“I appreciate the call, but like I said before, I’m not going to change my mind about this. I’m not going to endanger my son by telling my story,” Mary Louise announced as soon as the greetings were exchanged.
“Why don’t you share the news?” Fran said to me from the screen of my laptop. She was wearing a canary-yellow knit blazer with sparkly threads.
I was all but bouncing out of my chair. “Mary Louise, you don’t have to tell your story, and we don’t have to appeal. But you’re still going to go home soon.”
Her face froze and then her eyes started to go wide. “I’m sorry. I think there’s something wrong with our connection. It sounded like you said…”
“It’s true,” Fran verified. “The judge has been implicated in some hinky dealings, and once the investigation is underway, they’re going to be taking a hard look at his cases. Starting with yours.”
“The judge and everyone else connected is going down. Not only won’t you have to do anything about it, you also won’t have to worry about retaliation anymore,” I promised her, knowing Lucian would help me keep that promise.
Mary Louise brought her hands to her face, covering her eyes. “I don’t believe it. I just can’t believe it.”
“Believe it,” Fran advised with a rare smile. “Now here’s what I think we can expect…”
As the lawyer walked Mary Louise through the next steps, I absentmindedly paged through Mary Louise’s case file. All those years lost. All that time stolen. It could have easily been Lucian all those years ago.
All because greedy men wanted to line their pockets. I hoped they’d pay. Every last one of them. Lucian and I would make sure that they did, even as we figured out this new normal and began to build a life together.
And Mary Louise would get her life back.
Tears clouded my vision again. I blinked them back and stared down at the papers on the desk. A familiar name on the page caught my eye, and I frowned. It was a copy of Mary Louise’s arrest record. Arresting Officer: Chief Wylie Ogden.
My heart stuttered in my chest.
Lucian had mentioned local law enforcement had been on Hugo’s prison scheme payroll. Was Wylie one of them? He sure as hell hadn’t played by the book when he was chief of police, letting his friends off the hook and cracking down on citizens he didn’t feel any loyalty toward.
Another thought struck me like a brick to the face. He’d been friends with Tate Dilton, who had been up to his eyeballs in involvement with the Hugo crime family. What if Wylie had been the one to make the introduction?
My heartbeat was echoing in my skull. I needed to call Lucian. And Nash.
“We’ll be in touch as soon as we know more, but we wanted you to know that your days in that place are officially numbered,” Fran was saying, drawing my attention back to my laptop.
Mary Louise’s shoulders shook as she cried silently. She dropped her hands suddenly. “My baby. Does Allen know?”
I shook off my stupor and pasted a smile on my face. “Not yet. We thought he’d like to hear the news from you—”
The video feed and everything else in the house cut off abruptly.
“Damn it,” I muttered. Power outages never happened at convenient times.
I snatched up the arrest report and was just scrolling for Lucian’s number on my phone when the doorbell rang.
I raced to the front door, hoping it was Nash on official wedding business, and yanked it open.
But it wasn’t Nash. No, standing with dirty boots on my new welcome mat was Wylie Ogden. He was holding a box of books. A red toothpick dangled from his lower lip.
Fuckity fuck fuck.
Relax, I told myself. He doesn’t know I know. Hell, I don’t know if I know.
“Hi, Wylie,” I said, sounding suspicious as hell. “What can I do for you?”
“Picked these up at an estate sale and thought you might want them for the library. Shame about the fire.”
The fire that he could have easily set. The fire. The note. The rats on my porch. Oh God. Something tickled my nose. Was it…
“Your toothpick smells like cinnamon,” I said in a strangled voice.
“Family habit,” he said. “My dad always had cinnamon toothpicks on him when I was growing up. I wanted to be just like him from the time I could walk.”
I wasn’t sure what a normal person would say in response to that. So I just gave him my best fake smile. “Well, thank you for your generosity. I’ll be happy to take those books off your hands,” I said, reaching for the box.
“It’s a heavy one, and I’m a gentleman. I insist.”
Short of shoving him out the door and slamming it in his face, I didn’t know what my next move should be. If I did that, he’d know that I knew.
“You can set them down just here on the floor. I’ll get to them after Nash’s wedding. In fact, he should be here any minute to pick me up,” I lied brightly.
“She knows.”
The husky southern drawl behind me had the blood draining out of my face.
I spun around on my stockinged feet only to find Judge Atkins standing in the hallway, wielding a gun with what appeared to be a silencer screwed to the barrel.
“Uh, that’s not a gavel,” I joked stupidly.
“Shut the door, Ogden,” Atkins ordered.
Wylie set the books down, then obediently closed and locked the front door. “Don’t get your robes in a knot,” Wylie complained. He was nervous, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his eyes darting around. It made me even more nervous.
“She knows enough to be scared half to death of you knockin’ on her door, now doesn’t she?” the judge said, wiggling the gun in my direction.
I glanced around me, trying to come up with a plan of action. If I ran, I guessed the judge would have no qualms about shooting me in the back. If I tried to fight him like the rabid weasel he was, well, I’d end up with the holes in my front, and I really liked this dress. I didn’t have shoes on, so traction and kicking were problems.
I needed to at least stash the arrest report somewhere that Lucian would find it. He’d put two and two together.
My gaze snagged on one of the nearly hidden security cameras Lucian had installed in the living room. But the light wasn’t on. They’d cut the power and the Wi-Fi, I realized with a sinking sensation in my gut.
I dropped the arrest report and slowly put my hands on my head to show them I was no threat. “What’s the plan here, guys? It’s a small town. Odds are someone saw you on my porch or climbing my fence.”
“I was just donating books,” Wylie reminded me, producing a gun of his own from the waistband of his old-man pants. Great. Now two gun-wielding bad guys were making a Sloane sandwich. “And you were fine when I left.”
I was going to throw up. Everywhere.
“And I’m not here. I’m with my wife enjoying a romantic anniversary dinner,” Atkins said with a mean smile. “And any evidence will be burned up in the fire.”
The man intended to shoot me and set fire to my house. I almost felt sorry for him because Lucian wouldn’t stop until he’d destroyed everything Atkins held sacred.
“Look, I don’t know why you think you have to do this. Is it really necessary? I mean, so you took some kickbacks from a prison and set fire to a public library. It’s not like you murdered someone.”
“I’m not letting some little blond destroy my legacy over a few dollars,” the judge announced. “I’ve made my life’s work putting criminals behind bars.”
Yeah, the asshole was a goddamn hero.
“You should have listened to the warnings,” Wylie said sadly. “It shouldn’t have come to this.”
I debated sharing the news that the FBI would be closing in on both of them, then rejected it. They wanted me dead to protect themselves. Having absolutely nothing left to lose probably wouldn’t make them any more amenable to letting me stay alive.
“Where are we doing this?” Wylie asked.
“Do I look like I give a good goddamn where we kill the girl?” Atkins demanded.
“How about the front yard?” I suggested weakly.
“We’ll take her in the back of the house,” Wylie decided and waved his gun at me. But there was something in his stare. Something pointed. His gaze slid to the library cart just inside the living room doorway, then back to me. It was stacked high with several thick thriller novels.