Inside, the place was sterile, bright, humming with refrigeration units and the distant whine of centrifuges. The air stung with bleach. Canon led the way past two receptionists and a security desk, moving like a man who’d cased the place twice already. I clocked the security guard watching us, but he never left his post.
The tech was waiting in a side office, a windowless box stacked with sample racks and three monitors running code I couldn’t decipher. He was young—maybe thirty—but already balding, and his blue scrubs were wrinkled at the collar. When he saw Canon, he flinched, then tried to smile.
“Hey, man, you got my—?”
Canon shut the door, slow and final. “Tell my friend what you told me.”
Shivs put his hand on the small of my back.
The tech licked his lips. “I shouldn’t have, I know. I just needed the cash. It was a one-time thing.”
He looked at me, then away, then at the wall. “It was a woman,” he said, voice high and tremulous. “She said her name was Evelyn Hart. She brought the sample herself, pre-labeled, and paid me extra to run it as a rush. Two grand, in cash.”
“And?” I said, voice like a whip.
He fiddled with a pen, tapping it against the desk. “She told me to make sure it matched the Stillwater family sample on file. That’s all. Just make the report say they were first-degree relatives. I thought it was for legal—”
I slammed my hand on the desk. The pen went flying. “Did you even run the test?”
His hands went up. “I ran it! But the sample was already spiked, okay? The DNA was a one-to-one match with the reference, as if it were copied. That’s not possible. But the machine doesn’t know that.”
Canon pulled out his phone, hit RECORD, and set it on the desk. “Say it again. Everything.”
The tech stared at the phone, then at Canon, then at me. He looked like a man who’d just realized the people in front of him were not, in fact, the good guys. He swallowed, then started from the top, voice shaking but steady.
“I was paid by Evelyn Hart to fake a DNA test. The sample was rigged. The report is a lie.”
He looked at me, eyes pleading. “Can I go now?”
Shivs growled, and the man cowered.
I nodded. “You talk to anyone, we’ll know.”
He nodded, fast, and Canon ushered us out, phone already in his pocket.
Outside, I let myself breathe for the first time in hours. The sky was bruised, the color of overripe fruit. I felt like I could bite through it.
Canon handed me the phone. “It’s all there. Plus, he gave me the email trail—shows the time stamps, the logins, everything. Evelyn paid him through three layers of PayPal, but I got the accounts.”
I stared at the phone, then at Canon. “You sure about this?”
He grinned, wolf-bright. “If there’s one thing I know, it’s when a man’s scared enough to tell the truth.”
I nodded, the rage in me turning cold and perfect. “Thank you,” I said.
As we drove back to the mansion, I thought about all the ways people could be broken: by lies, by fire, by blood. But the worst was by trust. I rolled the phone between my hands, feeling the weight of it, the digital confession that would end one chapter and start another.
I turned and looked at Shivs. “You ready to make a mess?” I said.
His laugh was pure violence. “Born ready.”
Shivs
I’d never seen the Stillwater tasting hall look so much like a gallows.
They’d done it up like a fucking cathedral—white linen-draped tables, every glass decanter sparkling like a row of polished bones, and overhead, the old iron chandeliers that made even bourbon taste like blood. All of Kentucky’s power drank from this hall, but tonight, it was standing-room only: TV crews, industry heads, regulators, and a scattering of minor royalty, every one of them dressed to the nines and ready to watch a public execution. Half the city council was there. The other half was probably betting on how hard we’d fall.
In short, it was double the normal amount of assholes.