Page 18 of Dirty Judge

Bree (Giftshop Manager)

Hey there, Livvie. We won’t need you at the bookstore tomorrow, so this week will just be 12 hours of paid work, okay?

Lindsay

You’re really not talking to me?

I said I was sorry…

Istuffed a cheese cracker into my mouth and gulped down my third energy shot.

Six hours down, six to go.

I was parked outside of 1345 Park Avenue Place, the condo where the public property records claimed Judge Asshole lived.

With its marble entryway, twenty-four-hour doormen and white-gloved valets, it was part of a world where people had no idea what it was like to live paycheck to paycheck, where the smallest of fees could be wiped away with a credit card and never thought about again.

There were two pools inside—not including the one on the roof, a private five-star restaurant, and a premium spa for the “beloved residents’ personal and private pleasure.”

My laptop was open on my dashboard, the screen littered with windows of research on every aspect of this jerk’s life.

His biography read like a bullshit fairytale written by a bot. It was basically, “small country boy runs to the city to achieve his dreams by working hard, and you can do it, too!”

Reading between the lines, it was clear that he’d allowed his summa cum laude degree from Harvard Law to go to his head.

He’d spent over a decade at the top law firm in this city—where he’d earnedmillions of dollarsin settlements—and eventually shifted from practicing the law to controlling it.

He served as a trial judge for several years before the mayor appointed him to the criminal court bench, and he’d been ruining lives ever since.

I just couldn’t “get over” how much he’d affected mine.

The dominoes in my life had been crashing down one by one since my day in court, and soon there wouldn’t be any left standing.

And this all started with HIM.

Grabbing another cheese cracker, I considered my next move. I needed to have a plan for when he finally came home.

So far, I’d whittled the list down to three: State my case to him and beg him to reconsider his ruling. Join the Reddit board and vent with the other people he’d wronged. “Let it go” and be mature like a normal adult.

Ugh.

None of those options felt fitting enough, and they didn’t affect him at all. Just me.

They wouldn’t show him that he was wrong for what he did to me…

I wanted this man to feel how I felt—to know what it was like to be utterly hopeless and experience pain over something he couldn’t control.

But how?

As I was considering sending his neighbors a bunch of mean letters, a shiny black Ferrari roared past me and made a U-turn in the middle of the street.

It pulled up to the velvet ropes across from me, and then a valet attendant approached the driver’s side door.

Seconds later, Judge Ashton stepped out in a custom dark gray suit with a smug and sexy smile to match.

So he can afford multiple luxury cars?

The car he was standing in front of days ago was a champagne-colored McLaren.