wall ticks by with each passing second. Marking another second of my life where I am trapped. Caged like an animal.
Kept apart from her.
“They’re holding you on making a threat against life while in the possession of a firearm, and for resisting arrest.”
I look up at my lawyer, Sophie, as she walks into the interview room. It’s bigger than the cell I was in before. That just had a metal bed frame bolted to the floor and a low-level WC that stank with the dried-on remnants of the last lucky inhabitant’s bowel contents in. At least this room doesn’t stink of shit, even if all it has is a depressing-looking gray table in the center of the room, with a chair on either side.
“He was going to rape Rose.” I curl my fingers into my palm, until my nails bite at my skin. “He was going to fucking rape her. And all they’re worried about is the fact that I came close to doing the world a favor and ridding it of an asshole like Julian Young?”
Sophie doesn’t flinch at the venom saturating my voice. She will have heard it all before in her job. And much worse.
“That’s something I will bring focus to in the interview this afternoon. He’s a sexual predator and danger to the community alongside the other charges being brought against him. Mr. Young’s been on their watch list for years, as you know. I’m confident we will get all the charges against you dropped. Especially given the surrounding circumstances.”
She walks over to the table and places her briefcase on top of it, sitting opposite me.
Sophie Havers. Best lawyer in South England. Logan persuaded her to help me out. He met her once when he was set up on a double date with our mate, Drew. But Drew had a better connection with her. Something Drew’s been trying and failing to explore since. And looking at her now, all professional and confident, I can tell she isn’t a woman who will be talked into doing anything she doesn’t want to.
Apparently getting Sophie to agree to take you on as a short-notice client is as hard as finding the fucking Holy Grail. She’s known for choosing who she represents on a case-by-case basis without care of the monetary gain at the end. She already gets enough high-profile cases to have herself set up nicely.
Perhaps I’m the charity case. Because despite the estate doing so well, there’s no way I could afford her. I gave Logan my budget. I’m not eating into Jasmin’s future financial security because of Julian fucking Young. He’s already taken enough from her.
“The lab’s running the test now. We should have confirmation of paternity within the hour.” She takes some paperwork from her briefcase and places it on the table before snapping the lid shut.
Within the hour. Just like that, I’ll know for sure. I don’t see that it’s relevant to Young and the business he’s been running, or the fact his ass should be thrown in jail, never to see the light of day again. But Sophie insisted on a test as soon as she arrived and fast-tracked the samples to a private lab.
The acid simmering low in my gut tells me I already know the answer. I don’t need a piece of paper to tell me it’s true.
“He’s your father.”
I clench my teeth, a throbbing pain exploding across my forehead and blurring my vision.
Rose looked convinced. She wouldn’t have told me something like that if she wasn’t certain.
Yet, a small part of me still clings to the shred of hope that she was wrong. That she made a mistake. Because I’m nothing like him. I can’t be anything like him.
“It must have been a shock finding out. After everything that’s happened. I’ve read your file. About how you came to start working for Young.” Sophie fixes her gaze on me.
She knows. She knows it all.
“But I’d like to hear some things from you.”
I know where this is headed. She’s read my file. But that’s facts. Dates and stone-cold facts.
She’s asking about things those files don’t tell her.
She’s asking about how Mom never told me a lot about my biological dad. Only that he left before she could tell him she was pregnant. Adam was my dad as far as I’m concerned. He raised me. I never felt any different to Jasmin in his eyes. He loved us both the same.
Maybe he wouldn’t have if he’d known whose blood I have running in my veins.
A rapist’s. A criminal’s. A blot on society who shouldn’t be allowed to taint the air with his breath.
Tension claws its way through my body like a disease as I look back at Sophie.
“What do you want to know?”
There’s a knock on the door to my cell. Marcus walks in, carrying a tray of food and drink.
“It doesn’t taste as rank as it looks.”
I snort as I lean forward with my head bowed and my arms resting on my knees.
He walks in and places the tray down on top of the thin, stained mattress and steps back.
I glance at what looks like cottage pie slopped onto a plate.
“What? No steak and peppercorn sauce?”
Marcus snorts, his easy chuckle that follows sounding strange and out of place within the concrete walls. “Nah, no girlfriend. Doesn’t really mix with the job. My mom, though, now she makes a killer chocolate fudge cake.”
“And you?” I lift my eyes to meet his, and he folds his arms over his chest, widening his stance a little.
“James Harris. SOCA officer. Undercover for eighteen months.”
I nod, pursing my lips. He looks more like a James than a Marcus. And minus the long, greasy hair and accent I’d grown accustomed to, he’s like a different guy altogether.
“We were both after him.”
“Yeah.” James nods in agreement. “We were. And now we’ve got him. Even if it did go down a little differently. We both got what we wanted.”
I shake my head with a supressed laugh that holds no humor. “If you say so.”
Julian Young may be unlikely to wriggle his slimy ass out of this one, but there’s still what he did to Rose.
The look of fear in her eyes will haunt me to my last breath. She really thought he was going to do it. She thought that she was going to have to look me in the eye whilst that vile scum forced himself onto her. And after, when he’d had his fun, he’d have shot us both.
“I know what he was going to do,” James says as though he can read my mind.
“Yeah? You didn’t put a fucking bullet in his head though, did you?” I grit out, dragging my hands back through my hair and screwing my eyes shut.
Clear blue eyes. Clear blue eyes that looked into mine as she thought I was about to watch her be…
“I couldn’t. I didn’t know he was armed at that point. Not until you took his gun and threatened to kill him yourself.”
“Maybe I should have.” I open my eyes and meet James’s with a long exhale. “Thanks. For what you did. I might not have made it. He was going to—”
James presses his lips together and nods. He knows as well as I do that Young’s henchman could have easily shot me if James hadn’t acted fast and taken him out first.
Rose would have had my brains splattered all over her face.
I put her in so much danger. All because I was too fucking weak to stay away like I should have.
“Listen, I’m going to have a word. See what I can do. We both know that prick’s where he deserves, and after everything…” James looks at me with something akin to respect in his eyes. “After all you’ve done up until this point, I think it’d be wrong for you to have any further action taken against you. And threatening to kill with a weapon only sticks if someone actually heard you threaten to kill.” The corners of his lips lift into a small smile. “And it was windy last night, my hearing was compromised. All I saw was a guy who’d already been assaulted himself trying to save a woman in danger.”
I nod silently, my mouth in a grim line.
A woman in danger. Placed there because of me.
Rose. Sunbeam.
James continues as he walks toward the door, “Although I’m not sure my statement will even be required at this rate. Your lawyer has it in hand. I’ve never seen the officers in this station move their asses so fast as when she asks them for something. You’ll be out of here in no time.”
I nod again, my voice thick, as I manage to get out one word. “Thanks.”
“Hey, Dax?” I look up and meet his eyes as he stands in the doorway to my cell. “I think this is the most we’ve spoken in all these months.”
I smirk. “All that time you knew who I was. And I thought you were a guy who was even more stupid than he looked and stank of stale sweat and feet. Don’t take it personally, but I was there for one reason. And it wasn’t to make friends.”
James smirks back and holds his hands up. “Hey, I’m not offended. We both had our roles to play. It’s all part of the act. Although, it felt fucking good finally getting a haircut this morning.”
I meet his eye as he runs his hand around the back of his neck and newly styled hair.
“It’s an improvement. But you somehow pulled off the oily look. I had no idea you weren’t who you said you were.”
“Same to you. If I hadn’t been clued in, that is. I could have easily thought you were one of them.”
Bile lodges in my throat at his choice of words.
One of them.
James was there. He heard what Rose said. I am one of them. It’s running in my veins. His blood. His tainted, evil, warped—shouldn’t-be-allowed-to-exist—blood.
“Mmm,” I grunt, the smirk falling off my face.
“Eat up. And you’ll be out of here before you know it. Back to that girl of yours. I heard she’s already called the station five times for an update in the last hour.”
James hovers in the doorway for a moment. Maybe he expects this nugget of information to please me. To bring a genuine smile to my sour face. The comfort that someone is waiting for me, worrying about me. Wanting me home with them.
Wanting me back to watch the sunrise with them.
Someone who I could so easily have lost forever yesterday. All because I was too selfish to stay away until Julian Young was gone.
I wanted to move on with my life. Reset time.
With her.
But I’m still in a nightmare I can never escape. I spent years hating that bastard, dreaming of the day I saw everything taken from him. Only to find I share the same blood with him. It’s flowing through my body, giving me life.
Giving me life at the same time as stripping away every reason that I want to live.
My heart hammers as my breathing speeds up, each intake of air becoming shallow as heat flares across the back of my neck. Rage swells in my chest like a rough tide crashing onto the shore and washing up the corpses of fish, caught in old, gnarled nets.
Caught. Trapped. Their freedom a mere memory, lost forever.
James shuts the door. The sound of his boots hitting the tiled floor as he walks down the hallway is drowned out by an almighty crash!
Adrenaline courses through me like I’m hooked up to it directly into the vein.
Brown goo slides down the wall of my cell to join the broken plastic food tray and its remnants on the floor.
I was never good enough for her.
And now I never can be.
