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“And who are you, Posie?” she countered, and I flinched. “Because I know who you are. We all know who you are. Does he?”
I knew what she was getting at, and she wasn’t wrong. This was about more than just my attack. This was about more than just my childhood. This was about more than just being a survivor and fighting my way back to the real world.
This was about how a nineteen-year-old Lennon Marlow had sat at my bedside one night and had told me how she had tortured and killed Kenneth Thomas for orchestrating my rape. This was about how I had listened to every graphic detail about what she had done to him, and how I had asked her to tell me that story over and over again, not caring about how horrifically he had suffered at her hands.
This was about how I had smiled at the television when the news of Judge Thomas’ missing son had aired on all the local news stations. This was about how I wished that I could have been there when Lennon had unleashed her version of hell on Kenneth Thomas.
This was about how the new Posie had been born.
Chapter 22
Killian~
Posie was asleep in bed next to me, but I was feeling restless. This was our third night together, and I hated how we had to keep sleeping at her place because I wasn’t sure if she’d be comfortable enough at my condo. When I’d made up my mind to do this with Posie, I’d been certain that I could take it slow with her, especially after I’d read that file on her. However, taking things slow was turning out to be a lot harder than I had anticipated.
I wanted all of Posie Tinley, and I wanted it now.
Unfortunately for me, I didn’t have a choice when it came to the woman. Though things were moving faster than I had originally hoped for, that didn’t mean she was ready for how serious my intentions were. We were dancing back and forth between baby steps and big steps, and all it took was for one of us to trip to fuck it all up.
Knowing that I wasn’t going to figure it all out tonight, I’d been about to shut down my laptop, then go back to bed before a news headline had caught my eye.
Accused Millionaire Gets Probation.
I clicked on the article, and it was all about a tech millionaire’s heir getting probation on his conviction for rape against a fellow college student. According to the article, they’d been studying together in the library for a joint school project that they’d been paired together for. After the library had closed, he had offered to walk her back to her dorm, but he had ended up raping her behind the library.
As I continued to read the article, he’d been accused of rape, and there’d been enough physical evidence to arrest him. Even though his lawyers had argued that it was a ‘he said/she said’ situation, a jury of his peers had convicted him based on the physical evidence that had been presented, along with her testimony and those of the doctor, nurse, and the investigators of the case.
The fucked-up thing about the article was that justice had been served. The guy had gotten arrested, charged, and found guilty. It was the judge that had ruined it all with his light sentence of probation only. His reasoning was that he didn’t want to ruin a young man’s life simply because he’d had a minor error in judgement. The victim had plenty of counseling options to help her get over her trauma, so he didn’t see the sense in sending the young man to jail to possibly suffer the same fate, but with no help for whatever trauma that he might endure while incarcerated.
I read the article twice because I just couldn’t believe my fucking eyes.
From there, I started clicking every link associated with the story until I couldn’t find anything more. After that, I started searching everything that I could on the kid and his family, but they weren’t really the ones at fault here. Oh, the sonofabitch that raped her was definitely to blame, but he wasn’t the one who had given himself probation.
I itched to call Francisco and ask him to get me everything that he could on the judge, but I didn’t. If there was one thing that I made a point not to do, it was to take advantage of my Mafia connections. No matter how much Ria loved Ellie, this was my fight, not theirs. I’d been the one to take on this crusade and it wasn’t right to put other people at risk by involving them if I didn’t have to. That last phone call to the Benettis had been more of a curtesy to let them know that I’d be in their town more than it had been to ask for their help.
So, instead of abusing my friendships, I had started my own research on Judge Clinton Webster and the man had a history of handing down light sentences for college rapists. There’d been some noise from a few advocacy groups, but they hadn’t been able to do much. Apparently, as long as Judge Webster was dutifully sending murderers and pedophiles to prison, it was okay to let a few rapists off with a slap on the wrist.
As I stared at the face on my computer screen, the risk in going after a new target felt a lot heavier than it had before. Now, while I’d never gone after a judge before, the risk of getting caught hadn’t bothered me as much as it did now that I had Posie.
If you asked me, love was weird. While I loved my parents and sister enough to take a bullet for any of them, the hurt it would cause them if I got caught and ended up in prison wasn’t enough to make me stop doing what I was doing. I loved them enough to die for them, but not enough to not hurt them should I get caught. Some people could even argue that I didn’t love my family enough or else how could I take such a huge risk with my life, knowing what it’d do to them.
Yet, here I was, only three days into this thing with Posie, and I was already beginning to weigh the consequences of what I was doing. So, if I wasn’t willing to stop what I was doing for my family, did that mean that I already loved Posie more than I loved them? Simply because the thought was crossing my mind now? Now, of course, I knew that wasn’t true. Logically, I knew the impossibility of that, but it did make me question what to do next.
“What are you doing?”
I turned towards Posie’s voice, and she was walking towards me, dressed in only my shirt, and she looked fucking perfect. She looked like she should only wear my clothes from now on.
Reaching out, I closed my laptop, doing it slowly, so that she wouldn’t think that I was hiding something. “I couldn’t sleep,” I told her. “I decided to do some work, but then I got caught up in reading the news.”
“Why couldn’t you sleep?” she asked, stepping around the couch to stand in front of me. “Is everything okay?”
“I have to go out of town this weekend,” I semi-lied, making my decision about Judge Webster. “I have to leave tomorrow evening.”
“Oh.”
“For the first time in my life, traveling for work feels like I might not want to do it anymore,” I told her, and that was the truth. Even without the judge on my agenda, my job was always going to require traveling, and that was another thing that I was going to have to deal with realistically.
Posie gave me a soft smile. “It’s not easy being a genius millionaire, huh?”
