Page 12

Ethan nodded, a kind of grim understanding, then stepped out. The room was quiet, even with the three of us. Knight watched me, but I didn’t have the energy to care. Brielle still hadn’t moved or said much of anything. That worried me more than it should.

Lana stood, smoothing her jacket. “Come with me, please, Brielle.”

“I… what?” Brielle looked stunned. Like she was overloaded with emotion or just bone tired and couldn’t deal with anything.

Lana held out her hand to Brielle, tugging her to her feet when Brielle took it. “I need to go over a few things with you. It’s more about your safety than anything else, but there are some legal issues you’ll need to know about going forward.”

“Oh. All right then.”

I watched as Brielle followed Lana from the room and away from us. I didn’t say anything until the door shut, and I heard their footsteps in the hall. Knight’s voice came from behind me, soft but unignorable.

“You gonna follow his advice?”

I flexed my hands, then let them go slack. “Yeah,” I said. “Not sure I have much choice.”

Ethan opened the door, coming back into the office and taking a seat again.

Knight shrugged. “It’s the right call.” He stood and stretched before leaving me in the office with Ethan.

I stood and moved to the window, putting my shoulder to the wall as I looked out over the expanse of concrete leading to the crossover gate into Haven’s property. Knight liked having a line of sight on the women’s shelter building at all times in addition to the security cameras around the converted warehouse.

“I know you want to know what comes next,” he said, voice low. “But you’re not going to like the answer.”

I gave him an annoyed look. “I thought I was your client.”

He shrugged. “You are. But you can’t afford a misstep. So you don’t need to know what I know about Sutton. Not yet.”

“You always this careful?” I asked.

He looked at me for a long moment. “With the viper’s nest that woman got dragged into? Abso-fucking-lutely.”

We made a call to my parole officer who gave me shit for a solid ten minutes before turning her ire on Ethan. Woman sounded like a pissed-off schoolteacher. Strangely, Ethan’s serious expression morphed into amusement, even as his tone was gruff and just as pissed off as Ms. Hastings sounded. Ms. Hastings was quite possibly the most unpleasant woman I’d ever met, but she had a way of cutting through the bullshit I appreciated.

After we hung up, I shoved my phone back in my pocket. “What now?”

“Now…” Ethan waited until I looked at him, my full attention centered on what he said next. “Now, you consider that a woman who’d been controlled by a man for twelve years, since she was only nineteen years old, will do pretty much anything the next man in her life tells her to do. Especially if she knows he’s the only one who can save her.” Ethan was all business now. “So what I need you to do is quit handing her things for her to agree to when she knows good and Goddamned well she doesn’t have any choices here. She pretends like she does. You’re even pretending like she can control this narrative to make yourself feel better for letting her cop to perjury just to save your fucking pride.” He jabbed me in the chest with a finger. “Yeah. She lied. She was terrified for her life and the life of her grandmother.”

“She could have left. But she stayed.” The weak argument meant nothing.

This time, Ethan got up in my face. “Listen to me, you little piece of shit. I’ve seen what that woman went through to collect enough evidence to, not necessarily clear you, but prove you had nothing to do with planning or executing the heist. In fact, I’d go so far to say that the communication and references she found could prove you had no idea of the scale and scope of what was happening. But the fact remains, you were the fucking getaway driver. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t know the details, you knew your job. You also did your time.” He sucked in a breath before taking a step back. Obviously, he wasn’t going to take my side in this. I didn’t blame him. “I don’t know if she realizes the magnitude of shitstorm getting ready to hit her, but you need to make a decision and make it soon.”

“What kind of decision? You and Lana have the drive and the file. What else do I need to do?” In a move that was probably the biggest surprise of my life, Ethan Perry, the uptight, snooty lawyer, sucker punched me in the kidney. Hard. “The fuck, Ethan?” I stepped back, reassessing the situation and the opponent.

Ethan didn’t back off, getting back in my personal space. “I’m gonna say this once, Dane. That girl is the only person in this whole situation who’s innocent. The one time she did try to leave Sutton, her grandmother suddenly got kicked out of the skilled nursing facility she lived in. Sutton helped her find a different home, but it was a significant step down in comfort and care.”

“Knight never said --” He cut me off with another blow, this time to the jaw, like a fucking MMA fighter, lunging in to clip my chin with his elbow to hurt me and not himself. Fucker was fast too.

“I don’t give a shit what Knight told you. You fuckin’ did your time, Dane,” he snarled. “Why even consider letting Brielle do this? Not for you. That ship sailed a long fuckin’ time ago. It’s over and done. And the fact remains, you were complicit in the robbery of a bank. Instead of the twenty-plus years you could have done, you got fifteen years but only had to serve twelve. More because the money was never recovered. You got a sweetheart deal and that girl?” He pointed back toward the hallway where Brielle and Lana discussed her options. “She’s been living in fear for the past twelve years. Because of the threat of Sutton, with him keeping her under her thumb, she went from an outgoing, adventurous, beautiful woman to a recluse working a dead-end job with no friends and now no family. She waited long enough to bury her grandmother and give Sutton a sense of security that she would continue on as normal. She even scheduled a short vacation the week before she left because she knew he’d eventually come after her. What she didn’t count on was Sutton knowing her character. Once he figured out she was missing, he knew she’d come to Nashville.”

“Christ,” I muttered, working my jaw. The blow made my face sing with pain, but nothing I hadn’t dealt with before. “Does the woman have a death wish?”

“No. She has a conscience. And the guilt for lying at your trial, what she views as saving her own skin, has been eating her alive for twelve fucking years.”

“That’s a lot of shit you found out in not a lot of time.”

“It’s my fuckin’ job, Dane. Your job is to wait, and do what I fuckin’ tell you.”

We were silent after that. Ethan sat back down and waited, staring at me like a silent predator. Yeah. I got it.