Page 120 of The Trust We Broke
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill him. Just need to know what he knows.” There’s a protracted silence. “You still there, Bug?”
“I’m just processing why it didn’t bother me if you were.”
That’s my girl. I bite back a smile. “Given what he’s put you through, I wouldn’t be surprised either way.”
“Just…don’t let him bait you. I mean…he can’t, really. He can’t speak properly. But he can call for help. There will be camera footage of you walking in there. I’m a great lawyer, sweetheart, but even I can’t get you off if there is video footage of you walking in there and hurting him.”
She’s worried about me.
That’s all I hear.
That I could do whatever I wanted to the man I’m about to see, and she’d only care that I came out whole. “Have I told you I love you, yet, today?”
“Yes. But I happen to love hearing it.”
Wraith is walking back toward me, ticket in hand. “Intend to tell you often. For the rest of our lives. I gotta go, Bug. Keep doing what you do best.”
“As long as you do the same. And love you too.”
She tells me the floor and room he’s in, and then we hang up, just as Wraith slaps a ticket on the dash of my truck.
“Ready?” he asks.
“Let’s get it done.”
“You know,” Wraith says casually, “I’d prefer to not get arrested, today, and seeing I just had to use my credit card to purchase the parking ticket, and how we’ve already passed twenty cameras, you good to keep this civil?”
I huff at that. “The fucker doesn’t deserve civil. But I intend to talk to him in words he can understand.”
Wraith chuckles. “So, you know some long words, Prez? ‘Cause I never heard you use them.”
I flip him the bird. “Jurisprudential. That’s a long word.”
Wraith shakes his head. “Just proved my fucking point. That’s not a long word. Like, constitutionalization. That’s a big fucking word.”
I glare at my right-hand man. “You jerking off to a dictionary in the morning? And don’t call me ‘Prez.’ Yes, I am. But you andI have been friends way too fucking long for you to be calling me that.”
“Sir?” Wraith asks. “I’ve been taking lessons from Babyface.”
“Fuck you.”
“My liege?”
I laugh at that one. “You’re gonna make me break character.”
He shrugs. “Maybe that was the point.”
The hospital is like any other. Whitewashed walls to make it feel bright and normal, but with that lingering scent of antiseptic. It’s bleached of character, in an attempt to make people forget why they’re here.
ButIdon’t.
There are years of my life lost to a concrete cell because of this man. A man who presented as an upstanding lawyer to the world but shook judges’ hands behind closed doors and took MC money under the table after dark.
He took Lucy away from me and leaned on a judge to keep me away from her.
Iwouldkill him. But perhaps being unable to string a sentence together without a piece of paper is punishment enough for the man who used his voice for evil. And I’m certain the way we’re about to destroy his reputation and legacy will hurt more than a bullet.
Wraith walks by my side, hands in his pockets, eyeing the corridor like we’re already under threat.
