I feel fear.
CHAPTER 18
ARIA DAWSON
The office feels wrong the second I step inside.
It’s too quiet—like a mouth gone slack after a scream. The hum of the overhead lights doesn’t comfort; it needles. The faint antiseptic tang in the recycled air, once so familiar, now clings to my skin like a rebuke. My heels echo against the marble floor, each click a countdown I don’t want to reach the end of.
I stop in the doorway. Stare.
My walls are bare.
No plaques. No commendations. No certificates of service. Just the dull smear of adhesive ghosts where they used to hang.
My nameplate’s gone.
My desk… cleared. Not completely, but enough. A compad sits where I left a stack of Nar’Vosk depositions. The screen blinks with a polite message from Internal Oversight.
I don’t even need to read it.
I already know what it says.
“Reassigned.”
“Pending review.”
“For your safety.”
I laugh, a sharp, guttural sound that tastes like iron.
Safety.
What a joke.
My fingers shake as I touch the desk, expecting to feel… something. Anchoring. Familiar. But the wood’s cold. Impersonal. Like I never belonged here in the first place.
My cases are gone.
I swipe the compad anyway. Scroll. Names I’ve bled over, sacrificed sleep for—Van Hess, Tolari, Myrrin Prime syndicate—all rerouted to junior prosecutors with brittle spines and shiny shoes. All wrapped in a tidy bow of “logistical optimization” and “conflict mitigation.”
What they really mean?
Aria Dawson has become a liability.
Because ofhim.
Because somewhere between courtrooms and cross-examinations, I stopped seeing Aebon Rexx as a target… and started seeing him as something else.
Something worse.
Someone I’d kill for.
Someone I almost diedwith.
I sink into the chair. It’s too stiff now. Too straight. Like it’s waiting for someone more righteous to fill it.
The air feels thick. My ribcage aches, not from the healing fractures—but from the weight pressing in on all sides.
