Page 189 of Devious Lies (Cruel Crown)
“Dad told you to come here?” I frowned at the ‘loving friend’ engraved on the marble.
Always took you as a bleeding heart, Dad.
“Yeah.”
“You talked to him?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you possess a vocabulary beyond ‘yeah,’ or have the polluted waters here induced developmental regression in your brain?”
“Fuck, kid.” Gideon shook his head. “You're too young to be this jaded.”
“I was less jaded when I had a dad.”
He ignored my jab. “I heard the trial’s board booted Hank. I talked to someone on the research team and found out why they nixed him.”
“Because Doctor Douche lost his money with Winthrop Textiles and took it out on Dad,” I finished for him.
“No.” Gideon exhaled. “That’s what I thought, too, but no.”
I could punch him. Rewriting history to make himself feel better sat on some low-as-shit rung of hell.
“I’m done with this bullshit.” I moved to leave, but he stopped me.
“Hank lied.”
“Watch your mouth.” I fixated on Dad’s marker, wishing ghosts existed so he could haunt the fuck out of Gideon.
“He told you and Betty the lie because it was better than the truth.”
“Which was?”
“That he’d die any day. The trial hadn't helped.” Gideon finished off the beer and replaced it with another. “It was all a placebo effect.”
“He took the medicine.” I jacked the can from him. “I saw him. I drove him there myself and waited in the treatment clinic.”
“Yeah, and it looked like it was working because he thought it was working. It wasn’t. They removed him from the trial after they realized the results weren’t there. It had nothing to do with the money. In fact, I offered to pay for more treatments elsewhere. Hank said they wouldn’t help, but he did ask for a favor.”
I refused to accept this.
If Dad’s death had nothing to do with money, I wasn’t guilty. I didn’t play a hand in killing him. That meant, all this fixation on revenge over the past four years amounted to… nothing.
I downed that beer, too. “What’d he want from you?”
“He asked me to take care of his family, but I knew you wouldn’t let me.”
“No shit.” I crushed the can and added it to the stack. Looked better than the dead flowers soiling the other graves.
“I was your seed investor.”
My hand hovered above a new can. “My seed investor was a Saudi oil—”
“—prince named Zayn Al-Asnam.” His sly smirk begged to be punched. “I know. He’s a character from 1001 Arabian Nights. I had a cover story made, a shell company founded, the works.”
The windfall from insider trading on Winthrop Textiles stocks started Prescott Hotels, but Al-Asnam’s—Gideon’s—investment turned it into an empire.
Shit.
