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But I doubt I’m the only one who wouldn’t cry at his obituary if someone did the world a favor. The less creeps like him in the world, the better.
“Very well. And do you find the defendant guilty or not guilty?” the judge asks.
Julian straightens. I stare into his eyes.
“Guilty, Your Honor.”
His eyes gleam, and he bares his yellowing teeth before his mouth curls into a sneer, and he finally breaks my gaze.
I exhale and draw in a deep lungful of air.
I was holding my breath that entire time without realizing.
“No! Dax!” Jasmin sobs from the seating area.
Eyes whip to her, including Julian Young’s son, who is sitting on the opposite side of the central aisle.
Is he proud of his father? Or a fellow criminal—like father, like son?
Although, in the eyes of the law, I’m the only criminal here today.
I can’t leave my seat. I can only look on as Logan wraps an arm around Jasmin’s shoulders, and she blinks at me, wiping the tears from her cheeks with the heel of her hands and pushing her long, dark hair away from her face.
I love you,I mouth as her face crumples again and her entire body shakes with her sobs.
She drops her face into her hands as Logan holds her tight. He tips his chin at me in a silent confirmation.
He’ll look out for her.
We’ve known Logan since school. His family runs a luxury engineering and design company that his father is readying him to take over. But his father was adamant he worked for other companies first to make sure it’s what he wants. So, Logan has been working for me at the distillery Jasmin and I inherited from our grandparents. Our parents were killed in a car accident years ago. And that meant a multimillion-pound company was handed to us when I was twenty-one and Jasmin was fifteen. It’s been years of hard work, college night classes, and more business meetings than I can remember, but we’ve done it. We kept the business afloat, despite not having a clue what we were doing. Jasmin helped out around school hours, but I tried to keep her out of it, wanting her to choose her own future. Not be thrust into one chosen for her.
I wanted her to have freedom. To never lose the beautiful, strong-willed, dreamer of a little sister I had known. For the most part, it worked. We grieved our parents together. Held each other up when the other could have so easily crumbled into ash. We got through it. Day by day. And she still kept her smile that could light up the darkest corners of the earth.
But that smile is a ghost now as the judge reads out my sentencing.
The air leaves my lungs in one harsh burst and tension ripples through my shoulders for the first time since being arrested.
Three years.
Three years of my life I won’t be with her, when I promised her I’d never leave. She may be a grown woman now, but all I see is the twelve-year-old girl who was told Mommy and Daddy were never coming home again.
She looked to me then, her big brother, barely eighteen, with fear in her eyes. And it was simple. I had to protect her at all costs. We had to stay together.
And now I’ve failed her.
I clench my jaw again, unable to take my eyes from her crumpled frame as the officers come to lead me away.
Julian Young will fucking pay for this.
Chapter 2
Rose
Present day
“Yourhouseormine,Babe?”
Stale beer fumes fill my nostrils as I stare up into the glassy eyes next to me. The weight of his arm around my shoulders is like a noose, making my chest tight and my breathing labored.
