Diva (Ironclad Bodyguards Book 2) by Annabel Joseph, Molly Joseph Page A

spent the last week or so getting her stronger, taking walks, eating healthier, getting more sleep. She was mostly cooperative. Her overdose had gone a long way to scaring her straight. But you never knew when someone might relapse, especially if they were stressed. Lola butted heads with the new manager daily. Belligerent, pushy Don was the opposite of laid-back Greg, and Ransom suspected MadDance had hired the prickly manager to put the screws to Lola.
    Ransom tried to stay out of their spats, but it fell to him to calm her down afterward—and she couldn’t always be calmed. If she decided to buy drugs again in some rebellious fit, he wanted her to know how to test them for adulterants. He opened the ecstasy kit’s chemical indicator chart, a meticulously laid out rainbow of danger and death.
    Lola glanced at the ladder of colored rectangles and crossed her eyes. He ignored that vote of non-confidence and pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and made her do the same. Then he used a knife to scrape some powder from the ecstasy tablet onto different quadrants of the plate.
    “We don’t have to do this,” she said.
    “Yes, we do. If you take ecstasy, you need to know how to test it.”
    “I’m not going to take it anymore.”
    “Anymore is a very long time, and I can’t be your watchdog forever,” he said, brushing the powder into separate sections.
    “But—”
    “Lola, please. I just want to know that you know how to do this.”
    She relented, pressed her lips shut, and turned her attention back to the kit. He put the first reagent bottle in her hand.
    “Okay, take off the cap and squeeze a single drop onto the first bit of powder. Don’t get any in your eyes, or on your skin.”
    She wrinkled her nose at the sharp smell. “Jesus, what’s in this shit?”
    Your safety , he thought. Aloud, he said, “Caustic compounds. Sulfuric acid and other dangerous chemicals. Just be careful.”
    He hovered over her as she dripped the various chemicals on the tiny hills of powder he’d created. There were six tests, because there were so many things they were adding to tablets these days. Just be careful.
    He needed her to stop being reckless and start being careful, because something had happened in the past few days. He’d stopped thinking of her as an irritating work duty and started thinking of her as more of a friend. He’d come to recognize not just her bad behaviors, but her internal struggles with the unrelenting pressure of fame.
    As she fought to turn her life around in this three ring circus of a rave tour, he’d become more and more aware of her resilience and strength.
    “Okay,” he said. “Show me how to read the test. Look at the colors of the powder. What do you see as far as adulterants?”
    She sighed, glancing at the chart. “I told you, this is pointless. I’m not going to take drugs anymore. I’m done.”
    “Show me,” he insisted.
    Done, my ass. He trusted her about as far as he could throw her, which wasn’t very far, even with the positive strides she’d taken. A month and a half from now she’d be back in L.A. with her party posse, and he expected her to go crazy and do a bunch of stupid shit.
    “This pill has caffeine mixed into it,” she finally said, poring over the indicator chart.
    He nodded. “Most of them do. It’s a cheap stimulant, often mixed with amphetamines—and you remember what amphetamines do.”
    She wouldn’t look at him. He wondered if she remembered that night as clearly as he did, if she remembered how fast her heart had hammered in her chest. “What else?” he asked.
    She looked back at the chart. “Looks like there’s…pa-ra-cee… How the fuck do you pronounce this?”
    “Paracetamol. It’s a painkiller.”
    “They sure do put a lot of random shit in these pills.”
    “Some of it more benign than others. A tablet mixed with PMA can kill you. Bath salts, ketamine, heroin, they’ve all been found in ecstasy tablets. One bad batch full of fentanyl,