Slowly, Karl shook his head. “Right puzzle, wrong pieces, son. It’s true that Taylor got that girl pregnant. That smarmy fuck thought he could do a teenage girl, but he wasn’t smart enough to wear a fucking condom. That he didn’t want her was no surprise. She was a fucking child. A throwaway lay. But your father had nothing to do with her father’s death. That was me. I ordered his death and Edwards’.”
The realization that my family hadn’t directly ruined Nina’s family stunned me for a moment. All this time the guilt I’d shouldered had been wrong. My father hadn’t been a saint, but at least he hadn’t killed Nina’s father. “Why? Was it because Edwards was getting to close to the dirty laundry my father wanted hidden? Did he tell you to get rid of Cashen and Nina’s father?”
Chuckling, Karl lifted his glass and swallowed the last gulp of alcohol. “You have a misguided view of who Victor Stone was. A semi-talented businessman, his real skill was as a worker. He knew more about business than most men because he spent hours learning about it, but he would never have a threat eliminated. He preferred to fight it out. The competition is what he liked.”
As he stood to refill his glass, I asked, “Then why were they killed if my father wasn’t worried about losing the case or what Nina’s father had?”
With his back to me, he answered. “Rider Pharmaceutical.”
“What?”
He turned around and smiled, repeating his answer. “Rider Pharmaceutical. The success of Cordovex wasn’t going to be ruined by some nosy journalist or your father’s inability to keep his dick in his pants. So they had to go.
“All of this over Rider and Cordovex?”
“That competitive streak in your father extended to your mother too. When he found out, he gave me that tiny, pissant company named for her maiden name. I knew what that meant. That was his way of saying I couldn’t have the woman I loved but I could have some useless company to remind me every day that he’d won. Over the years, I’d been able to make it into something and then Cordovex came. We got it through the FDA with an acceptable level of problems, but no amount of hope changed the fact that it wasn’t what we wished it would be. Your father found out and fired me. He was nice enough to give me some time to come up with a way to save face when I left Stone. That’s where his mistake was.”
I wracked my brain to remember any evidence of Karl ever being fired, but if there had been any proof, I’d never seen or heard about it. Whatever he was going on about was fiction to feed his demented ego. “My father never fired you. This is all just to make you feel like you weren’t some low level operative in a company run by a bigger man.”
“So I found a way to make sure I didn’t have to leave. I couldn’t be forced out if the man doing it wasn’t around anymore.”
Karl’s words slowly sunk into my brain and I suddenly realized I wasn’t breathing. It couldn’t be true. He must have been lying.
“I see by the look on your face you don’t believe what I said. Believe it. I needed to find a way to get rid of your father and Taylor, since he’d take over the minute your father was gone. That your mother would have to suffer for staying with him was poetic justice, but I knew I’d have to find some way to get rid of you too. I figured I could deal with that later. Tressa had secretly told me that Victor planned to fire me over the Cordovex thing your girlfriend’s father had found out about and thought convincing him to take a few days off would give me the chance to leave the company quietly. She told me you didn’t want to go. Something about some party you didn’t want to miss.”
As he spoke, I remembered that time like it was yesterday. I’d told my mother I had no interest in going away with them but at the last minute, I’d given in to her constant asking me to change my mind, thinking a few days in the islands would at least offer a chance to party there with much better drugs. My mother had been so happy when I finally relented.
Rage coursed through my veins as the truth became clear. Karl had killed my family over his petty ambitions and now planned to kill me and Nina because he was a megalomaniacal fuck. “You bastard! You killed them over a fucking job?”
“I deserved that job! I made Rider Pharmaceutical a company worthy of respect and he wanted to shut me out of everything! I deserved everything he was taking away.”
“You killed my entire family over some bullshit company the Feds would have ruined anyway. Cordovex would have been the end of Rider,” I said quietly, still unable to process the actions of the monster in front of me.