortunate that Layne and her men had failed to do any long-term damage to the idiot her Kyle made puppy eyes at.
The purple-haired moron wasn’t worthy of Kyle, but in some ways Julia understood. What they’d had had been so passionate, so overwhelming, that he needed a bleating sheep in his life after their relationship.
She watched as MaeBe walked along with Kyle’s half siblings. The door came open, and there was no way to miss the light in Kyle’s eyes when he caught sight of the trio.
Her heart clenched and she hated the fact that the look on his face wasn’t for her.
He was her one weakness. She should slip into his room and end it, but she couldn’t.
Perhaps it would be more fun to burn his world down around him.
Starting with his family. He loved his brother David. It might be fun to play with him. Yes, that would be a good start, but in the end she would take them all down.
* * * *
“Grace, he’s fine. He took a bullet to the lung, covered it with duct tape, and still managed to take out the bad guys,” Sean Taggart was saying.
“Uh, I took two bullets, and Kyle wouldn’t share the duct tape, so you might ask him to share that sandwich.” Hutch looked to the sad cup of gelatin the nurse had brought him as a snack and prayed the