Page 56 of Justice Denied

He laced his fingers together to avoid punching something as the emotions from those days boiled his blood. “Mom was about seven months pregnant when they had their last fight. Hunter had left some drugs in the apartment, which Mom had found. Mom was furious because social services had been sniffing around for a couple of years and she was terrified someone would come by unexpectedly, find the drugs, and take me—and the baby when it was born—away from her.

“Hunter didn’t care. He laughed and said he was through with her and her brat, that he even doubted he was the baby’s father. That set Mom off, and she flew at him, slapping and hitting. He responded by punching her in the stomach over and over again.”

Memories of his mother’s screams, her vain attempts to get away from Hunter, seared into his mind. His anger at the man hurting his mom and baby sister burned hotter and hotter. “I grabbed the iron skillet Mom had left dirty on the stove and ran into the bedroom, where Hunter was kicking my mom, who lay on the floor trying to protect her baby with her arms.”

He could still feel the weight of that heavy pot in his hands. “I swung it with all my might at Hunter’s head.”

He focused on his hands, which trembled in his lap as the memory of the impact, blood splattering over him, played in his mind. His mother’s whimpers. The blood pooling underneath her intermingling with the blood flowing from Hunter’s head as he lay on the floor not moving.

“How old were you?” Jetta’s soft question drew him back to the present.

“Seven, nearly eight.” He cleared his throat and raised his head. The compassion and understanding in her blue eyes eased some of the guilt he still felt over taking another man’s life. “Mom lost the baby, a little girl she named Sadie. Before she passed out, Mom told me she would say she was the one who hit Hunter with the skillet, that she told me to bring it to her and that’s why I got blood spatter on me. It was the last thing she ever said to me.”

“Oh, Seth.”

“I never said anything different because I was afraid I would get my mom into even more trouble if I told the truth.” He breathed out a sigh, the burden of carrying that secret alone all these years easing from sharing. “The cops called social services.”

“Foster home?”

“Homes.” He gripped the back of his neck with a hand. “At first, I kept running away, trying to get back to my mom. She needed me. If I wasn’t there, she might not remember to eat.” Tears dotted his eyes, but he refused to let them fall, wanting to get the rest of the story out. “So I was moved farther and farther away until I stopped trying to find her. By then, I was so angry, many foster parents didn’t want to deal with it.”

“What happened to your mom?”

“One day, when I was around ten, a social worker came to tell me my mom had died. Drug overdose. I knew better. She’d given up on life because she didn’t have me.” Sorrow clogged his throat. She might not have been a perfect mom, but she had loved him and tried her best.

Clearing away the lump, he continued. “They couldn’t trace any relatives on my mom’s side—she never talked about any siblings or her parents—so I finally ended up in a group home run by a young couple. By then I was fifteen and had gained a lot of weight. It was my way of coping with all the stress and trauma. I went to counseling for a few months, but since I refused to talk about my mom or our life together, they stopped making me go.”

Those bleak years of fear, anger, and despair were behind him. Being a follower of Christ had accelerated the healing process. “When I attended George Mason University, I went back to therapy, which helped me a lot, but I never mentioned the murder.”

“You were a kid trying to protect your mom. It was self-defense.”

“The cops concluded it was self-defense for my mom back then too. She was never charged with any crime.” He paused. “I was messed up for a long time, and I still can’t stand to see any man treating a woman with disrespect.”

A slight smile turned up the corners of her mouth. “I know, it’s one of your best qualities. You make me feel safe and secure.”

Her words soothed the raw edges of his emotions, filling in a little bit more of the hole the trauma of Hunter’s death and his removal from his mother’s care had created all those years ago. It gave him hope that one day, the entire hole would be gone. He couldn’t believe he’d told Jetta his deepest, darkest secret without her recoiling from him. Maybe she was beginning to care for him like he cared for her.

* * *

Ryan placedthe ball onto the tee, then lined up his club. He channeled all his anger into hitting the ball as hard and as far as he could. It sailed through the air and temporarily disappeared before bouncing onto the green on the sixteenth hole.

“Nice shot.” Luis Skyler, his former college roommate and corporate attorney for a pharmaceutical company, slapped him on the back. “You’ve been in attack mode all afternoon.” He shouldered his bag and waited while Ryan picked up his.

The two of them played a game whenever they could squeeze it into their busy schedules, and Ryan had been more than happy to ditch the office for a few hours when Luis called him around lunchtime with an offer of a 3 p.m. tee time. “Have I? Guess I’m carrying my work into my game.”

“You mean the possibility of Maxwell Technology’s hostile takeover of Topher Robotics.”

Ryan shouldn’t have been surprised Luis had heard the rumors. “That and other things.”

“The wearable AI.”

This time Ryan stopped walking and waited for his companion to do the same. He had worked much too hard to have knowledge of the secret artificial intelligence device leak out. The suspicion this hadn’t been a random invitation burst into his mind with the force of a cannonball. “What’s going on?”

His friend tried a jovial smile. “Two old college roommates playing a game of golf.”

Ryan saw through the lame attempt at levity. “Don’t mess with me.”

The smile dropped from Luis’s face, and he stepped closer. After glancing right and left, as if ensuring they were indeed the only two people on this particular bit of the golf course, he lowered his voice. “I’m in negotiations to work for Alternative Realities as vice president of their legal department. During the final interview with a handful of their board members, one mentioned you and I must have attended university at the same time, and he wondered if we’d known each other. I, of course, spilled the beans that we roomed together all four years. Afterward, this board member pulled me aside and asked if I knew how close you were to having this AI device ready for action.”

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