The door clicked shut behind him.
I stood there for a full minute, breathing hard, fists shaking with the effort not to punch something. The smug bastard had just threatened Knox. Threatened a man who’d already paid too high of a price, whose daughter was growing up without him.
And he’d done it to protect his son’s reputation. To silence Faith. To make sure the truth about Daniel Kearns stayed buried.
I grabbed my phone, fingers flying over the screen. First, a text to my investigator:Dig deeper into the Kearns family. Everything. I want to know every parking ticket, every sealed record, every rumor.
Then I stormed into the conference room, to a second whiteboard in the corner and flipped it around. On the blank side, I wrote two words:JUDICIAL INTERFERENCE. Below that, I documented everything Kearns had just said. The threats. The Knox leverage. The implication that he had a puppet defense attorney waiting in the wings.
If this ever went before an ethics board, I wanted every detail recorded while it was fresh.
Judge Kearns had just made this personal.
He wanted a war?
He just got one.
And if Kearns thought he could use Knox as leverage, he’d severely underestimated how dirty I was willing to fight. This wasn’t just about defending a client anymore. This was about justice. Real justice. The kind that didn’t care about your last name or your father’s position.
The kind that protected women like Faith from men like Daniel Kearns.
Living or dead.
But how could I go into battle if doing so would drag Knox under? I couldn’t drop Faith’s case without betraying Blake andFaith. But I couldn’t keep going without risking Knox’s freedom either.
After pacing for a couple of minutes, I realized this wasn’t my decision to make alone. Knox needed a say in this too.
Looked like I’d be paying my friend an unscheduled visit today.
30
RYKER
Fluorescent lights in the penitentiary’s visiting room buzzed overhead, casting everyone in that special shade of prison pale that made even the healthiest person look like they needed a vitamin D transfusion. The air tasted stale, recycled through too many lungs, and the metal chairs scraped against the floor in a rhythm of misery.
Knox sat across from me, arms folded, looking like violence had taken human form and decided to get obscenely talented tattoo work.
“You look like shit,” he said.
“Your greetings are becoming redundant. And good to see you too, sunshine.”
“Seriously, did you not sleep last night?” He tilted his head, studying me like a particularly interesting autopsy. “You’ve got that twitchy thing going on. The one where your eye does the—” He demonstrated with an exaggerated facial tic.
“My eye doesn’t twitch.”
“It’s twitching right now.”
I rubbed my face. “Judge Theodore Kearns paid me a visit. He’s the father of the man Faith’s accused of killing.”
Knox went still. The kind of still that made other inmates nervous. “Let me guess. He wants you to drop Faith’s case.”
“Got it in one try.”
“And?”
“And he threatened to tank your parole hearing if I don’t.”
The silence stretched between us like a tightrope. Around us, families clustered at scarred metal tables, trying to compress years into supervised hours. A toddler shrieked with laughter two tables over, completely oblivious to where Daddy lived.
