I’ve asked myself that same question over and over. “I don’t know. I just know they were involved somehow.”
“I’m sorry,” she whispers. “I hate that they could hurt you.”
“It’s not your fault.” I know that now and I don’t want it to weigh on her.
Opening up to tell her this feels like I’m in a twilight zone. It’s not just that I’ve let very few people know the full story—only Colton knows the full extent. But sharing it with her makes it feel like I have someone I can lean on. I bump my nose beneath her ear and squeeze her tight in an embrace.
“The truth is coming out,” I murmur. “One way or another.”
She makes a soft sound in agreement, turning to kiss me.
“I also brought these,” Maisy says, getting up to rustle through her bag at the foot of the bed. She comes back with a stack of magazines and perches in my lap.
It’s the science journal I’ve been looking up online. I lift a brow.
“A friend of mine, his parents run that medical research clinic in town. He got them for me.”
“You have helpful friends. I should’ve gone after them instead of you.”
She smacks my chest and puts the stack of magazines on the table. “Maybe I can scope out the company if I play it like I’m stopping by to see my mom? She had an important meeting on the calendar that she’s spent a month preparing for. Maybe I’ll convince the guard to let me wait in her office since I’m her daughter. I can snoop around and see if I can get us more.”
“Let’s find out.” I adjust her in my lap, reaching around to switch windows on the laptop. My brows furrow at the map. “That’s weird. I have tracking on her phone, but she’s not there.”
Maisy’s brows dip. “She’s really strict about her work hours, she should be there.”
“Hang on.”
I type a few keys to trigger the tracing Colton hooked me up with. It takes a minute for the scanner to pinpoint her signal, but once it does we both lean in. The address she’s at isn’t anywhere near where she should be, on the opposite side of town in the middle of nowhere. It’s not far from the shipping warehouse I snooped around at, but further off from the rest of the shipping district.
“Switch to street view on Google maps,” she suggests. “I want to see where she is.”
I plug in the address and Maisy tilts her head as we take a virtual tour. It’s another warehouse, this one much shadier looking than the shipping facility. The tin siding is covered in rust and the roof looks in dis
repair.
“Wait. Go back, I recognize that logo.”
“This?”
I navigate back to the front of the building. On a rolling bay door in faded, peeling letters is SynCom.
“SynCom,” Maisy says in a dull tone. “Fox, that logo is on her paychecks.”
“What? Why wouldn’t Nexus Lab be the ones paying her?”
“They are. It’s done through this, I think. I was with her once at the bank and she had me hold a stack with this stamped on it.”
“There must be some kind of investor or something that owns Nexus Lab privately. I’ll find out if this SynCom is a holdings company and see what this means.”
“We make a good team.” She beams at me.
I rub my mouth. “I should’ve been working with you instead of against you this whole time. I would’ve gotten more answers sooner.”
“I told you at that party, jerk,” she teases, elbowing me. “We could’ve been doing so much this year—kissing and kicking ass—instead of wasting all this time.”
I hum at the memory of my wild daisy at that house party. That first taste was everything. “Did you keep those pants?”
“Maybe.” She blushes. “I was going to throw them out because they’re stained, but…”