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What she hadn’t expected was to believe him. To feel the truth of it in her gut.
In her heart.
She pushed the thought of it away. She couldn’t let her feelings for Nick dictate her moral position.
She thought about Leland Walker, about the rally she’d attended the day before and the sick feeling she’d had in her stomach as she’d watched everyone look up at him, their faces shining like true believers.
She’d feared him then, had feared what he might do with more power, and now that she was alone, now that she wasn’t beholden to the knee-jerk instinct to defend her preexisting positions, she couldn’t deny the direction of her thoughts.
He had hurt people, killed people, and he didn’t care.
She’d wanted him gone, had felt the futility of making him pay within the confines of the justice system she served. She hadn’t liked the feelings welling up inside her, but she couldn’t deny that they’d been there.
Then she’d found out about MIS, about Nick, and all her old instincts kicked in. All the years of law school, all the times she’d sat in a courtroom and listened to lectures about the importance of the law, all the times she’d stood in a courtroom and given a lecture about the importance of the law.
Between that and her worst fears realized about Nick, there hadn’t been time to actually think things through. Now her lawyer’s mind kicked in, and she thought about the first rule in every case: assume nothing.
They were instructed to look at every piece of evidence with fresh eyes, to follow where it led instead of trying to make it fit with what they already believed to be true. She had to act like the lawyer she was to make sense of the situation. She needed to examine the evidence from every angle, to play out the arguments from every side, to weigh the tangible against the intangible as if she were a jury of one.
The endless night in her hotel room had given her a lot of time to think, and the truth was, it wasn’t as clear-cut as she’d made it seem in her argument with Nick. The law was clear-cut, the prevailing wisdom that any system was better than no system. She didn’t even disagree. Without a system of justice, society would fall into anarchy.
But what about a fail-safe? Nick’s question about what to do when the system failed, when someone who could go on to hurt more people was released, was relevant.
It was important.
She wasn’t thinking about the people who committed one crime and got off without paying for it. She was thinking about the people who did damage again and again — people like the man who’d gotten Erin Murphy hooked on heroin when she’d still been in high school.
People like Leland Walker.
What about them? Was it right — was itmoral— to look the other way and throw up her hands, acknowledge that the system was weak and imperfect and move on?
Because it didn’t feel right. It felt less and less right the more she thought about it.
She took a deep breath. She wouldn’t lie to herself: some of it was personal.
Don’t you ever get mad, Lex? About what Leland Walker did to you? To Samantha? Don’t you ever just want him to pay the price, the law be damned?
Nick’s words had been like a strong wind on the embers of her rage — rage she’d tamped down since she’d learned that Leland had been the man who’d killed Samantha. The fury that had flooded her body had caught off-guard, forced her to look away from him in case he saw the truth — that she wasn’t a calm, reasoned prosecutor guided by her intellect.
Not when it came to her own pain, to the pain of people she loved. Then she was just like everybody else: thirsty for revenge.
Or justice, as Nick had called it.
She chewed her lip. There was a fine line between the two. It bothered her that Nick thought he could walk it, brought up a million other questions, but if she was being honest with herself, she couldn’t discount the argument.
She allowed her thoughts to return to Nick, because honesty meant honesty all around, and she couldn’t pretend he didn’t exist, couldn’t pretend her feelings for him didn’t exist.
She was in love with him, and while that didn’t supersede the other issues, it wasn't nothing either. That love meant something because she trusted herself, trusted what she saw when she looked into Nick’s eyes.
She knew smart women fell in love with bad men all the time, but killing people for money wasn’t just bad, it was evil.
Unless that killing prevented worse suffering.
She thought back to her college ethics classes, all the debates about making a decision that would harm one person to save more than one — two, five, ten, a hundred. At what point was it a moral imperative to stop further suffering, even if it meant the suffering of one person at your own hands?
She hadn’t had any difficulty with the philosophical debates. While others had argued that it wasn’t their place to play god, Alexa had always felt the questions were simple mathematical equations.
Easing the suffering of the most people possible was what counted. If you had the chance to do that and you didn’t, you might as well hold a gun to their heads and pull the trigger yourself.
