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“He agreed.”
I shudder out a ragged breath, my hand reaching for my chest again as I try to temper my respiration, grounding myself to the warm, intelligent eyes of Hunter Jackson, Washington’s hotshot thirty-something Assistant District Attorney who also happens to be one very hot man.
He reaches for my free hand and squeezes it tightly, letting go straight away as I manage to breathe through the anxiety I've been feeling since he called me this morning and told me to come into his office at 2 p.m. sharp so that he could grant me a fifteen-minute window in his stupid-busy schedule.
I don’t know why the Assistant DA would meet with a lowly victim like me, nor spend so much time on the phone with me in the weeks leading up to this, but I know that Grey pulled a lot of strings to make it happen. He and his family are, after all, one of the most prominent in the city, which is probably one of the reasons Grey has no interest in ever seeing me again. I mean, the wealthy, well-known Everitt sire and the hippy chick who leads yoga and chanting classes for a living and struggles to pay her rent at least six months out of the year.
Well, struggles because I refuse to allow my well-to-do parents to control one single thing about my life ever again.
“I just… I can’t believe he agreed to it,” I say, not even wanting to imagine the narcissistic injury admitting fault on any level would have done to a man like Micah Korhonen. And his family are so well known around Washington. They must be mortified, no doubt looking for some innocent person to blame for years of their sociopathic son’s shitty behavior. I’m sure I’m enemy number one in their eyes, even if I refrained from filing charges, and still have, despite the lunatic spending months scaring me out of my mind. It's always someone else’s fault with that type. Women are always somehow to blame for the misconduct of powerful men.
“He had no choice,” Hunter responds as I rake my eyes over his neatly cut black hair, finding his earnest brown eyes framed by flawless olive skin. “The evidence we have of the assault is overwhelming. I just wish the guy he sent over to scare you had agreed to talk. We could have got the plea up to ten years, maybe.”
I drop my gaze, suddenly seared by the memory of that blade cutting into Greyson’s flesh and the blood that fell from it, smearing his skin.
The whole thing feels like a nightmare, especially seeing as I never even got to see how it was healing.
The only contribution I could make was giving him my arnica gel and my carrot seed, ylang ylang and tea tree essential oil blend that I use on wounds and scars as a parting gift that day before he handed me that letter that I still haven’t read.
“You couldn’t link them up?”
“No. Their encryption system was too good, and all connected to internet metadata from servers that can be closed down without a trace. We’d need an FBI-level budget and it just wasn’t approved in this case.”
“So, what will that guy he sent be charged with?”
“Nothing,” he replies, making darkness seep into me. “There was some meth, but a small amount, not enough to press charges. Just enough to put him in violation of his parole. Switch knives aren’t illegal in Georgia so there’s nothing to charge him with there, except that it shores up our case for him violating his parole.”
“What about him using the knife on Greyson?”
He shakes his head. “It’s just too close to self-defense. We’d never get a conviction out of it.”
“And him being on my balcony?”
“Not a crime, unfortunately. I mean, unless he got in…”
“Great,” I say, shuddering out what’s left of my breath as I wonder why it seems like the police only have the power to do something when women are dead.
“The good news is, he’s going back inside for the parole violation for another three years, so you’ll finally get to breathe for a while.”
I nod, my eyes roam up Hunter’s crisp white shirt, over broad shoulders to the tanned skin of his neck. “Does… Greyson know? That he’s not facing charges for the knife wounds?”
“Yes. He knows.”
“And he’s okay with it?”
“He seemed more concerned with making sure your ex was put away… and knows the consequences of continuing his harassment.”
I nod, the memory of Greyson Everitt still annoyingly present in my mind, along with the vision of his face, his body, the imprint of his touch, his taste. I just hope the memory of him will now fade away.
His concern, as well-meant as it is, irritates me, though I don’t know why. It’s not like he led me on. He told me straight that he couldn’t offer me anything. And while we’ve only communicated by text since he left and only about the case, I hate the fact that my mind wanders to him all fucking day long, like some curse I now have to carry around.
The hormonal holiday hangover from hell.
It's so fucking stupid. I mean, I know we went through some weird shit together but it was after all a vacation hook-up. You’re not supposed to give them a second thought once you land back in the real world. I know enough about life to at least have gathered that.
But god dammit, the way he fucked me, watched me, held me… I can’t imagine ever meeting a man who can do the things he can… and who makes me feel quite so alive. So muchmyself.
It sounds so simple, but when you lose yourself, when you find yourself untethered, disconnected from your own freaking soul, all you can think about is how to get the pieces back together, and for a few fleeting hours this summer, I felt it. Something about the way he would look at me, hold space for me, it made me feel like I could be…meagain.
