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That couldn’t be… This entire time…
“Wait, so you knew who I was all this time?” I scoffed. Un-fucking-believable.
He wanted to accuse me of not sharing the skeletons in my closet with him when we started getting serious and vulnerable, but this—this—was worse than what I had hidden from him.
“No, I didn’t know you were working for Charlotte—at least not until I caught you at the warehouse. It’s why I let you get away—aside from the fact that I had fallen in love with you, I needed you to finish the job and find Atwater for me. To lead me to him before you took him out. That is why I added the confession layer to your job at the last minute. I needed to buy myself time to find you. I wasn’t planning on you giving me your location so easily.”
“But you work for the CIA. Why hire Charlotte in the first place? Why do you want him dead?” I couldn’t wrap my head around his words; this whole time, I believed the client was simply out for revenge over the drug being stolen—a way to prevent him from releasing it and taking all of the credit for something that wasn’t his, to begin with. But now…
What was that he said about taking lives but in different ways?
Atlas released a dark chuckle, the sound sending shivers down my spine. This side of him was turning me on—the good guy gone bad. The hero turned villain.
“I hired Charlotte to track down Atwater because even with the resources of the CIA, I couldn’t get my hands on him; I needed the additional help. But you were so quick to violence with your questioning of employees for information that you attracted the attention of the CIA. I had to get involved to redirect their focus so you could get the job done.
“The transfer to the Minneapolis Unit? That was all part of my plan. I pushed them to send me instead of two other agents who were more than qualified for the job. I had to be here so that I could give you more time, and when you finally got the information needed to catch Roman, I would be right here to take care of him myself.”
“But that doesn’t answer my question as to why you want him dead. Ataraxia is a stolen drug from a lab in Europe; what does that have to do with you?”
“Everything, Chy.” He yelled. “It has everything to do with me because that drug murdered Kaleb. This piece of shit right here murdered my brother.” He gestured the gun at Roman, ready to pull the trigger and end his life within a split second.
I froze in shock at his words. Roman killed his brother? Was the drug overdose a cover-up?
“Atlas…” I whispered under my breath. I could feel my heart squeezing in my chest. He told me his brother had died when they were nineteen from a drug overdose. Was Ataraxia the drug that killed him? But I thought it was designed to cure addiction... And how was it even available back then? The more information he fed me, the more questions I had.
“Ataraxia, the drug Atwater here is trying to release, isn’t new; it’s a drug that he previously tried to release but had to pull it due to problems with the formulation. Ataraxia is a rebrand and rework of an older drug that backfired—killing hundreds of clinical trial patients, including my brother, Kaleb.”
“You told me Kaleb died of a drug overdose. I don’t understand; Ataraxia cures addiction.” I looked at him with disbelief. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
Atlas blew out a sigh and continued, “Kaleb had a drug problem when we were seventeen, and it spiraled out of control by the time of our eighteenth birthday. That’s when we heard about the first version of this drug, only back then it was called Relessen. It was being marketed as a drug that could save addicts’ lives. That it would cure my brother’s addiction. We couldn’t afford to wait until it was available to the public; they claimed it would take years to be approved, so he enrolled in their clinical trial program instead.
“They gave him a bottle of pills that he was instructed to take every day for three months and then slowly taper back to one pill a week afterward, provided there were no adverse side effects. They didn’t disclose any documentation regarding what was in Relessen. That information was strictly limited to those participating in the program. If Kaleb wanted to continue receiving the drug for free, he couldn’t talk about the trial or any information they provided him. If he broke his non-disclosure, they would remove him from the program and charge him for whatever he had already taken. He couldn’t afford it, and my parent certainly couldn’t either. The trial was his only option, so we never pushed further.”
Atlas ground his teeth as he spoke, the anger and rage clear as day in his tone. The more he said, the more my heart broke for him and Kaleb.
“After the drug began to take effect in the first week, we didn't have any doubts about it. Sure, it seemed too good to be true, but then he was clean for six months, and we were all getting back to where we were before his addictions had started. He was my best friend again, and we were closer than ever. However, in the last six months, everything started crashing down on us. He started getting sick, one unexplainable symptom after another, until eventually, one year to the day that he took his first dose… He died. Multiple organ failure.”
I couldn’t help but think back to my parent’s accident and how the driver of the vehicle that hit ours survived the crash but died of multiple organ failure a few days later in the hospital. The gears started turning in my head, and I thought about our age difference. I was fifteen when my parents died, and he was nineteen when his brother passed… I was twenty-six now; if I’m not mistaken, Atlas is thirty. I caught his birth year on his driver’s license when we were carded at the sports bar on our first lunch date.
Holy shit… the driver was a clinical trial patient…
My mind fell back to when I was dropped off at Madison’s house all those years ago, when the social worker was telling her family about my parents’ accident.
“Chyler’s parents died in a tragic accident. She is still emotionally recovering from the events of that night. We don’t believe she has properly grieved the heavy loss of her parents, but with time, she will start to heal. I can only imagine what she is going through inside her mind… In regards to the accident itself, they were hit by a suicidal driver. The driver had survived the accident and was hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries. A few days after being admitted, the day they were supposed to be released, they died of multiple organ failure. Sudden and unexplainable. The doctors said they believe a drug overdose caused it…”
Coming back into myself, my eyes were glistening over from the memory. I looked at Atlas and felt my breath quicken and my pulse starting to race. Anxiety was pulling me under with the heavy realization that the driver who killed my parents was trying to kill himself before the drug did.
Atlas’s voice washed over me as I started growing numb.
“The doctors couldn’t give us an answer to the cause of it. It just came out of nowhere. Sudden and unexplainable is the terminology they used when they first told us. One day, we were out celebrating one year of him being clean, and the next, he was in the morgue of the hospital.
“Relessen was not a single-dose cure for addiction; it wasn’t strong enough, and it required long-term use to remain effective. Most of the participants in the trials relapsed once they stopped taking it, and the rest—those who continued to take the drug, all met the same fate as Kaleb. They all died of multiple organ failure one year after their first dose. We were told that some of those patients who figured it out attempted to commit suicide to escape their already sealed fate.”
I cursed, my knees becoming weak and threatening to collapse from under me.
“Kaleb was poisoning himself faster than the drugs he was addicted to. His solution killed him faster than his problem would have. It destroyed his body; it was a death sentence in a bottle with a cheap printed label that promised life—release from addiction.
“Once word got out that Roman’s drug was killing its users, he pulled everything out of public view and had the DEA cover up his mistake. No one ever knew the full extent of what had happened, the death toll—Kaleb's story. Because he was a known addict before the trial, they covered up his death, declaring it an overdose. AN OVERDOSE.”
