Chapter 29 Conrad
Conrad
I don’t sleep. I count the revolutions of the ceiling fan and the miles between my self-control and the wall dividing my room from the one where Phoenix and Maverick are having an…enthusiastic…evening.
Every time she says his name, jealousy slides under my ribs, hooks its claws in something soft, and rips. I flip the pillow, roll to the cool side, consider noise-canceling headphones, and reject the idea on principle.
I’m the adult in the room. Adults don’t get jealous over things they agreed to. Adults also don’t lie awake cataloging every way they’d do it differently if it were them in the dark.
I try to ignore it.
Phoenix Jones is just a girl. The girl, maybe, I’ll give her that much.
She was the one who got away, the one who…damn, what was that song? Put my tender heart in a blender or some shit. Oh, yeah, that’s the one. She rendezvoused, then she was through with me.
But she was only ever just a girl. I have to keep telling myself that. This entire ‘minder’ experiment was never meant to be anything more than a fancy brand of exposure therapy—a means of getting over the one who left me empty inside.
I’d bring her close, get what I didn’t get last time, then find every flaw and fixate on it until I was done with her.
Instead, here I am, sulking as I listen to Maverick make her cry out to God oh Jesus over and over.
By the time five a.m. rolls around, I’ve set a new personal record: zero minutes of sleep and a gallon of coffee.
The phone lights up on the desk, the name of the hotel’s law firm flashing across the screen.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
I answer on the second ring. “Give me something good.”
“Define good,” my lawyer says, brisk, caffeinated, already billing ungodly money to multiple suckers.
“Just give me good news.” Sleep deprivation does nothing for my usual sunny disposition.
“My billables are going to skyrocket with the new lawsuit you’re facing.”
“How is that good news?”
“It’s good for me.” I can hear the shark in his smile.
“Your senator’s wife, Mrs. Langford, has escalated.
She’s alleging that after her initial incident, someone came to her suite to ‘fix’ the botched Botox.
They dissolved it, re-did it, then sold her lip injections.
She’s also claiming she was offered weight-loss injections.
Now she’s complaining of headaches and swelling. And horrible constipation.”
“As she is a huge pain in my ass, that kind of tracks,” I say. “But we don’t do injectables. At all.”
“I am aware, but someone still gave them to her—and they claimed they work for you. Perception is nine-tenths of reality.”
I groan. “Fuck my life. How the hell do we fix this? I don’t need to pay for some schmuck’s scam.”
“I understand that. However, she’s very loudly married to a senator and quietly dating a gaming board member. She can be a real problem.”
“I’m aware.” I pinch the bridge of my nose.
“There’s more.” He pauses just long enough to be theatrical. “There were three more overdoses overnight. Fentanyl. Not designer party blends. Pure ‘let’s close a coroner’s backlog’ fentanyl.”
The words hit like a hammer to the sternum. I stare at the window, where dawn has decided to look like a crime scene today—flat and gray. A dull drizzle hits the window, telling me the land casino will be busier than usual. No one wants to be on the river when it’s raining.
“Send me everything,” I say. “Names. Times. Toxicology when it posts. And pull Mrs. Langford’s exact statements. Every word.”
“Doing it now. Also, Conrad?”
“Mm?”
“Don’t give her another cookie. Seriously, don’t comp another motherfucking thing. She’s just looking for shit to pile on.”
I almost laugh and lean down to give Zeus a piece of cheese I grabbed from the fridge. He snarfs it down so fast I blink, wondering if I imagined giving it to him in the first place, and give him another. “She’s already got the whole jar.”
I hang up, text the others to meet me in the living room, then ping housekeeping for fresh coffee—pot after pot—and pastries, including those apple fritters Phoenix loves. After listening to her and Maverick all night, I need sleep. Instead, it’s time to wake the house.
Storm arrives first—hair still damp from the shower, T-shirt inside-out—and pours himself a cup of coffee, black. He reads my face and skips hello, dropping into a chair to wait.
Maverick slides in next wearing sunglasses like it’s noon instead of a corpse-gray six a.m. He lifts the shades and squints at me. “You look terrible.”
“And you look like you lost a cage fight with a tiger.” The angry red crescents on his forearms say Phoenix enjoyed herself.
Maverick flips me off with a smirk and collapses on the couch.
Atticus drifts in last, his headset crooked around his neck and his eyes bloodshot. “If this meeting isn’t about the ghost in my system, I’m flipping a table and setting it on fire for the hell of it.”
Phoenix pads out in one of Maverick’s shirts, the sleeves dangling past her fingers, legs bare, and face puffy with sleep.
My chest does something stupid. So far I’ve seen her wearing Storm’s shirt, Atticus’s shirt, Mav’s shirt…when the fuck is she going to wear one of mine? I shove the thought down. I open my mouth to tell her to leave, but Mav tilts his sunglasses and glares.
I hold my hands up, palms out. Message received.
“We’ve got a problem,” I say, ignoring her entirely as she pours herself a cup of coffee.
“We’ve got ninety-nine problems,” Atticus mutters. “Which one are we going with first?”
“The senator’s wife. She’s escalated. Says someone came to her suite to ‘fix the botched Botox.’ Dissolved, re-injected, added lips, the works. Now she has headaches, swelling, nausea, and a bullhorn pressed to both our lawyers and the press.”
Phoenix drops onto the arm of the sofa, her expression sharpens as the fog burns off. “The spa doesn’t have an MD on staff, so none of that is available.”
“Exactly.” I glance at Atticus. “I want every camera’s footage near her floor for seventy-two hours. If a fruit basket crossed her threshold, I want the bellhop’s shoe size.”
Atticus rubs his eyes. “Put it in the pile. The pile is on fire.”
“Pile’s about to get a friend,” I say. “Three more overdoses. Fentanyl.”
The room freezes.
“Neat,” Storm says, voice flat. “So we’re juggling fake bitches with fake faces and asses, and real chemical death.”
Maverick peels the sunglasses off and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Is this the part of the movie where the casino catches fire and sinks into the river while someone plays a violin?”
“Not a movie,” Atticus says. “We don’t get a soundtrack.”
“We do get a list, though,” I say, holding up a hand. “One: find the drugs. Two: cut the supply and whoever’s dealing. Three: decide if this is the Blackvine shipment and determine what ‘making it right’ looks like. Four: deliver the thief to them. Five: keep the resort alive while we do it.”
“Six,” Atticus says without inflection. “Get me four uninterrupted hours of sleep before I kill someone.”
“Seven,” Maverick adds. “Prevent me from committing public-relations suicide.”
“Eight,” Storm says mildly. “Kill the senator’s wife.”
Phoenix rolls her eyes at him. “Really?”
“Kidding,” he lies. I know he’s lying. “Mostly. I’m saying we have a senator’s wife setting bonfires with our name on them. Remove the match, remove the fire. Or at least make her stop lighting new ones while we put out the rest.”
“We’re not killing a senator’s wife before breakfast,” I say. “Before lunch is also off the table.”
“What about after dinner?” Storm asks.
I stare. He smiles. Phoenix glares anyway. The knot at the back of my neck loosens a notch.
Atticus paces to the window and back. “The shit with Langford is just optics, though, and we all know it. She matters, but she’s not the root of the problem.
We have an in-house vendor doing off-label cosmetic crap for cash, and somebody feeding real fentanyl into our pipeline.
Those might be the same person. They might be cousins.
Either way, they’re using our business to run theirs. ”
“This is going to sound crazy.” All eyes turn to Phoenix, who somehow seems like she could be heading a board meeting, all while dressed in Maverick’s shirt and covered in a just-fucked look.
“But this stuff happening the way it is makes it all seem like it’s connected.
And it’s really fucking insidious. Like, all of these things seem to be happening on their own.
That girl we saved, she tried to say something before the paramedics took her away. ”
“She said something about two already being gone. Vendors run beauty in daylight like it’s a billion dollar drug deal,” I say, thinking it through, “and somebody else shadows them at night with the real poison. Or it’s the same crew wearing two hats.”
“More than two hats, but one pipeline,” Maverick mutters. “They use our rooms, our VIP accounts, our laundry carts. No overhead. Maximum takeaway, and built-in patsies.”
Phoenix nods once. “And they need predictable dead zones—where doors open without anyone logging anything, where there are blind spots, where laundry and service carts don’t get searched.”
Storm looks at Atticus. “Tell me we’re not that predictable.”
Atticus stops pacing. The look he gives me says worse—they’re more organized. He taps his temple like he’s counting.
“Add this to our list,” Atticus says. “Maintenance master badges opened three equipment closets last night: the ballroom A/V on the twelfth floor, eighteen’s DVR.
My integrator found a hardware tap—a little vampire clipped to the copper.
Whoever it was cut thirteen minutes out of a hallway feed like it was lunch meat.
Also, a process spoofed one of my service names by one character.
Somebody knows my system. Either they learned it or they built it. ”
I follow about three-quarters of that.
Maverick groans. “Translation for the non-cyborgs?”
Atticus looks like he’s tired of everyone who isn’t him—so, everyone. “We have an asshole wrecking my system, and I can’t even prove he’s real. He’s making CCTV videos disappear and legal problems appear.”
“Number whatever to our pile of problems,” I say. “The Calhoun call. We’re on a two-day clock, and we’ve already burned one. They believe their product is here. They want it back, plus restitution for what they think we sold.”
“Okay,” Phoenix says, voice tightening into purpose. “Here are our options: push back on Langford quietly. Babysit every inch of the spa and adjacent suites. Maybe send someone in undercover—see if they get offered anything above and beyond the regular services.”
“Are you volunteering?” Storm asks, too casual.
I cut him a look that says I will bury you. “We’d need better bait.”
She folds her arms. “You think I can’t do it?”
“No. I think they’re hunting people with money to burn, not women they know are connected to us and spend all their time working.”
She glares but then thinks better of it and lets it go.
Maverick clears his throat, slicing the tension. “What if we do a decoy? We plant the rumor ourselves: ‘The guest had a reaction; management quietly used a concierge doctor to fix the awful work.’ Let the roaches come to the sugar. See who’s pissed a legit provider is on-site.”
“And when they do?” Atticus asks. “How do we catch them if they can turn off our cameras?”
Storm leans back, fingers laced behind his head. “Go upstream. Someone’s supplying the fake meds. Check shipping corridors. Look for unusual deliveries to spa-adjacent storage. Any nighttime tote passed through back-of-house without a signature gets flagged.”
“Already on it,” I say. “Legal’s pulling vendor manifests. Atticus, mirror those against badge logs. If a delivery happens and no badge opens a door, it’s either a ghost or…one of the four of us.”
“Don’t trust anyone,” Phoenix adds quietly. I glance down to see her rubbing her hand over the old broken finger she tries to pretend didn’t happen. “You never know who is going to hurt you. So don’t trust anyone. We have no idea how high the rot goes.”