I let the silence build until it almost felt like mercy. “I can handle myself, Father. I always have.”
He breathed out, a sound both angry and proud. “That’s my girl,” he said, and hung up.
For a while, I didn’t move. The courthouse was black except for my window. The espresso had gone oily and cold. I reached for the bottom drawer, turned the little chrome key, and slid it open.
Seneca Wallace’s file was still there, waiting, a thumb-thick stack of court printouts and photocopied arrest reports bound by a bulldog clip. I took it out and spread it across the desk, page after page fanning out like a coroner’s report for a man still alive. The top sheet was the mugshot: Wallace staring down the lens, chin up, eyes half-lidded with contempt or boredom or both. The scar along his jaw looked almost surgical in black and white.
I tapped the photo with my knuckle, then pulled the probation report. Charges: battery, reckless endangerment, possession of an illegal firearm, resisting arrest. A row of juvenile incidents, then nothing for years, then the explosion of violence that had landed him in my courtroom. Buried among the paperwork, a note from the last judge to handle him: “Defendant displays premeditated self-restraint when not provoked. Consider alternative sentencing.”
I snorted. “Alternative sentencing,” I said, low. What I’d really sentenced him to was a thirty-day timeout and an expensive slap on the wrist. The DA had come by my office twice to ask whatthe hell I was thinking. I told her the truth: that keeping Wallace locked up would only give him time to become a martyr. But that wasn’t the whole truth.
There was something about Wallace. Something I’d never admit out loud, not even to my own father. I saw it when he walked into court, in the way he measured the room, how he looked at me like he was cataloguing vulnerabilities. He never fidgeted, never stammered, never did the pleading, performative bullshit most defendants tried when facing a hard-ass judge. Instead, he studied me. Dared me to flinch.
I’d spent my life learning to hold a stare with every cousin, uncle, mobster, and every idiot male lawyer who thought intimidation was a negotiating tactic. But the look Wallace gave me wasn’t about dominance. It was closer to curiosity.
I caught my reflection again and noticed my hair had come half undone, a coil slipping down to brush my shoulder. I thought about fixing it, but didn’t. Instead, I reached for the mugshot, turned it upside down, and let my fingers linger on the paper’s edge. My pulse was high, the way it got after a good closing argument or a near-miss on the interstate. I wasn’t afraid of Wallace. I was afraid of what he made me remember.
The espresso was stone cold, but I drank it anyway. The bitterness spread down my throat, a reminder that comfort was not the point. I gathered the papers into a neat stack, locked them back in the drawer, and laid both palms flat on the desk, feeling the wood grain bite at my skin.
Tomorrow, I’d have to face the DA again, and the local press, and the sour-faced bailiff who’d started calling me “Mean Queen” under his breath. I’d have to walk the halls like I always did, all tailored suit and perfect posture, and the threat of the gavel never far from hand. I often told myself, just one more year. Just one more year of being proper before I let my hair down and really fucking enjoy life before it's too late.
But for now, I allowed myself to just breathe. In and out, slow and measured, like the seconds ticking down before a verdict. I thought of my grandfather, cooling in a morgue seven states away, and of my father, counting enemies and calories with the same obsessive attention. I thought of Seneca Wallace, sitting in whatever shithole apartment he called home, waiting for the clock to run out on his sentence.
And, again, I wondered what it would take to finally throw out the rulebook and do something reckless. Dangerous. Human. To be one of them and not give a fuck.
The building was silent again. I slid the chair back, straightened my jacket over my shoulders, and retwisted my hair into the same severe knot. Before I left, I killed the lamp and stood for a moment in the dark, letting my eyes adjust. It was almost peaceful, knowing the enemy was out there and not inside me for once. I left the file locked in the drawer and walked out, my heels echoing down the marble corridor as my shadow stretched tall behind me.
I didn’t make it ten steps from my office before the itch set in. The kind you get in the pit of your stomach when you know you’ve overlooked something, or maybe just when you want to punish yourself a little longer. I backtracked, the echo of my heels a slow metronome, and let myself in again.
I switched the desk lamp on low, peeled off my jacket, and set it over the back of the chair with practiced care. The lining was still warm, still clinging to the outline of my body, the way a fresh crime scene holds the heat of a struggle. I tugged loose the knot of hair, allowing a few strands to fall against my cheek, and sat with my knees tightly together under the desk. Only then did I open Wallace’s file again.
I worked left to right, document to document. Each page was heavier than the last. Arrest reports with an officer’s handwriting that leaned harder the more brutal the offense.Photocopies of expulsion notices from some Oklahoma reform school— “incorrigible,” “prone to violence,” “possible learning disorder.” Then the big one: a sixteen-year-old Wallace, no lawyer, answering for a dead father in a county juvenile court. I read every line of the transcript, from the stone-faced testimony of neighbors to the one-sentence summary by the DA: “A tragic case, but the boy did what he thought was necessary.”
There were newspaper clippings from the years in between. Wallace as a name on a casualty list from Kandahar. A half-blurred photo of him in camo, jaw squared, eyes unreadable behind dark lenses. Later, a shot of him at a VFW dinner, looking neither honored nor especially welcome, standing a little off to the side with hands in pockets. Then the mugshots started again—older, more composed. Even the scars seemed to line up in a deliberate pattern, as if he’d decided what he was supposed to look like and set about making it real.
Under the stack, I found a few loose items I’d missed before: an envelope of letters, written in a woman’s tight, anxious hand. From the years before his first conviction. The signature was always the same: “Love, Mom.” I let my thumb hover over the postmark, thinking about how many times I’d written letters just as fraught, just as unmailed, to people who no longer cared to read them. We were both prisoners of our fathers’ sins.
The last item was a photo. Not a mugshot, not a surveillance still. A snapshot, candid, printed on cheap Walgreens paper, the colors already fading. Wallace in his cut, the Bloody Scythes rocker vivid in the New Mexico sunlight, holding a wrench in one hand, the other arm slung over the shoulder of a battered-looking man who might have been his brother. Both of them were laughing. Both were hard, unguarded, so different from the clinical violence that usually accompanied his name. The kind of smile you never saw in court. Deep down, Seneca Wallace was a good man.
I set the photo down and flexed my right hand, letting the fingers trace the ridge of the old scar above my knuckle. It had healed rough, never quite lost the white shimmer. I earned it from my grandfather, learning how to punch a wall rather than punch a person, a lesson in pain management that never really stuck. Some scars you kept visible just to remind yourself how much you’d already survived.
My body was betraying me. My pulse was outpacing the clock’s tick; the air felt close and humid in the hollow between my collarbones. I remembered the way Wallace watched me in court, the lack of fear, the nearly impolite honesty in the way his eyes drifted down, then back up, like he was reading me for something more than a verdict. In the moment, I’d felt only annoyance—a judge is supposed to be the most dangerous animal in the room, not the most desired. But now, alone in the dark, I admitted what it had really been. We’d experienced mutual recognition. He’d seen me, seen through me, in a way that lawyers, cops, and even my own blood never managed.
I drew in a slow breath, held it, let it out as if I could exhale the heat pooling inside my chest. The file was just a pile of paper again, inert, easy to control. I pinched the pages together and closed the folder, hard, flattening my hand against the cardboard until the slight tremor subsided.
“Dangerous,” I said aloud, just to break the silence. The sound of my own voice was steadier than I expected. I straightened my skirt, rolled my shoulders back, and pulled the loose strands of hair into their proper place, twisting the bun until it hurt just a little. Jacket on, collar fixed, hands smoothed flat.
I chuckled on my way out. My grandfather once told me that there were two sides to the law, and that I should make sure I was on the right side. So, I chose the opposite side that my family was known to choose. That made me an outsider to some, but tothe Martinis, I was still a Bellini regardless of the word Judge in front of my name.
Chapter three
Catherine
There’s a saying about empty courthouses at night. They’re safer than graveyards, but only a little. I didn’t believe that, and I sure as hell didn’t believe it as I locked my office and started the long walk to the garage. The old colonial building shed its lights by nine, leaving only the glow of the streetlamps to guide you down marble halls that always felt a degree too cold. My heels echoed like gunshots, each step rolling out in front of me, warning off the ghosts or inviting them closer.
The parking garage was an architectural nightmare with three concrete levels that wound tighter and tighter around a core so dark you could imagine it filled with nothing but spiders and secrets. At night, it turned into a wind tunnel. The air was sharp and raw, tasting faintly of engine coolant and old tobacco. I pressed the elevator button and tried to shake out the stiffness from my shoulders, the kind that sets in after a day of fighting people who can’t decide if they want to fuck you or kill you.
The elevator doors opened on level two, stuttering once before releasing me into the empty deck. The security lights flickered, creating a jerky film reel of shadow and glare. My Lexus, one ofthe few indulgences I allowed myself, sat at the far end, solitary under a busted lamp that threw more darkness than light. I advanced with my bag cinched tight under one arm and my keys in a white-knuckled grip. It was probably unnecessary, but I kept my finger ready on the panic fob. Old habits don’t die. They just get quieter.
