27. Chapter 27 #3
He wiped the oil off his fingers and got up.
“What’s going on?” Eevee asked.
Baz ignored her as he cracked the door open. A large, filled-to-the-brim brown envelope flopped to the floor. Hayati was written on top in messy handwriting.
Sami.
Baz’s heart jumped. He picked up the envelope and darted down the hall. Dark curls disappeared behind the closing elevator doors. No!
He sprinted down the stairs, took two at a time.
His heel caught on a step. He crashed belly-first into the handrail; pain exploded in his gut.
Grunting, he continued his pursuit and fuck, he lived too high up.
His lungs were on fire by the fifteenth floor, his throat ached from his rapid breaths by the eighth.
He burst through the doors to the lobby. It was empty.
Shit.
Baz steadied himself on the reception desk. “The man,” he panted. “Which way did he go?”
Larry the doorman looked at him as though he had lost his mind, with the most textbook how-am-I-supposed-to-know shrug Baz had ever seen. Ugh, fuck. Baz dropped his head back to catch his breath. His legs were still shaking when he dragged himself into the elevator.
Eevee lingered in the open apartment door. “What just happened?”
Good question. He held up the envelope as he walked inside because that was the only explanation he had. He emptied the contents onto his kitchen counter.
Papers spilled out. Several pages that looked like they had been ripped out of a notebook.
There was a spreadsheet with names and dates.
Some kind of transcript that had Ian’s name all over it.
Printed emails, including one from Ian to a representative of Captain Green informing him that the opposition had withdrawn their settlement offer and refused further negotiations, time-stamped hours after their settlement meeting.
What the hell? Baz had never withdrawn an offer, he had made one!
And if Captain Green hadn’t been made aware of it, that was grounds for disbarment.
“Look at this.” Aya held out a notebook littered with pink sticky notes. “This indicates Ian forged a client’s signature.”
The double page was full of what Baz assumed had been practice attempts. Damn.
He turned to the next page in his own stack.
Another email, this time to Sami. A file was attached, the instruction to ‘pretty it up’ written underneath.
That couldn’t mean—yes, it did. One page showed an expert testimony, the word ‘before’ scrawled on top of it in red ink.
The next, the same document, except with a secretary’s red received stamp on top, circled multiple times, dated two weeks prior to the email. The after.
So this was the shit Sami was involved in. Fabricating evidence, helping Ian commit fraud. Why did he go along with that? What did Ian have on him?
“Who did this come from?” Eevee asked.
“Sami.” He traced his fingers over the hayati, imagined Sami having done the same before pushing it underneath his door. But why?
Eevee rested her chin on Baz’s shoulder. “What does that say?”
“Hayati. It’s Arabic for pain in the ass.”
Aya snorted. “No, it’s not.”
What? “Sami told me it was.”
“He lied. Hayati means my life. I dated a girl at Cambridge who melted every time I called her that.”
Wait, it did?
Sami thought of him like that?
Oh, Baz couldn’t even relish that he had been right about Aya being queer; his brain was too busy latching onto the speck of hope that all might not be lost.
“If all this is true, it could end Ian. And Sami,” Aya said.
“Yeah.” And it was real. He wouldn’t question Sami’s honesty again. Which meant Sami had presented himself on a silver platter to be turned in. Was this some kind of test of Baz’s loyalty? Or was it a cry for help from a drowning man?
“Could this get you back on the case?” Eevee asked.
“It could win it. I think Sami is telling me Ian never passed on our settlement offer.” He handed Aya the email. “If so, Captain Green might still be open for negotiations.”
Aya’s eyes darted across the page. She nodded. “You are one lucky bastard, Baz.”
“We can’t use this! If Ian as much as guesses where we got that information from, he’ll go after Sami.” He had literally said so in the bathroom earlier.
“He knew that when he gave it to you.”
Eevee gasped, flapping her hands. “He’s sacrificing himself for you! That’s so romantic!”
No, it wasn’t. It was stupid. Why would Sami sit on this for however long and not do anything about it? Why did he trust Baz with, essentially, a roadmap of his and Ian’s crimes?
“I don’t understand why he’d give me this.”
Eevee bounced on the balls of her feet, shaking Baz’s arm. “Isn’t it obvious? He loves you too! You need to go to him!”
“He ran away from me! Twice.” If Sami had wanted to talk, he would have knocked or let himself in. He had never shied away from that before.
“Maybe he thinks you’re mad at him for what he said. He clearly wants you to come. Look at all this! What is this if not an olive branch?”
“It’s a whole olive tree, roots and all,” Aya remarked.
Okay, fine, but, “What would I even say? ‘I know you told me to get lost but—surprise!—here I am anyway, confronting you again since that worked out so well earlier’?”
“How about you start with hello and continue with, ‘Why did you give me all that dirt on you?’” Aya said.
“And your emotions! Tell him how you feel about him.”
He could see in Eevee’s eyes how she was mapping out their future, as if they would jump into each other’s arms and everything that had gone wrong would suddenly be forgotten like in some cheesy rom-com.
“It’s not that simple, Eve.”
“Oh, Baz, come on now!” Aya exclaimed. “He just handed you everything you need to win the case and put Ian away for good after you lost the hearing. Who does that if they don’t care about you? Men, I swear.”
Eevee nodded along so eagerly, he feared she’d give herself whiplash. “Listen to Aya.”
Well. Baz was dying to get answers. Fat lot of good speculating had done him so far.
He had already lost Sami. If he could get him back… Offering his heart out again, risking it to be squashed once more, was terrifying. But not as much as wasting his chance was.
God, he hoped Eevee and Aya were right about this.
“Okay. Okay! I’m going.”
He shoved the papers back into the envelope.
No one else could see them until he found out what was going on, how he could help protect Sami from the fallout of making this public.
This might not be his case anymore, but it was his person whose life was on the line.
Baz would be damned if he hurt him again.