Down and Dirty
Taylor Holloway
Contents
Also by Taylor Holloway
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Prologue
1. Jenna
2. Nicholas
3. Jenna
4. Nicholas
5. Jenna
6. Nicholas
7. Jenna
8. Nicholas
9. Jenna
10. Nicholas
11. Jenna
12. Nicholas
13. Jenna
14. Nicholas
15. Jenna
16. Nicholas
17. Jenna
18. Nicholas
19. Jenna
20. Nicholas
21. Jenna
22. Nicholas
23. Jenna
24. Nicholas
25. Jenna
26. Nicholas
27. Jenna
28. Nicholas
29. Jenna
30. Nicholas
31. Jenna
32. Nicholas
33. Jenna
34. Nicholas
35. Jenna
36. Nicholas
37. Jenna
38. Nicholas
39. Jenna
Newspaper Clipping
40. Nicholas
41. Jenna
42. Nicholas
Newspaper Clipping
43. Jenna
44. Nicholas
45. Jenna
46. Nicholas
Epilogue- Jenna
Epilogue- Nicholas
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Also by Taylor Holloway
Also by Taylor Holloway
Scions of Sin
Bleeding Heart - Alexander
Kiss and Tell - Nathan
Down and Dirty - Nicholas
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Thank you so much! I hope you love ‘Down and Dirty’ as much as I loved writing it! - XOXO Taylor
Prologue
The darkened offices of Durant Industries’ corporate headquarters were incredibly creepy at two in the morning. Every pop, squeak, thump, or groan of the enormous office tower—ordinary structural noises that go unnoticed during the day—was magnified. I skulked around like a burglar, wincing at the unnaturally loud slam that resulted every time I closed a file cabinet. My phone buzzed, and I nearly slid out of my skin in surprise. It was just a text from my dad: where are you?
I ignored him.
I was not cut out for this. Two days ago, all I’d wanted was to solve a small accounting puzzle that I’d stumbled onto by sheer chance. Yet here I was, wearing all black, armed, and holding a flashlight between my teeth like a fucking secret agent as I looked through the paper Research and Development archive files in the basement. My phone buzzed again: Seriously where the hell are you? My dad would just have to wait.
On Monday as I was working on some mind-numbingly boring budgeting spreadsheets, I discovered something entirely by accident that would free me from my corporate training wheels once and for all. My darling father, the CEO and self-styled master of the universe, had fucked up big time.
It wasn’t an obvious fuck up at first glance. Just a few lines on a spreadsheet that added up wrong. It’s a bit of an oversimplification, but basically someone had gone in and changed a formula so that instead of one plus one equaling 2, it equaled .2 in the revenue section. It was buried deep within a subsection of a hidden tab I’d only opened by mistake. Why would anyone want to disguise profit? I pulled the string.
The string was stubborn, but with a little coaxing and ingenuity and a lot of knowledge on Excel pivot tables, the mystery slowly began to unravel. My father was hiding a program in the research and development department—a program that was generating a huge amount of profit. There were only two reasons I could think of to explain why he would do such a thing. Option one was straight-up embezzlement. Maybe he kept the project off the books, so he could pocket the money. Stupid, but possible. Option two was that the project was something that couldn’t appear on the books for legal reasons, because we were working on a top-secret government contract. Option three was that the project was something that couldn’t appear on the books for illegal reasons (aka we were just doing something illegal, and then illegally hiding it).
Ruling out option one was relatively simple. All I had to do was check to see if the final total included the hidden money, which it did. Someone had very carefully ensured that the money was added back in, little by little in other places where it wouldn’t be questioned. Dad wasn’t stealing from the company. Good for him.
So, what was he doing? I needed to rule out the possibility of a top-secret government project. We got those now and then. We were the oldest and most powerful chemical company in the country, and had hooks in every sector and application we could weasel our way into. Over the past day, I’d searched for any information suggesting that I just hadn’t been told about the project or it’s associated contract. Some of the contracts we’d been working on with my father’s favorite military contractor, Skylark, were decades old. But there was nothing related to this. There was no legitimate reason for the hidden money.
That meant it had to be illegal, and that was why I was going through paper files in the middle of the night. When I’d finally found the first file on the secret project, my jaw had gone slack and waves of nausea had sent me staggering to dry heave over the nearest trash can. I was now on the third file out of ten, all of which contained the meticulously documented, successful efforts of my family’s company to produce a new class of neurotoxic chemical weapon.
The compound we produced was a colorless and odorless gas, fast-acting, cheap, heavier than air, and uniformly deadly. Spread through an area by grenade or dropped from above, it persisted in the environment for only about eight hours, but during that time any oxygen-breathing creature would experience muscle spasms that persisted until asphyxiation or heart attack. The photos of the laboratory animals used for testing (mostly rabbits and rats) were horrifying. It looked like an excruciating death for any creature.
“There you are,” a cool, familiar voice said, cutting through the silence and making me drop the file, spit out the flashlight, and go for the pepper spray I’d “borrowed” from my assistant’s purse that afternoon. It was in a purple colored lipstick-tube-thing, but I brandished it menacingly at the intruder. Technically, I had every right to be here, day or night.
But he did, too. My dad looked at the little canister and raised an incredulous eyebrow. He was wearing a suit, and his eyes raked over my cat burglar outfit with disdain: black hoodie, black jeans, black sneakers. He smirked. I wanted to punch him.
“Is that pepper sp
ray?” He asked condescendingly. “Ironic.”
“What is this?” I barked, shaking a picture of a contorted, tortured, doomed animal at him.
“Um, it looks like a dead rat to me,” he answered sarcastically.
“You know what I fucking mean! What is project Winterspring?! What the hell are you doing?” I was yelling, and I didn’t care.
“Calm down Nick,” my father said sternly, perhaps not realizing that even if I hadn’t already outgrown any fear of him well before the age of twenty-seven, I’d definitely lost all respect for him tonight. I was in no mood for his condescension.
“This isn’t really a situation where calming down is warranted Dad,” I snapped back, imitating his typical, snide tone, “this is a ‘panic and call the news media’ situation. This is a ‘lose your shit and scream hysterically’ situation. Chemical weapons are illegal. Fuck. They’re evil!”
My father just sighed. He ran a hand through his hair in apparent frustration.
“I should have known you’d overreact. Nick, there is more going on here than you realize.” His voice had shifted to a more conciliatory tone. I found it extraordinarily irritating that he was now trying to placate me.
“Well great, we agree on one thing then,” I answered, “because I sure as hell didn’t realize we sold chemical weapons to the highest bidder so dictators and despots could oppress civilians and kill women and children. Who are you selling this shit to? Russia? Syria?”
“No,” my father said somewhat defensively, “we sell them to the United States government through Skylark.”
My shock was now complete.
“There’s no contract for this,” I managed. I was sure of that. After going through every single government contract twice with a fine-tooth comb, I was very sure of that. “Chemical weapons are banned by every civilized nation on earth. Including the US.”
“Don’t be naive,” my father said with a tired voice, “it doesn’t suit you. We both know the United States is more of a ‘do as I say not as I do’ sort of superpower. There are a lot of unsavory things in this world and plenty of competing elements within our own government. You can either work with the system and try to shape it, or you can be destroyed by it.”
“The board doesn’t know about this,” I finally managed, “you’ve been keeping this from everyone. Even Alexander.”
I went to the board meetings along with my cousins Nathan and David. None of us were voting members but we were collectively being groomed to take over. The fact that my father was keeping this from my uncle Alexander, my father’s older brother, was a guess.
“It’s better that way for all of you. Real deniability is even better than plausible deniability,” he replied, confirming that Alexander, the only person in the world who possibly actually liked my father on a personal level, didn’t know. “Even if you knew, what good that do?”
I almost laughed.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I cried, “maybe give us the opportunity to stop making illegal chemical weapons?”
“God, how did you manage to go this long in this business and still be so clueless,” my father said, raising his voice for the first time, “there’s no stopping. The elements of our government that want this stuff don’t take no for an answer. They’ve got interests of their own. I don’t know what they are, and I don’t want to know. All I can say for certain is that they’re much more dangerous than the weapons we make. They will kill you before they let you blow the whistle on this. They’re already looking for you. They’ll happily kill our entire family to keep this secret. You have to drop it.”
My heart had already been pounding furiously, but it now began to hiccup painfully against my ribs.
“What do you mean, drop it?” I stammered.
“I mean forget it. Never think about or talk about project Winterspring ever again,” he answered, “look, you’ve already attracted some very bad attention. If you can agree to let this go, there might be something I can do to smooth things over with Skylark. But you have to promise to let this go.”
We stared at one another in the dark.
“I can’t,” I said. Some things can’t be unseen, forgotten, or swept under a rug. I’d never encountered one of them until right now, but now that I had, there was no way I could go back to sleep and continue on like everything was okay.
My father sighed heavily and shook his head. He straightened his jacket. He looked at his watch. The moment lengthened, stretched, and morphed into something different.
“I expected this,” he admitted, and then in a voice that made my blood run cold, added, “Nick, you have to run. They know you’re looking into this already, they’ve got a team looking for you. I planted information that you were at the house in Waterloo for the board meeting. Maybe it worked, but they’ve got ways of finding people. Nick, listen to me: you can never, ever come back here. You can never breathe a word to anyone. Become somebody else and keep your head down. In the parking garage there’s a car in the handicapped spot. The keys are in it. There’s cash in the trunk. Don’t contact me, or anyone you know for any reason.”
“But I—”
“You have to go now,” He interrupted. He took the files I was holding out of my hand, shook it, and gestured toward the door.
“I don’t understand—” I started.
Just then, the elevator door dinged down the hall. Someone else was in the building? No one should be here but us. My dad put a finger to his lips and then pointed to the stairs. The basement stairwell led directly into the parking garage.
“Dad, we have to—" I whispered, and he shook his head. I heard heavy boots stomping down the corridor. There were at least three people out there. My father’s eyes were wide, and I’m sure I looked just as panicked.
“Go!” He urged, “I’ll buy you a few minutes. Go now!”
1
Jenna
Caribou, venison, elk, buffalo, moose, and fish of every variety that I was familiar with (and many more I’d never heard of before). Alaskan exotic protein options appeared to be endless. Even truck stops proudly advertised the best selections of local moose jerky, reindeer burgers, or horrifyingly, something called salmon candy. My trip was proving to be a carnivore’s paradise.
Too bad I’m a vegan. Alaska is twice the size of Texas, but since I’m from New Jersey and had never before been south of Virginia, I really had no idea how utterly gigantic that was. When the man at the rental car place told me the drive from Anchorage to Bear’s Bend was “only six hours” I at first thought he was joking. Five hours into my journey, I was regretting volunteering for this assignment. Tracking down my boss’s boss’s prodigal son had sounded so easy until now. I may not be adventurous, but I am ambitious. I hoped that this journey would end up getting me the VP promotion I was angling for. Even if I had to survive off fruit juice and canned beans while hiking through the tundra, I would find this guy; I’d staked my career on it.
Before me, endless acres of frozen subarctic forest spread from mountainous horizon to horizon. It was vast, beautiful, and alien, not to mention extremely snowy and cold. Hours had passed since I saw another car, human, or settlement. I’d run out of audio books about a hundred miles back. And according to the guidebook I bought when I realized that cell coverage was laughably bad, this was the “densely populated” eastern edge of the state. I’d read and reread the safety information provided with the rental car, and the thought of being stranded out here on the Alaska Highway in negative forty-degree weather was starting to make me a bit paranoid. Ordinarily rental cars don’t come with thermal blankets and gallons of emergency water. When I finally saw the sign for Bear’s Bend, I was hugely relieved.
Then, I saw the town. In actuality, Bear’s Bend was less of a town and more of a gussied-up truck stop from what I could tell. I supposed not that many people were required to watch the turtles or whatever this town was known for. I’m not exactly sure what qualifies a settlement as an official hamlet, but there was no way thi
s place had a fair-trade coffee shop, a Bikram yoga studio, or a Juice bar, which meant it did not meet my personal minimum criteria. I’m an entitled millennial. I have needs. I also have quarter million dollars in student loans, two aging parents with no retirement savings, and a job that works me sixty-hour weeks without overtime or good benefits, so wanting some decent hot yoga with my economic deprivation seems only fair.
Bear’s Bend, with its total of four whole buildings and one sketchy looking shed, was clearly never going to make my shortlist. This was my destination? I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the prospect of trying to find someone here, although it ought to be fairly easy, given the size. More than anything, I was beyond excited to stretch my legs, get some coffee, and relieve the pressure on my suffering bladder. I pulled into the single commercial establishment’s parking lot and hustled inside. I wasn’t impressed by what I found.
The woman behind the counter didn’t seem particularly impressed with me, either.
“There’s no one around here by that name, sweetie,” she told me, looking me up and down with either disbelief or suspicion (possibly both), “are you a cop or a game warden or something?”
Down and Dirty (Scions of Sin Book 3) Page 1