Not again.Her freshman year wasn’t defined by textbooks or exams, but by the ache of losing the boy who vowed to love her forever… and left her within a single day.
Craig smirked.“Everyone knows the Masterson family around here.”
Oh yes, she knew the Masterson family very well.A father ruled by a wife who could make the Wicked Witch look like a saint, a woman steeped in venom, with more vile than anyone she’d ever known, and one she prayed would stay gone from her life forever.
She had heard that Tripp’s father had passed away recently, and her first thought had been, did his wife kill him?Too bad his witch of a mother was still alive.
“And not in a good way,” Nicole muttered.“Talk about a family full of drama-filled divas.”
He chuckled, flipping through his file.
“Bad blood?”
“You could say that,” she said.
Their past was steeped in more bad blood than she cared to confess, betrayal, lies, and a runaway groom.She told herself he must have gotten cold feet.And still, she couldn’t forget their wedding night, so sweet, so unrepeatable, that no one else had ever come close.
Across the aisle, Tripp finally looked up.Their eyes locked.
And just for a moment, the world narrowed to the space between them.
All the memories of them as kids surged through her, only to end with that final morning after their wedding, the morning he never came back.She’d waited for hours, dread coiling tighter with every minute.And when the truth finally came, it wasn’t with words spoken face-to-face, but with an email, cold, distant, final.
His lips parted slightly.Recognition hit him like a slap.
Then disbelief.
Then something else, something she didn’t want to name.
Nicole turned away, stone-faced.
She didn’t have time for this.Not here.Not now.
The door at the front of the courtroom opened.
“All rise,” the bailiff called.“The Honorable Judge Carlton Price presiding.”
Everyone stood as Judge Price, a tall, silver-haired man with kind eyes and a reputation for fairness, took the bench.
Nicole straightened her spine.
This wasn’t about Tripp.This was about justice.
This was about Bianca Laurent.
About the life Derrick Reddick had snuffed out without remorse.A man who had killed his own child, along with its mother.
And she wasn’t about to let him get away with it.Any more than she’d let Tripp off the hook for abandoning her, leaving her to break the news of their marriage to her parents alone.He’d promised he’d be back.He never was.And when she showed up at his house, he was gone.
As in forever gone.
The pre-trial began.
“Nicole Reyes, for the prosecution,” she said, standing and facing the judge.
Tripp stood, his voice cool and confident as he faced the judge.“Your Honor, I’m replacing attorney Victor Lawson, who is in the hospital.The defense moves to suppress the prosecution’s claim that this was a premeditated act.”
Nicole stood just as smoothly.“Your Honor, the prosecution intends to prove that Derrick Reddick planned the execution-style murder of Bianca Laurent from the moment he learned she was pregnant.”
