CHAPTER 43

SEBASTIAN WAS LEAVING a detailed message for Ron, highlighting the important aspects of Faye’s conversation with Candice Jackson and explaining their next steps, when he saw Faye come out of the hotel’s revolving doors, looking around like Paul or one of his boys was going to pop out of a car and start shooting.

He slid out of his spot. She saw the Jaguar coming her way and hustled toward it.

“You hear everything?” she asked when they were moving.

“Every single word,” Sebastian said.

“She’s really—”

“Yeah, Paul did quite a number on her.”

“Paul?” Faye whipped her head to him, Sebastian seeing the color flaring in her cheeks. “It’s your blood that caused that. And now that shit’s running through my veins.”

“Paul didn’t give her Pandora.”

“Then what did he give her?”

Sebastian hadn’t shared Paul’s sick grand plan with anyone except Frank, wanted to keep that nightmare locked down tight.

Faye said, “It has something to do with female carriers, doesn’t it?”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“From Anton. That day he met Paul. On the way home Anton told me Paul needed female carriers—the younger, the better. What makes their blood so special?”

“Look, you—”

“Either he does something to it, enhances it in some way, or it has something to do with female reproduction. Which is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Bullshit.”

Sebastian turned his head and shot her a glare, one that made it clear it would be in her best interest to shut up.

Faye ignored him. “I’m putting my life on the line for you, in more ways than one,” she said. “I’ve got a right to know what you did to me.”

“I promise you, as God is my witness, that what happened to Candice Jackson will not happen to you. Pandora is one hundred percent pure. Untainted. No blood expanders or fillers or any other chemicals. Why do you think my product is in such high demand? You think I’d keep getting repeat customers and have a waiting list a mile long if I scrambled people’s brains, made them do degrading shit to themselves? You think that’s the type of business I’m operating here? Blowing up people’s lives?”

“What, you have ethics?”

“I’m nothing like the Armenians or Mexicans.”

“What makes Pandora so unique? So special?”

“Kindness,” he replied. “And clean living.”

She glared at him, incredulous, her gaze roving over his face.

It was true, what he’d said. Kindness and clean living were the final part of his secret recipe, what made Pandora so different, and in such high demand. He had figured it out early on, when he and Frank had started, by reading studies on cattle, how they experienced high levels of stress from overcrowding and the fear they experienced on their way to being slaughtered—the stress hormones changed the taste of the meat.

The same principle held true for carriers. Stress hormones affected blood, and in order for him to harvest the most efficient blood, to maximize its potency, his donors had to be in peak physical and mental shape. That meant clean eating, rigorous exercise, things like meditation and being treated like a human being, a partner, not being locked up inside some cage in the dark like a veal calf.