Page 13 of Proof

“Mikey, why don’t you go take a break,” Sully said softly, easing his big body between mine and Michael’s. The kid was shaking like a leaf, and I could see silent tears sliding down his cheeks. Jesus, the kid hadn’t been as freaked out the day I’d pointed a gun at him. What the hell must I look like to warrant the dramatic response?

I wanted to apologize to the young man. I really did. But no words came.

“What happened?” Sully began once his assistant had left the room. I hadn’t even noticed that several men had appeared seemingly out of nowhere. They were all large and fit with a few of them dressed in crisp black suits and a couple who’d clearly been sparring, based on their shirtless bodies and taped hands.

Most of the men looked at me with disgust. After all, they had a murderer standing in their midst.

A part of me wanted to take them all on. I wanted to cause pain just like I wanted to feel it. Anything to escape the emotions JJ had stirred up inside me. Emotions I’d been so sure that I’d had under control.

Sully waved the men away. They disappeared as silently as they’d come.

“Find someone else because I’m done!” I snapped. I began pacing back and forth in the large lobby.

Despite the high ceilings and long hallways, the place still wasn’t large enough. All my senses were on alert and adrenaline was spiking through my veins.

“I’ll go to my grandmother to get the money to pay you back,” I continued. Then I was striding for the front door.

“You talked to him,” Sully said quietly.

I laughed out loud. “Talked” wasn’t exactly the word I would have used to explain what had happened on that canyon road.

“You knew what would happen,” I said accusingly as I stood where I was, hand on the door that would lead me outside where I could once again feel the sun on my skin and breathe in the smog-filled city air; things I’d taken for granted before being locked up.

When Sully didn’t answer, I spun around. “Was all this a game to you? Some kind of fucking setup?” I snarled. I kept scanning my surroundings as I waited for Sully’s men to attack me from all sides.

“It wasn’t a game, Cass,” Sully responded sadly. He slowly moved to the reception counter and leaned against it. “It was… a test.”

“Test?” I asked in disbelief. “I haven’t spoken to you in two years and yet you go and mortgage your house, the only thing you have left of your parents, and pay some camera-hungry criminal defense attorney to get me out of prison for a…test?”

I found myself striding forward. “You intentionally put me in your debt so you could get me to follow your brother around for a fucking test?” I growled. I was nearly chest to chest with Sully. “What was the plan, Sully? To have some of your guys shadowingmeso they could take me out the second I got near your brother? Make it look like one of them shot me in self-defense? You didn’t need to waste your money to do that. It would have been a hell of a lot cheaper if you’d paid off someone on the inside to get rid of me for good. Hell, if you’d just left me there, I probably would have offedmyselfinside a year, tops!”

When Sully didn’t respond, I turned on my heel and went for the front door. The bastard waited until I was once again on the verge of escaping before he spoke again.

“The test was for JJ.”

His words brought me to an abrupt halt. “What?” I asked dumbly because I was sure I’d heard him wrong.

“Come to my office, Cass. I’ll tell you all of it.”

“Tell me here!” I growled. I forced myself to turn but I remained near the door. I could feel the walls closing in on me. I could hear the soft hiss of the cell door sliding shut.

Sully dropped his eyes and took in a slow breath. “You haven’t read any of the papers since you got out. You haven’t watched the news about your case, have you?”

“Why the fuck would I? I lived it, you asshole,” I responded. I pointed in the direction Sully’s men had gone. “You saw the way they just looked at me! Why do I need to see that on every paper, cell phone, and TV screen from here to the fucking North Pole?”

Sully went to sit in one of four large leather armchairs. He motioned to the chair opposite him. If I sat, we’d be looking straight at each other with only half a dozen feet separating us. “Move it closer to the door if you want, Cass, but I think you’ll want to sit when you hear what I have to tell you. You can leaveat any time. There’s a doorstop to the left of the door. You can use it to prop the door open if you want.”

The harsh reminder about my inability to be in a room when the door was closed was another punch to the gut. As much as I hated the need to do it, I went to the door and propped it open, then returned to sit across from Sully. I wondered if he’d put the doorstop there just for me. Son of a bitch was too fucking observant.

I hated that I had no fucking clue what words were going to come out of his mouth, but I was desperate for answers because nothing made sense. It hadn’t since the night I’d been physically dragged away from JJ’s body and placed in cuffs. I’d been driven off in a police car as paramedics had begun the task of trying to save JJ’s life.

“Hiring Hutch to get you out of prison and asking you to shadow JJ were two separate things,” Sully began. “From the moment you were charged, I was trying to find some way to get you out but then things just got… complicated and?—”

“Why?” I interjected.

“What do you mean ‘why,’ you dick?” Sully responded angrily. “Because I knew you didn’t do it. And before you ask me how I knew that, the answer is because you are and have been my best fucking friend for more than half our lives. JJ has been in your life since he was a little kid. You treated him like a little brother from day one. You protected him, you encouraged him, you comforted him when he wished he could remember our mother.” Sully shook his head like he couldn’t believe I’d ever think the worst of him.

“You never reached out to me while I was in jail waiting for my trial. You let me sit in a cell for two days not knowing if JJ had lived or died. My piece-of-shit lawyer was the one who told me JJ had pulled through!” I shouted.

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