Page 80 of Lost Room Lawyer
This new approach felt like a liberation. After nearly seven years buried in legal texts and academic writing—where footnotes and correct citations were a constant burden—I had grown to despise it. The rigid laws and rules had stifled my creativity and shackled me. But now, I was finally free.
Realizing that it wasn’t my mother’s death that had broken the chains, but my growing feelings for Hector, I let out a desperate scream and dug my nails into my neck.
“Fuuuck!”
I pushed aside the chaotic thoughts and started working. Writing felt cathartic. It demanded all my concentration, and the more my protagonists suffered, the more my own world seemed to regain its balance.
Not today, though.
Not as much as I had hoped.
I kept drifting back to the conversation with my father. Leo had always been good at unsettling me. Even though I had proven my capabilities with my first book, he had managed to belittle me. It made me so damned angry that I couldn’t calm down and worked like a madman.
By midnight, I was utterly overstimulated and craving sleep. Yet a storm raged in my head. I kept closing the laptop and pacing the room, trying to calm down. My body wouldn’t cooperate. Driven, I sat back down and wrote furiously, teetering on the brink of insanity.
When I moved aside a notepad, Dominic’s sleeping pills came into view. My heart raced, and I was breathing as if I had just sprinted. My body felt like it was going out of control.
I took a pill out of the aluminum package. Half a pill, Dominic had said, but with my heart pumping like this, I was sure even one wouldn’t be enough.
Staring at the pills, one thought surfaced clearly: Peace. This was what I held in my hands.
I felt so drained.
I just couldn’t take it anymore.
First, my mother’s death, then Hector, now the internship…
No, I didn’t just want a little sleep. I wanted to sleep deeply and for a long time.
I extracted one pill after another out of the package and gradually swallowed them with water. The very act of taking them had a calming effect, but I just couldn’t settle down. My thoughts kept spinning, and I felt like I was slowly losing my mind.
The jingle of keys resonated from the hallway, followed by the sound of the apartment door as it swung open.
Dominic?
I got up to close my bedroom door, but I was overcome by dizziness. My limbs felt as heavy as boulders, and leaden weights pressed down on my eyelids. As I tried to take the first step, the sensation overpowered me like an explosion. My body became paralyzed, and even my foggy mind couldn’t issue any commands. My knees gave out, and I crumpled to the ground, vaguely aware I had hit my head on the table. But I was too numb to feel any pain.
“Nico! Are you okay?” I heard from a distance.
25
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Hector
Despite the favorable outcome, Juri was clearly tense as we left the courtroom.
“You made it through,” I said, trying to offer him some encouragement.
“Yeah.Lucky for me I can’t be bought with money anymore,” he replied sarcastically.
The three guys had indeed offered him an outrageously high sum in hopes of reaching an out-of-court settlement. “You showed real backbone. Not everyone can do that. Those guys will stand trial, and now that two of your former colleagues are also finding the courage to sue them, there’s a very good chance those three will end up in prison. All thanks to you.”
Juri scratched his arms nervously and cleared his throat. “So, uh… how’s everything going with you and Nico?”
I furrowed my brow in surprise. Where did that come from?
“Sorry. I just want to talk about something else.”
