Chapter 13 #3
“I can only advise you on how it typically goes, Miss Quinn. I don’t have a crystal ball.” Landau keeps his voice low on account of the amount of people milling around us, from sharply dressed lawyers to defendants with thrifted shirts and miserable looks on their faces.
Pepper decides she absolutely will not oblige in return.
In fact, if anything her voice gets louder.
“This isn’t a game! This is my-my—” She pauses and makes a great effort to swallow something down, stealing herself.
“This is my life and I’ll ask you two boardroom buffoons in suits not to screw it up! ”
Her vicious tongue would usually be water off a duck’s back, but there is just something about this woman that makes me want to get down in the mud with her. “Might I remind you that you’re in this position because of your own poor choices.”
She sneers, her lip curling, a look of such contempt on her face it physically stings. “If the world wasn’t run by arrogant assholes like you, I wouldn’t have to!”
“And that’s why you’re working with Incognito, is it?” I hoss the accusation, my mind still spinning from the DA’s mention of it.
She scoffs, a scowl pinching her brows. “What a load of nonsense, I work alone. Always have, always will.”
I open my mouth to give more shit back to her, but her plump lower lip trembles, and an expression of utter devastation breaks across her carved features.
It’s a rare chink in her armor, one that lets me see the scared girl hiding away inside, behind the defenses she’s so carefully constructed to survive in the world.
She’s infuriating, and stubborn, and has a tongue sharp enough to cut grass at the White House, but she’s also just a human going through life for the first time like everyone else. The heat in my chest fades away like air from a balloon, and I force my shoulders to drop back down.
“What’s the concern here? Talk it out with me.
” I slowly take her arm and guide her over to the wall, as though she’s a bomb that could blow any second and I’m the idiot in a padded suit.
Landau stays a few feet away from us, giving us space to talk privately.
Pepper all of a sudden becomes wholly engrossed with the botanical pattern covering her boots.
I use my finger beneath her chin to gently force her head up, and my chest closes in on itself when I see a wet streak down her cheek in the wake of a tear.
The world around me falls quiet, and all of the side projects I spin over in my brain at any given moment screech to a halt.
All I can focus on is that fucking tear as it drips from her jaw and the feeling I suddenly have inside where I want to tear this whole building apart brick by brick.
“Talk.”
She sniffs, swiping away the tears and finally meeting my gaze.
“Sunny,” she whispers. “She’s sixteen soon, so If I can delay the trial for two years, she will be eighteen and it won’t matter if I get convicted.
She will be old enough to stay in New York even if I’m not her guardian. I don’t want her whole life uprooted.”
I swipe the pad of my thumb across her cheek and erase the tear track, marveling at how soft the skin is there. If my eyes are not mistaken, the lightest shiver runs down her body.
“I know I put myself in this position. Don’t you think I know that?” The moment is raw and honest, and for the first time since I walked into that cramped little interview room the first day I met her, I am seeing the real her.
My voice is gravelly when I speak. “For whatever it’s worth to you, you have my word that I will help you and Sunny in any way that I can—no matter what happens.”
Her dark lashes hit her cheekbones twice in rapid fire, and my focus gets pulled in to her open mauve lips. “Why would you do that?”
I’m suddenly very aware of how close we have become, her heated skin just an inch or two from mine. And when did her hand curl around my wrist, and my fingers find their way to cup her neck? I don’t move. I can’t move. All I can do is concentrate on trying to give her some small comfort.
“Because, Pepper Quinn, I’m not the asshole you think I am,” I murmur, pulling her an inch closer in a moment of unrestrained madness, her soft jasmine scent swirling into my senses.
A sharp breath sucks rapidly into her mouth, something I don’t recognize dancing across beautiful big brown irises.
We stay like that, breathing in each other’s air, wholly ignorant to the rest of the world.
The sound of my phone ringing brings reality crashing in, smashing through the cozy little cocoon we twined ourselves into for a moment. I drop my hand and she jumps away, straight white teeth worrying at her lower lip.
I draw out my phone and answer it when I see who it is.
“Chase?” The tight and shrill voice blurts so loudly down the phone that I have to hold it further away from my ear.
“Mom?”
“No, it’s me.”
I swiftly recognize the subtle difference. “Emily?”
“I need you to come now. It’s Mom, she’s…she’s not okay.”