Chapter 26 Ryker
RYKER
I’d never felt this level of rage before.
Not even when Tessa told me what happened to her in college. Not even when Blake and I hunted down that piece of shit, ready to make him pay for what he’d done to my sister.
But this. This was different.
Faith had been a child. A small, defenseless kid with no one to protect her. There was something sacrilegious about hurting children. Something that went far beyond criminal law and into the realm of unforgivable.
Every person who’d hurt a kid deserved to rot in prison for the rest of their miserable life.
That wasn’t the lawyer in me talking. That was the human being.
I’d nearly lost my job more times than I could count for refusing to represent those monsters.
Made enemies. Burned bridges. Pissed off senior partners who cared more about billable hours than morality.
I didn’t care then. I sure as hell didn’t care now.
But with that white-hot fury came something else. Something I didn’t want to acknowledge.
Doubt: a five-letter word that meant a feeling of uncertainty or a lack of conviction.
I mean, Jesus, I’d spent years practicing criminal law. Years watching patterns emerge. Years learning to recognize the recipe that created defendants who committed unspeakable acts.
Childhood trauma. Check.
Exposure to brutality at a formative age. Check.
Severed attachment bonds, ripped from the only family she had left. Check.
No stable support network. No one to teach her healthy ways to process rage, grief, fear. Check.
Faith’s past? It checked every single box. Now Jace’s words echoed through my head.
“We don’t know what she’s capable of.”
I entered the prison visiting room, which smelled like industrial cleaner and desperation.
We had twenty minutes today. Twenty minutes to work his parole prep, and I needed my head in the game.
Knox sat at the far table, tattooed arms crossed, looking like he could kill me with his pinkie finger and still have time to finish his lunch.
The fabric of his orange prison outfit strained across his shoulders, pulled tight where his biceps pressed against the sleeves.
I remembered the Knox from his college days. Leaner then and quick to laugh. Prison had carved away the softness, replaced it with something harder. His hair, buzzed short on the sides with just enough length on top to run a hand through, made him look military. Dangerous.
The new inmate two tables over kept sneaking glances at Knox, then quickly looking away. Smart kid.
“You look like shit,” Knox said by way of greeting.
“Charming, as always.” I dropped into the chair across from him, the metal legs scraping against concrete. I opened the folder I’d brought with me. “Your parole hearing—”
“How’s Faith?”
The question landed like a sucker punch. “You heard about that?”
“Sure did.” Knox leaned back, and I swear every inmate in the room tracked the movement.
My jaw clenched. “I’m doing my best to defend her.”
“Your best.” Knox cocked his head, studying me with eyes that had learned to read people like court documents. Prison did that. Taught you to see the cracks.
“Yes, my best.” I tapped the folder. “Which is what I’m trying to do for you right now. Question four is about your remorse. We’ve practiced this, but the board’s going to push harder this time.”
“But something’s wrong with her case?” Knox leaned forward, his forearms on the table.
“Never said that,” I replied.
“Cut the shit. Something’s eating you, so why don’t you just spit it out already?”
“Why are you so interested? You’re living in a concrete dungeon with a toilet that doubles as a conversation piece. I’d say that’s the more pressing issue. We have eighteen minutes left to prep for the most important hearing of your life, and you want to play therapist?”
“Seventeen minutes,” he corrected, that ghost of his old smile flickering at the corner of his mouth. “But who’s counting?”
“I am. Your lawyer is counting. Because unlike you, apparently, I’d like to see you walk out of here in this decade.”
Knox’s expression didn’t change, but something shifted in his posture. “Let me guess.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re fucked up about Faith, and you can’t talk to Blake because he’d rearrange your face just for thinking about his sister in whatever way has you twisted up right now.”
I slammed the folder closed. “Almost every time I’ve come to do parole prep lately, you change the subject. Have you given up on making parole?”
The question hung between us like a loaded gun. Knox’s cheek twitched, a muscle jumping beneath stubbled skin. For a moment, I thought he might actually answer. Tell me why he kept sabotaging these sessions. Why he seemed more interested in everyone else’s problems than his own freedom.
“Friendship is a two-way road.” That was all he said. Did he think of himself as a burden? Was that why he wanted to “be there” for us so badly?
I sighed, deflating. “If I needed relationship advice, I’d go to Jace.” Axel was out of the question. Asking him about emotional complexity was like asking a goldfish about quantum physics.
And Knox was right. I couldn’t talk to Blake about this. Hey, you know how I’m into your sister, which already makes you want to kill me? Well, plot twist: I might not be cool with her if it turns out she’s a cold-blooded killer. Because, you know, standards.
“Aren’t Jace and Scarlett headed to Cabo soon?” he asked.
“How do you know everyone’s itinerary?”
“I make time for the people I care about.” The words were simple, matter-of-fact. “Calls. Visits. You know, human connection.”
“Careful. Your reputation as the scariest motherfucker in here might take a hit.”
“Two things can be true.” Knox’s voice dropped. “Someone can make another inmate piss himself in the shower line and still give a damn about his family.”
I checked my watch. Fifteen minutes left.
“Just spit it out already,” Knox said. “Because we both know you’re not leaving until you do.”
He seriously wasn’t going to let this go. “Fine. You want to know what’s on my mind?” The words came out sharp. “I’m confused. There. Happy now? Your boy’s having a crisis.”
“About the birds and bees? I can draw you a diagram. Might even throw in some hearts and flowers if you ask nice.”
I glared at him. “I can’t discuss case specifics—attorney-client privilege. But hypothetically …”
“Hypothetically.” Knox’s expression turned serious.
“As a defense attorney, sometimes, you face the question: What if your client is guilty?”
“You think Faith is guilty.”
“No.”
“Try that again, this time more convincingly.”
I scrubbed a hand over my jaw, my fingers cramping from how tightly I’d been gripping the folder.
“I don’t think she’s guilty.” I picked at a groove in the table where someone had carved INNOCENT with impressive dedication.
“But even if she were guilty, it wouldn’t change my obligation.
She’s Blake’s sister. I’d still defend her. ”
“But you like her.” It wasn’t a question.
I opened my mouth to deny it, then snapped it shut. What was the point?
“You like her,” Knox continued, “and you’re not sure you can get past it if she actually did it.”
“It’s idiotic.” I ground my molars. “I’m friends with you, aren’t I? And our other brothers aren’t exactly running for sainthood.”
“But this is different.”
“I don’t know why.” I pressed my palms against my temples. “She looked me dead in the eye and said she couldn’t remember what happened. Like amnesia was just … convenient. And then she revealed that her past was far darker than most of the guilty clients I’d represented in my old job.”
Knox tilted his head. “And that bothers you.”
“You want to know what bothers me?” The words came out in a rush. “My last client who played the memory card turned out to be guilty. Stone-cold guilty. I believed him. Initially at least.”
Knox went still. Even his breathing seemed to pause.
“He swore on his mother’s grave he was innocent.
Looked me in the eye, just like Faith did.
And I bought it. At first. But even when I started to have doubts, I continued representing him.
” My voice cracked. “First thing he did after walking free? Murdered his ex. The one who testified against him. Along with her roommate and the poor delivery guy who showed up at the wrong time. So, yeah, it bothers me. But it shouldn’t.
I mean, fuck, when Blake told me Tessa was attacked, I grabbed a bat,” I continued.
“I was ready to cave someone’s skull in. ”
“Did you find the guy?”
“No.”
“And if you had? Would you have beaten him until his heart stopped?”
Silence stretched between us while I wrestled with the memory of that volcanic fury.
Knox leaned forward, his chair scraping against the floor. “You would’ve stopped, Ryker. The guy would’ve gone to the hospital maybe. ICU perhaps. But taking a life? That’s not in your DNA.”
“I’m friends with men who’ve taken lives,” I argued.
“You’re loyal. Morally gray, sure. But your line?” Knox tapped the table. “It’s made of different stuff than ours.”
“I wanted to end the guy who attacked Tessa,” I repeated.
“Wanting and doing are different creatures.” Knox’s eyes held mine. “Picture it. Right now. Someone who hurt someone you love, standing in front of you. Knife in your hand. Could you drive it into their heart? Feel the resistance of flesh, the scrape of bone? Watch the light leave their eyes?”
The visiting room noise faded. I was back in that night, bat in hand, rage making my vision red. Then a different day—the euphoria when Blake told me Tessa’s attacker was dead. The relief. The satisfaction.
But me being the executioner?
“To protect someone I love? Probably.”
Knox looked skeptical. He knew me too well.
“No,” I admitted, the word barely a whisper. “I couldn’t.”
“There’s your answer.” Knox sat back. “This girl is forcing you to examine where your gray begins and ends. What you’ll accept in theory versus what you’ll accept with a partner.”
“Why does it matter? I’ve stood by all of you.”
“Because, one day, you might share a bed with her.” Knox’s words cut through my rambling.
“Build a life. Have kids who carry her DNA, along with yours. That’s not brotherhood.
That’s choosing someone to create the future with.
And you’re terrified she might be exactly what her past suggests she could be. ”
The truth of it sat heavy in my chest.
I chewed on the inside of my cheek, nodding. “You’re right.” Whenever I found myself imagining being with Faith, that implied I imagined her in my future. And my future had a wife and kids in it. “Turns out, I have a problem with cold-blooded murder. That’s apparently where I draw the line.”
“Says the man visiting his friend, the convicted murderer.”
“That’s different—”
“Is it?” Knox challenged. “Or are you just better at accepting violence in your periphery than in your bed?”
“Easy for you to say. You killed someone for a damn good reason.”
Knox’s expression went flat. Dangerous. “Careful.”
“I’m just saying—”
“You don’t say. We don’t talk about that, so keep my story out of your mouth.” His words came out sharp, each one placed like a blade against skin. “I did what I had to do. You’re trying to figure out if Faith did. Big difference.”
“Five minutes,” a guard called out.
Knox studied me with those eyes that had seen too much, done too much, and still, somehow, he gave a damn. “You know what your problem is? You think there’s some cosmic scorecard. Good reasons and bad reasons. Justified and unjustified. But sometimes, Ryker, there’s just survival.”
Well, shit. Why did he have to put it like that?
“You want to know how I’d handle it?” he continued.
“Handle what?”
“If I found a woman I loved, there’s nothing she could do that would make me walk away.” His voice carried absolute conviction. “She kills someone? I’m buying the shovel. Someone hurts her? They’ll need dental records for identification.”
The woman at the next table had stopped pretending not to listen. Her eyes were wide, locked on Knox like he was either her worst nightmare or her darkest fantasy.
“That’s alarming,” I said.
“That’s loyalty. Difference is, I know what I am. And what I’d accept.”
Was it weird that I envied that about him? I shouldn’t envy that. Right?
“One question,” he said. “Forget what she might have done. Forget the evidence and the analysis and your ghost stories. Just answer this: do you believe her?”
The question hung in the recycled air while my mind scrambled for logical ground.
“Time’s up!” The guard moved toward us.
Knox stood, and every inmate in the room tracked the movement. Six foot four of controlled violence, tattooed with the scripture of his sins, and yet he was the one person I trusted most with my truth. “When you can answer that with your gut instead of your head, you’ll know what to do.”
I sat there for a moment, legal strategy undiscussed. Twenty minutes gone, and we’d talked about everything except what I’d come for.
Or maybe we’d talked about exactly what I’d come for.
As I gathered my things, Knox’s voice stopped me.
“One more thing, Counselor.”
I turned back.
“You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not whether she’s guilty or innocent.
It’s whether you can love someone whose past you’ll never fully understand.
Someone who might have darkness you can’t fix.
” He held my gaze. “Because if you can’t handle the possibility, then you need to walk away now.
Before you hurt her worse than anyone else ever has. ”
The words followed me out of the prison, into my car.
“Do you believe her?”
The question had claws, digging deeper with every mile.
But the real question—the one that made my hands grip the steering wheel until my knuckles went white—wasn’t about belief.
It was simpler. More terrifying.
Could I love her if the worst was true?
And if I couldn’t—if my feelings evaporated the moment doubt crept in—then what did that say about me? About the kind of love I was capable of giving?
Faith had spent her entire life being abandoned by people who were supposed to stay. People who claimed to care right up until things got hard, until she became inconvenient, until her damage showed.
I’d promised myself I was different.
But doubt ate at my insides like acid, and now, I wasn’t so sure anymore.
Maybe I was just another person who’d look at her brokenness and walk away.
The thought made me sick. But there was no time to process this.
In a normal relationship, I could step back.
Take a breath. But I was her lawyer. Later today, I’d be at her door again, and I had no idea what the hell I’d say.