Page 102 of Connor's Claim

With the items I’d be leaving on one side of my desk and my packed bag on the other, I exhaled bright excitement and picked up the letter. I’d done it.

“All set?” Mick asked.

“I’m going to leave this on my father’s desk, then yes.” I indicated down the way to a glassed-off office. The mayor’s private space.

Mick stood from his lean and prowled after me.

The suite of open-space offices curved around the front of the building and had several entrances and exits into the hallways beyond. In usual working hours, the place would be busy with staff, but today it was a ghost town. Only the spectre of me, the ex-employee, drifting through it. For the last time.

It was both gut-wrenching and thrilling how little I cared.

At the glass door, I temporarily considered posting the letter but changed my mind. I wanted it to be waiting in my father’s eyeline as his first item of business on Monday morning.

I’d miss his reaction, but you couldn’t have everything.

Entering the room, I left Mick behind and crossed the quiet space. The very air felt weighted with the consequence of what I was doing. The familiar scent of beeswax polish reached my nose, but I only knew the tunnel vision that allowed me to find the perfect placement of my resignation letter dead centre on the leather infill of the mayor’s desk.

There. Done.

“What the fuck are you doing?” my father said.

I jumped. At the back of the room, my father stood in the doorway that exited to the central corridor. It was nearly always locked, him preferring visitors to be brought to him through the main office with the busy team of people and the view out onto the city. But not today.

He was here. Shock broke through my high.

I took him in. The smart suit. The tidy brown hair the same shade as mine and Riordan’s but with salt and pepper at the temples. If he smiled, a real smile and not the crocodile smirk he wore now, he’d look kindly. Maybe even grandfatherly. It was the public image he desired but which could never be true in real life.

“I’m glad to see you,” I found my lips saying.

“A week, Everly. You walked out and abandoned your post. That is unacceptable.” He folded his arms and moved behind his desk, the smirk fading to cold rage I’d learned to fear as a child. Menace poured off him.

Despite my matching anger, I shifted backwards. From the angle Mick had of the room, I wasn’t sure if he could see my father. So I turned. Lifted a hand and waved.

The glass door clicked.

Locked.

Fear slammed into me. The mayor’s desk had a button that engaged the lock for privacy. I’d forgotten it existed because he never used it.

Behind the glass, the gangster rattled the handle. Alarm sank over his features.

He wouldn’t be able to get in.

My blood iced over, and I twisted back around. “What you find acceptable no longer interests me. That letter confirms my resignation. I should have walked out on you a long time ago.”

He worked his jaw, calculation in his eyes. “You think you can leave?”

“I know I can.”

He advanced on me and snapped out a hand to grasp my elbow. I struggled backwards, twisting to see Manny close in on Mick, a rapid conversation commencing, the words of which I couldn’t hear. They wrenched at the door again then split, boots thudding in their race to find the other way into this room.

My father yanked my arm, dragging me with him to the rear exit of his office. I struggled against my constraint, but he was far stronger than me. He always had been and always would be.

We exited the office and crossed the rear access hall. I tried to drop to the floor, screaming out a protest. My father forced me to my feet and threw me into a lift waiting on the opposite side. I hit the wall and slithered to a crumpled heap.

We descended. The two guards couldn’t reach me in time.

My mind leapt to Connor and his reaction to me being gone.

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