But Miranda had earned that chair, just as she’d earned their penthouse apartment at the Metropolitan, their villa in Tuscany, and the Alexander McQueen suit she’d carefully chosen from her closet this morning. She’d done things other people would probably call unspeakable in order to climb the ladder. She’d simply called them necessary; after all, she was here, wasn’t she? Renowned physician. Remington Memorial’s CEO. Self-made multi-millionaire.
Head of the biggest health care fraud scheme on the eastern seaboard. Possibly the entire country.
But Miranda hadn’t pulled herself out of the dirt she’d been born in to stop at anything less, just as she hadn’t married Royce for his charm, and certainly not for love. Christ, the thought was laughable. Like everything else in her life, he had a place and a purpose. Not that he’d fulfilled it last night.
“Oh?” Royce asked. The surprise on his classically handsome face was genuine, telling Miranda that he hadn’t even bothered to check the accuracy of his work, and she pressed her irritation into a tight smile.
“Yes. Unfortunately, that glitch in the system that I asked you to take care of yesterday is still an issue.”
There were plenty of places Miranda could speak more freely about the darker side of their business dealings. The prescription forgeries. The diversion of narcotics. The doctor shopping and billing fraud, all masterminded by her, all at her command. But the hospital wasn’t one of those places, no matter how private her corner office, and protecting herself was her number-one priority.
Prison, and the lack of control that went with it, wasn’t an option.
Thankfully, Royce got the message to speak with care. “Are you sure, darling? I was pretty thorough.”
“Not quite thorough enough.” She’d been highly disappointed to see Axel Franklin’s name in Remington Memorial’s database of admitted patients this morning, rather than on the list of current occupants at the morgue. A review of his chart had confirmed it. The little bastard still had a pulse. “See for yourself.”
Sliding a tablet across the pristine blotter on her mahogany executive desk, Miranda waited for Royce to skim the chart himself. Royce was no doctor, but he’d grown up rolling in money, and in this case, that Ivy League education paid off.
“Well. That’s unfortunate.”
It was an understatement. Greed had made Axel forget his place. He was a cog—functionally necessary, but of very little significance. He was replaceable. One of hundreds of people working one of a dozen different healthcare fraud schemes that Miranda had carefully crafted. Not that Axel knew there were other schemes. Miranda wasn’t stupid. He knew only what he needed to in order to serve his purpose, which was supposed to have been going to area hospitals under an assumed name complaining of pain from a fake chronic condition. Thanks to Miranda, the “condition” had very convincing paperwork to back it up. All Axel had to do was fill his resulting prescription for pain killers and drop the narcotics with a contact Miranda had carefully recruited, and in exchange, Axel got a cut of their street value. But he’d ruined it all by demanding more, then threatening to go to the police when she, through her contact, refused.
No one—no one—took control from Miranda. No one else dictated the terms of the empire she had worked so hard to build. She alone got to play God. She decided who did what. Who got what.
And she decided who died.
“It’s a loose end we cannot afford,” Miranda corrected. It didn’t matter that Axel had no idea who she was, nor had he ever laid eyes on Royce until Royce had stabbed him in an alley around the corner from his shithole of an apartment last night. No one could prove she had anything to do with any of the fraud that bankrolled both her lifestyle and her ego. In fact, Royce was the only person who could definitively connect her to any of the fraud she’d engineered or the people she’d had killed, and she had a safeguard for that, too. Everything else was circumstantial or hearsay. No paperwork. No electronic trail that would be admissible in court. No damning evidence pointing to her and her alone.
“It’ll need to be taken care of before it gets problematic. Permanently this time.”
After a slight hesitation, Royce said, “That might prove difficult, considering the current circumstances.”
“Are you saying you’re not up to it?”
The question landed right where Miranda meant it to—in Royce’s expansive and highly sensitive ego—and he stiffened in the wingback chair across from her desk. “Of course not. I’m simply saying we’ll need to work around a few roadblocks for safety’s sake. That’s all.”
“I’m already ahead of you, sweetheart,” she said, smiling just enough to make him think they were in this together. Reaching for the tablet Royce had lowered to her desk, she tapped her way to a new screen before handing it back to him. “What do you think?”
He read for a moment, nodding his approval. “Brilliant. As usual.”
Miranda inclined her head in acknowledgment. “You’ll need to act quickly.” The last thing they needed right now was for Axel to regain consciousness and start talking.
Royce’s jaw tightened just enough to hint at the cruelty hidden beneath his charming exterior. “Consider it done.”
She resisted the urge to point out that she’d considered it done the first time, opting instead to fake a what-would-I-do-without-you smile. “Thank you, darling.”
Now all she had to do was find someone to replace Axel, and everything would be just fine.
Carmen was ready for lunch. Or wait, maybe it was still breakfast time? No, she’d taken far too many vital signs and patient histories not to be at least a few hours into her shift. Hadn’t she?
Carmen forced her Danskos to a stop on the linoleum, closed her eyes, and dragged in a deep breath. Between working at the Davenport Clinic and the work she’d been doing far from the Davenport Clinic, the days and nights were beginning to blur together, turning into an indistinct haze. The three hours of sleep she’d squeezed in between coming home just shy of dawn and when she’d hauled herself out of bed a few hours ago had been of the toss-and-turn variety, which didn’t exactly help her brain fog. But it hadn’t been her fault that Liam had literally shown up on her doorstep, asking questions she’d had to answer with caution. Or that his eyes were so piercing that they might as well shoot truth serum darts.
Or that, even after all this time, she still wanted to fling her idiot self into his stupid, well-muscled arms despite the fact that she knew all too well how much she didn’t belong there.
She’d found out the hard way, and gotten the pride-punching rejection to go with it.
Carmen shook her head, forcing herself out of her head and back to the clinic. She had a thousand better things to spend her energy on than the memory of how Liam Hollister’s arms had felt around her in the only moment of weakness she’d had in over half a decade. Namely, the fact that the digital intake board hanging over the nurse’s station showed seventeen people needing to be triaged and treated for various ailments. Running a hand over the two French braids (mostly) keeping her hair in check, she reached for an electronic chart, turning toward the waiting room…