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“Is this funny, Ms. Steele?”
“Funny?” She echoed, uncertain how she managed to stifle the laughter. It hurt, that macabre sound, like it was edged with rusty razor blades that tore her throat. “Why would it befunny¸Mr. Rheingold, that I’d attacked my father after he refused to let me get an abortion although heknewI’d been raped, that one of his friends had been the man to rape me, and heknewthat, that he’d given the bastard the go-ahead? No, it’snotfunny. Although I find it grotesquely humorous, in a way, that you have the balls toactappalled over itconsidering you were thereon one of the days Itried to run away—and that my father attacked me for it.”
She had to keep raising her voice to be heard after Rheingold, then the judge both demanded she be quiet.
Her final words, though, had everybody falling silent.
Even the judge looked slightly dismayed.
Rheingold was pale, his mouth slack.
The prosecuting attorney acting on behalf of the state was the first to regain composure. She rose, her hands flat on the surface of her desk.
“Your Honor, permission to approach.”
Judge Whitmer cleared her throat and then beckoned for both attorneys to join her.
Isabel was fuming. But at the same time, she was cynically amused.
Oh, she’d beenwaitingfor this moment.
Rheingold thought she hadn’t noticed him that day, skulking outside her father’s office when she’d been dragged into her father’s office, her attempt to slip past the watchful eye of her dogged babysitters an abysmal failure, just like the past three had been.
She hadn’t been able to believe it when the prosecuting attorney handling her father’s second appeal had informed her that Edwin Rheingold would be handling the case.
He’d been her father’s protegee. Better than most, Rheingold should know how dangerous it could be to piss Wilson Steele off, how ...unhealthyit was to fail to live up to his rigorous standards.
Wilson Steele’sdispleasurewas on display for the whole world to see right now, his features hard as granite, pale gray eyes as chilly as chips of ice. He flicked a look in her direction.
Isabel stared back without flinching, any fear she’d once felt having long since burned away. The only thing he could do to frighten her would be to threaten her sisters and they were safe away from him, under witness protection, several states away.
As long as they were safe, nothing her father said or did mattered.
There was nothing left he could take from her.
A faint noise caught her attention and she shifted her focus to Edwin Rheingold. He moved on stiff legs toward the bench, the colorless oval of his face seeming to float above the lapels of his pricy designer shirt. His pale blue eyes and pale blond hair barely offered any color, offering a washed-out appearance more than anything.
He looked like a man already dead.
His eyes wheeled in her direction as he closed the final few steps between them.
She stared back at him pitilessly.
She might have felt sympathy, had he been unaware of her father’s actions, his influence.
But he’d been in their house too many times, had stood silently as those who displeased Wilson Steele had bones broken, noses smashed, fortunes obliterated and children threatened.
The only people she would pity would be any family he might have, innocent people ensnared in the actions of others, the way she and her sisters had been.
Sometimes, late at night, when she clutched her pillow and tried not to think about the empty forever stretching out in front of her, she wondered if there was going to come a time when she couldn’t even find it in her to care about that.
