Chapter 11 #2
"I don't know. He won't really talk about it.
But last week these men came to the courthouse.
He didn't tell me himself. I overheard him on the phone with another judge about it.
" She lowers her voice, leans in like she's sharing gossip instead of something that's making the blood drain from my face.
"They were Russian. Asking about old cases.
Like, really old cases. And Dad was rattled, Sel.
You know my dad. Nothing rattles him. He once had a defendant threaten to kill the family in open court, and he just told the bailiff to note it for the record. "
Russians.
At the courthouse.
Asking about old cases.
The restaurant noise fades to static.
I can feel my heartbeat in my ears, slow and heavy, and the mimosa in my stomach turns to acid.
"Did he say which cases?" My voice comes out level. Practiced.
A year of training, and the composure holds even when the ground is opening beneath me.
"No. He just kept saying 'it's nothing' and 'don't worry about it,' which, as you know, is Dad code for 'I'm extremely worried about it.'" Emilia frowns. "Why? Does it mean something to you?"
"No. Just... with everything going on with organized crime in the city, Russians poking around courthouses isn't great."
"Right? That's what I said. I told him he should report it, but he got all weird and changed the subject." She shakes her head. "I swear, judges are the worst patients. They'd rather preside over their own murder trial than admit someone scared them."
She laughs, and I force one out to match.
But under the table, my free hand is gripping my thigh hard enough to leave marks, and my mind is already running calculations I can't stop.
If Zhukov's people are approaching Judge Hart, they're doing the same thing they've been doing everywhere: mapping Cassius's network, identifying pressure points, finding the cracks they can exploit.
Judge Hart took me in after my parents died.
Judge Hart is connected to the Deveraux case.
And Emilia, sitting across from me in a sundress, talking about her father's strange behavior over bottomless mimosas, doesn't know that she's become a node on a very dangerous map.
I look at her. Really look. The blonde bob. The blue eyes. The freckle on her left cheekbone that she's had since we were teenagers. The engagement ring from Tyler that she keeps twisting on her finger because it's still new enough to feel foreign.
She is completely, devastatingly unprotected.
"Em." The word comes out before I can filter it. "If anything weird happens, if anyone approaches you or shows up at your apartment, if your Dad gets more rattled, will you tell me? Right away?"
She blinks. "What? Why would someone—"
"Just promise me."
Something in my tone makes her face change.
The lightness drains out of it and she looks at me the way she looked at me the night I showed up at her door at sixteen years old, soaked in rain and shaking, after the police told me my parents were dead.
"Sel. You're scaring me."
"I'm not trying to scare you. I just..." I take a breath. Steady. Control it. "The world is weird right now. I want to know you're okay. That's all."
She watches me for a long time.
I can see her making decisions behind those blue eyes, weighing the instinct to push against the history of trusting me, trying to find the shape of whatever I'm not saying.
"I promise," she says finally. "But you have to promise me something, too."
"What?"
"Whatever's going on with you, whatever this 'work stuff' is that's eating you alive, you'll come to me when you're ready. You won't disappear. You won't shut me out."
I hold her gaze and lie to my best friend for the last time.
"I promise."
I hug her goodbye in front of the restaurant, and I hold on longer than I should.
She laughs against my shoulder and says, "Okay, weirdo, it's brunch, not a funeral," and the word funeral lands like a stone in my chest.
"Love you, Em."
"Love you, too. Next Saturday. Same place. Non-negotiable."
I watch her walk to her car, that small blonde figure in a sundress, waving once over her shoulder before she disappears behind a white Prius.
I memorize the wave. The way her bob swings when she turns. The flash of her engagement ring in the sun.
I memorize all of it because some part of me knows this is ending.
Not today, maybe not next week, but the distance between my world and hers is growing by the hour, and eventually the gap will be too wide for brunch to bridge.
The drive back to my apartment takes twelve minutes.
I spend all twelve with both hands on the wheel, jaw clenched, running scenarios I don't want to run.
The Russians know about me.
They know about Cassius.
They're at the courthouse, asking about old cases, which means they're tracing the same connections I traced.
And if they find what I found, if they piece together my parents’ murder and Cassius’ involvement, they won't just use it as leverage against him.
They'll use it as leverage against me, and anyone connected to me becomes collateral.
Michelle at the DA's office, who pulled those files as a favor.
Judge Hart, who took me in and raised me alongside his own daughter.
Emilia, who just hugged me goodbye without knowing she's standing in a blast radius.
I park in my building's lot and sit behind the wheel without cutting the engine.
The car idles while the radio plays something soft and meaningless.
My hands are still on the wheel and my knuckles are white.
I should warn them.
Should call Michelle and tell her to bury those files.
Should call Judge Hart and tell him to take Emilia on a long vacation somewhere the Bratva doesn't operate.
But warning them means explaining, and explaining means unraveling, and the thread that connects all of it leads straight back to Cassius.
To me.
To the locked collar under my sweater and the gun on my nightstand and the man I let walk out of my apartment last night when I should have pulled the trigger.
Inside, the apartment is exactly as I left it.
Evidence wall.
Shattered glass I still haven't cleaned up, the fragments catching light in the hallway like something spilled and frozen mid-splash.
The gun, catching the afternoon light on the nightstand like a dare.
I make coffee I won't drink, stand at the kitchen counter and watch the pot fill and think about the last time I stood here, the night I put the pieces together.
The wine I poured and dumped.
The files I spread across the floor.
The moment my father's handwriting blurred through tears I refused to shed.
That was days ago.
Days since the world rearranged itself around a truth that had been there the entire time, hiding in plain sight, wearing expensive suits and smelling like sandalwood.
I pour the coffee into a mug that isn't my father's, because his is in pieces in the bathroom trash.
Take one sip. It tastes like nothing.
Everything tastes like nothing lately, food reduced to texture and temperature, my body going through the motions of sustenance while the rest of me operates on something less tangible.
Adrenaline. Anger.
The particular fuel of a woman who hasn't decided what she is yet and runs on the friction of not knowing.
I sit on my bed, and pull my phone from my pocket.
A ridiculous amount of missed calls from Cassius.
No voicemails, though.
He wouldn't leave voicemails.
That would be a record, and Cassius Wolfe doesn't leave records.
I scroll through the call log. The timestamps tell a story: two calls last night, forty minutes apart.
Three this morning, closer together.
Then a gap.
Then five more back-to-back around noon, like he lost patience with his own restraint.
Then silence for the last three hours.
He's either given up or he's doing something worse than calling.
He's watching. Of course he's watching.
He has cameras, people, resources I can't even quantify.
He probably knows I went to brunch.
Probably knows I met Emilia.
Probably knows I sat in my car for six minutes afterward staring at nothing.
The thought should terrify me.
Instead, it lands with a dull familiarity that's somehow worse.
This is my life.
A man who murders judges and monitors my brunch dates and somehow, despite everything, is still the person my body reaches for in the dark.
Still the voice I hear when it's quiet.
Still the name I almost said when Emilia asked me what was wrong.
The absence of him is physical.
I didn't expect that.
I expected anger, and the anger is there, banked and smoldering and ready.
I expected disgust, and that's there too, mostly aimed at myself.
What I didn't expect was the hollow ache that lives in the space between my ribs and pulses every time I breathe, the place where his presence used to sit like ballast, keeping me steady.
Without it, I feel tilted. Off-center.
A building with one wall removed, still standing but leaning in a way that can't hold.
I set the phone face-down on the comforter.
The screen glows through the fabric for a moment, then dims.
The apartment is quiet.
The kind of quiet that isn't really quiet but the absence of a specific sound.
His voice. His footsteps.
The clink of ice cubes against crystal.
The particular silence he carries with him that isn't empty but full, pressurized, the silence of a man who chooses every word and makes the spaces between them feel deliberate.
I've been living in that silence for so long that actual quiet feels wrong.
Hollow. Like a room with all the furniture removed.
I pull the sweater down and look at the collar in the bedroom mirror.
The one that isn't cracked.
The diamonds catch the light and throw tiny fragments across my face, and I think about Emilia's engagement ring, how she keeps twisting it because it's new and foreign and she hasn't learned the weight of it yet.
I've been wearing mine for over a year.
I know its weight the way I know my own name, and I can't take it off.
I pick up the phone again and hold it against my chest.
The screen is warm from the missed calls, or maybe that's just my imagination turning everything he touches into heat.
All those calls.
I lie back on the bed and hold the phone over my heart and hate myself for how much I want it to ring again.