23. Knox
KNOX
PRESENT
When I tell my little canary about my arrest, she assumes that’s the bulk of the story, but oh boy, would she be wrong.
The booking process took two and a half centuries, so by the time I was placed into an interrogation room, I was practically asleep on my feet.
This, of course, did not play out in my favor when the officer finally came in to speak with me another century later to find my head on the table and me unconscious.
If anything, I was pretty sure I had a concussion, but no one gave a shit enough to get me checked out.
Instead, I got reamed out with the cliché, “Only the guilty sleep” spiel, which didn’t bode well for my defense that Holt attacked me unprovoked.
Maybe I just had a long, horrible day, motherfucker. Ever had one? And it was a quarter after four in the morning. Most humans in this time zone were asleep.
I kept my mouth shut, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t brace for impact.
As it turned out, I wasn’t just being sought after by the police for punching my half-brother. Oh, no, that wasn’t good enough for Lillian’s revenge of me simply being born.
I didn’t have a prior criminal record or even so much as a parking ticket, and a couple of the attendees actually overheard the exchange and, more specifically, what Devin said. If the case had ever gone to court, it would have likely been thrown out.
The detective investigating my case, Clifton, strutted into the interrogation room, placing a timepiece on the table in front of me sealed in an evidence bag. “Look familiar?” he asks, but I ’ m the one who should be demanding answers here.
“What are you doing with my watch?” I had it hidden inside my bedroom, under a false bottom compartment of the drawer in my nightstand.
“We found it after we were granted a warrant to search your premises.”
“I’m being charged with assault, and the only person with a weapon was Holt. Why would you need to search my place?”
“Because of the original charge.” He said this like I should have already known what he was talking about, and when he saw that I wasn’t, he smirked. “How much would you say that goes for?”
He gestures to the yellow brass pocket watch, and given that it’s about two hundred years old, I can assume it’s nothing to sneeze at. But since it was an antique given to me by my father a few months ago, I had no interest in selling it, so I never bothered to look.
I shrug. “I don’t know. Ten grand?”
“Try fifty-six.”
Holy shit.
I let that sink in, but I wasn’t about to let that sidetrack me. “Okay, that still doesn’t explain why you have it. Is it protocol to take people’s belongings that have nothing to do with the case?”
“No,” he said slowly, like I was an idiot. “It’s protocol to recover stolen items when found in the suspect’s possession.”
Stolen items?
What.
The.
Fuck?
“Your stepmother, Lillian Blackwood, reported it stolen after a break-in at your father’s estate last night.”
“My old man gave that to me for my eighteenth birthday. She was there,” I argued, but there was no point. He had already made up his mind that I was a thieving scumbag. Or he was in on it.
He asked me if I had any verification, and I told him my father had provided me with a “proof of gift” letter that had been stored with the timepiece, but the officer claimed there was no such thing found at my house.
He also found it “odd” that I didn’t post anything about it on social media. “A lot of kids your age would show off something like that. I know my son would.”
Yeah, well, then he ’ s a fucking idiot .
When you live in the Valley, you don’t show off shit unless you want it stolen. If I took a picture of that and anyone saw it, I would have needed to report a dozen break-ins by the end of the day.
I tried to explain this not-so-common common sense, but I may as well have been arguing with the wall.
I didn’t have any witnesses with me at the time of the supposed break-in, and I didn’t know if there were any surveillance videos available where I had been, but I knew there were plenty on my father’s estate.
I said as much, only to get another smirk.
“You’ve been to your father’s manor multiple times, yes?”
I nodded.
“Whoever broke in clearly knew the layout of the home. He managed to evade all but one of the cameras positioned around the outside of the property.”
Lillian obviously gave him the footage, because he pulled it up on the tablet in his hands and slid it across the table to me.
The footage was dark, but not dark enough for the night vision to kick in yet. Likely around the time I had just left the cemetery at sunset.
The figure captured in the video was clearly masculine, dressed in head-to-toe black, and had a baseball cap pulled low over his face.
Due to the darkness of the footage and the angle, it was impossible to even make out the lower half you could see as he slinked across the property and into the house, but Officer Williams seemed to think that was the nail in my coffin.
“Whether you’re aware of it or not, your stepmother saw you enter the home through the second-story balcony, and I can’t say I can argue with that. Looks an awful lot like you, doesn’t it?” He pointed to the tablet with such certainty that you would think I had posed for the camera.
But even with how dark the footage was, that looked nothing like me. I knew the property and the height of the doorways. If anything, I would have thought it was Jax, if not for the fact the intruder was more muscular. The guy had to be at least four inches taller than me.
And then I saw it.
Clearly, this person didn’t know shit about how to jump from any kind of height, because the burglar leaped off the balcony and landed nearly upright, doing nothing to absorb the impact on his knees. One leg buckled, and even as he took off running, the knee locked up again, making him almost fall.
Funny.
Who had I just met later that night with a trick knee?
Anna curls up next to me, her head resting on my bicep as she drags her fingers over my chest. “Your stepmother did all that just because she didn’t like you?”
There isn’t doubt in her voice. Just complete bewilderment.
Because, honestly, who would do that to an eighteen-year-old kid?
With my father gone, I had no connection with her family.
It was obvious my brother wasn’t interested in having a relationship, and I sure as hell didn’t want one.
I would have been out of all of their hair.
But, as it turns out, pettiness was Lillian’s second reason.
“My father’s will actually gave her fifteen million reasons to get rid of me,” I say, feeling Anna’s fingers go still.
“He wanted his sons to participate in his businesses, so he stipulated that each of us had to work for at least five years at one of his companies before we could receive our part of the inheritance. The only thing that could remove us from contention was a criminal record.”
My little canary shoots upright, and she sounds pissed on my behalf. “Are you fucking kidding? She sent you to prison because she didn’t want you inheriting what was rightfully yours ?”
“If, for some strange reason, I ran into a problem with the law, my portion of the inheritance would then be split evenly with the other two heirs,” I say, coaxing her back against me. As much as I like hearing that fire in her voice, I miss her warmth more.
I still can’t believe my brother went to work at Westfall.
When my old man stipulated he wanted us to join one of his companies, he obviously meant that in an executive way.
He wanted us in a position where we could learn the ropes of the business so that we could eventually take over for him.
Instead, Devin decided to take a managerial position at one of the jewelry shops where he didn’t have to do shit, dumping all of the responsibilities on his secretaries and spending all of his time trying to fuck his sales associates.
“Shouldn’t the police have found that suspicious ?
” Anna asks, this time resting her head down on my chest. “The one eyewitness to this break-in just so happened to be the same person who would get seven and a half million dollars if you went away, and no one thought to question that? People have killed for a lot less.”
“My stepmother has influence, and I had a public defender who couldn’t even remember my name. I got four years for grand larceny.”
“What about the assault charges?”
I let out a humorless laugh. “Even more bullshit. The charges for punching my brother were dismissed, and the ones with the officer ended with a hung jury, twice. As it turns out, one of my old classmates was parked in her car across the street and witnessed part of what happened. She testified to seeing the officer punch himself, but the prosecution showed her old social media posts, claiming she had anti-police sentiment. Her bias cast enough doubt that some of the jury didn’t find her testimony credible.
After the second mistrial, the prosecution had no choice but to drop the charges.
My friend, on the other hand, wasn’t so lucky.
Because there was doubt about the witness testimony, we couldn’t prove that he acted in self-defense.
The only conclusive evidence was the body cam footage that showed him grabbing the officer and then dislocating his knee.
He had to serve three and a half years.”
I haven’t talked about everything that’s happened with anyone, and now that I have, I feel…lighter somehow.
“You do realize you’ve told me enough that I could find out who you are, right?”
I may have omitted certain names from the story, but it wouldn’t take much digging for her to put the pieces together.
Still, I grin. “I know.”
Because my canary won’t look into it. Not now.
She proves it, trailing her fingertips over my forearm. “What can I do?”
“Sell one of those fancy pairs of shoes under your bed.”
“Why?” After what she told me about how she hates having to use that fucker’s gifts to survive, you might expect her to be offended. Instead, she sounds genuinely curious.
“I’d like you to make a donation.”