The first thing I love about my job. Designing new drugs and constantly besting myself.
The second thing. Torturing murderers, pedophiles, rapists, and other muthafuckas who the justice system allowed to get away with their crimes.
Slightly hypocritical? Sure. Am I losing sleep over it? No.
Am I feeling like a fucking Avenger? Hell yes.
“Jaq,” I say, my attention still fixed on the thing in the cage.
“Day two. Subject one. Test group. Seems to have recovered from the last trial. The seizure and convulsions didn’t cause permanent, adverse damage. The CAT scan and MRI returned normal. Although, the subject hasn’t spoken since the trial, but this could be due more to psychological trauma than physical.” They remove a light from their lab coat pocket and shine it between the bars directly in the subject’s eyes. Animalistic sounds claw at the back of its throat as it scratches its arms. “Dilated pupils. Clenched jaw. Common signs of methylenedioxymethamphetamine usage.”
“They couldn’t just saymollylike everyone else, huh?” Perla mutters.
Jaq side eyes her. “Just because you’re the size of a mustard seed doesn’t mean you need to be bitchy with me, sweet pea.”
“That’s faith the size of a mustard seed, Bishop T. D. Fake,” Gus corrects them.
Jaq shifts his side eye to Gus. “I said what I said.”
I snort, because these three can go at it all night if I don’t intervene.
“Continue, Jaq.”
With a superior sniff, they turn back to the cage. “As I was saying, along with the dilated pupils and teeth grinding, there’s been excessive perspiring and he hasn’t been asleep in two days. Some of these symptoms can occur over habitual drug use, but these have appeared almost immediately.”
“That could be a positive result, because the onset of usual MDMA effects takes about an hour and hits its peak at seventy-five minutes, give or take. But from the recorded notes, the subject exhibited the effects much sooner. Within ten minutes. And while the customary reported euphoria lasts about three and a half hours, the subject’s lasted eight. That’s remarkable. But the adverse effects also presented much sooner—within an hour.”
“Damn,” I murmur. “No vomiting though. Or hallucinations or signs of paranoia.”
“None.” Perla shakes her head. “And we took a urine sample, too. Did you see that? We saved that as a little gift.” She grins, and her eyes sparkle behind her blue-and-gold frames. Bending her head over her tablet, she taps the screen, then tips her chin. “Check your email.”
Arching my eyebrows, I go to my inbox and tap on the attachment inside the waiting message from her. Moments later, I lift my head and smile wide.
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope.” Perla laughs.
“And good news. It won’t show up in that either,” Jaq adds.
“Ew.”
“Really? We’re having a moment here.”
Perla and Gus throw at their friend, who just shrugs.
I chuckle and once again glance down at the lab results Perla sent me. According to the PDF, subject one’s urine and blood samples came back completely clean of any drug substances.Satisfaction and triumph burn hot inside me like the fucking Olympic torch. Not even Glass Slipper was undetectable. Butmynew drug—Fairy Dust—the one I’m creating in my secret lab, the one that will fundmynew empire, is untraceable. Imagine, a designer drug that people could take in the club on Sunday night and pass a urine test at their jobs on Monday. One that would send them as high as the goddamn U.S. Bank Tower and keep them there longer than any other drug out there, without the crash. One with more power than even Glass Slipper, the best synthetic substance in the streets right now.
Addicts would be flooding clubs, bumrushing pushers, hounding suppliers for this product.
And they would only be able to get it from one source. Me.
The billions Fairy Dust would generate didn’t motivate me as much as knowing it would topple the House of Cross throne and the usurper and his bitch-ass mama who sat on it.
The usurper.
Asad Prince.
My fingers involuntarily clench around the edges of my tablet. The memory of him pausing in front of me just before he left the study earlier this evening floods my mind, and I inhale a low, deep breath, battling back the rush of rage that wants to drown me in a crimson wave. He’d peered down at me with his usual inscrutable gray stare—like a pathologist examining me right before he gets to work dissecting and collecting. In my sophomore year of college, I visited Surgeon’s Hall Museum in Edinburgh, and I can just see him storing pieces of me in those jars and under slides to analyze, then throw away when they start to bore him. Because I learned that early aboutPrince, as everyone else calls him, except me. Send useless prayers up that you didn’t catch Asad’s attention. And if you did, hope he lost interest sooner rather than later. Because the only person who had fun when Asad toyed with his things was him. He left all his playthings broken. Which was why I couldn’t understand why so many women and men flocked to him, begging for that gunmetalgaze to just trip over them. They offered him everything, from every hole in their body to their stock options.