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God, is this what he felt every time he sent me on a mission? I felt a lot less angry about all those years he’d held me back from fieldwork now.
Dad must have seen the fear in my eyes because even as they were pushing his head down into the squad car, he called out, “I’ll be alright, son. Just help your mom while I’m gone, you hear?”
I nodded, throat full.
That was a promise.
It meant I won’t die, and I trust you to get me out of this.
But, at the same time, it was a reminder: while he was gone, I was the acting Don, and that meant that my main concern had to be the ultimate good of the family.
He said help your mom, but he meant put the family before all else—even me. He was telling me that this might not be a battle worth fighting.
Well, fuck that. I was fighting it.
I’m sure I wasn’t hiding the anger or the fear very well, but no one ever said I had to be emotionless to be good at my job. And I was going to be damn good.
As I watched the squad car pull away, taking my father with it, I swore to the simmering hate in my chest that I would be so damn good at it that the family would be cleaner than ever by the time he was back in his office.
“Now, we are seizing this shipping container, and our office will search all its contents. We will need statements from each of you?—”
“I’m not saying shit,” I grit out, glaring at the officer who’d spoken. “I’m invoking my right to stay silent.”
All the soldiers took turns saying the same, and I started planning. As soon as I was released, I’d be calling Arthur, dad’s consigliere of almost a year now, and I already knew the first thing he was going to say.
Get a good lawyer.
Chapter Two
LAUREN
Ihuffed, rubbing my neck, trying to loosen it before returning to the never-ending mountains of paper on my desk.
Well, “desk” was a generous word. I had a fold-out table in a cramped room without any windows because ‘natural light would discolor the pages.’
I was stuck in a glorified broom closet doing barely more than an intern because I needed to be reminded that good grades didn’t translate to good work.
Funny thing is, they’d be right if I ever flaunted my academic achievements. But since I didn’t and worked hard for every scrap I salvaged for myself, they were just bitter old men playing with their power over me. Fucking disgusting.
Part of me wonders if I would have worked this hard to get into and through law school so early in life if I’d known I’d end up doing mind-numbing digitization work from cases over a decade old. Then I remembered what I was running away from and thought, yeah, I still would have worked just as hard.
Just, maybe, taken a different job after I passed the bar.
Truthfully, my job was one any intern could do. It didn’t require special knowledge or training that the interns wouldn’t already have had anyway. Still, the partners at this firm looked at my academic record and immediately decided that I must have been a stuck-up bitch who thought she didn’t have any more to learn.
So, obviously, they had to humble me so that I could “start from the bottom like everyone else.”
Except, last I checked, no other bar-certified lawyer in this firm had literal decades of student debt as I did. If that’s not starting from the bottom, then what is?
I sighed to myself. I was getting righteous again—my blood sugar was probably low.
I stood and stretched, groaning quietly as my spine remembered what the word ‘straight’ meant with a satisfying series of cracks, but based on the sounds coming through the door, I didn’t think I wanted to make the trek to the staff room just yet.
Some guy out there—not someone whose voice I could place—was talking quickly and urgently. I groaned. I didn’t want to barge into a situation, I just wanted my damn apple.
However, stepping out of my office, the words were suddenly not what I was worried about. The man I saw through the glass door of the conference room, that had been left slightly ajar, was hot.
He was easily one of the most attractive men I’d ever seen in person.
