“Keep asking me questions,” he said, pulling Mr. Thimble out from against his chest. “I need to keep my mind prepared.”
I grabbed the manila folder tucked behind him on the seat. There were a lot of questions. We’d gone over many of them before, but there was no assurances he would be asked any of them. “Who did you report the crime to?”
“I went to the New York State Inspector General’s office in—” He let out a whimper. “Albany.”
“How long after discovering the information did it take you to visit them?”
Another big inhale. “I had to collect evidence first.”
“So, it wasn’t immediately?” I said, and it pained me to give him harsh rebuttals. “There was time between when you found out and when you reported the findings?”
“I had to make sure the evidence wasn’t going to be destroyed,” he grumbled, squeezing Mr. Thimble harder.
“And how did you do that?”
His jaw clenched, tickling me as he continued to lay his head on my lap. “I discovered that every file was uploaded to the company server. Since my job allowed me access to the R&D data banks, I could see the information that was buried or taken out and destroyed from the paper files.”
“And how did you know to look for it?” I asked.
Ezra turned his head to look at me. He was crinkling up his suit. “When we received complaints about a product, it triggered an investigation, and that investigation was my department. My job was to analyze risks, prepare reports, and recommend ways forward to correct the risks. Since—” He blinked and I could see tears in his eyes. “Since I discovered that Nexovex buried information about products on the market, I couldn’t go to anyone in the company. I didn’t know who to trust. And—and someone came to my house, someone I thought was a friend, they tried to kill me.”
I shook my head. “It was perfect, up until that point. You can’t tell people that. There was no police report. It was cleaned away.”
“Then how else can I tell them people were trying to kill me?” he asked.
Since I’d never been in a court room or questioned about that stuff, I really didn’t know. I’d been before a jury of people before, but not for something this serious. We continued the rest of the drive talking through some more of the questions.
“How long do you think it’ll take?” he asked, now seated and slumped against my shoulder, his head resting on me.
“I’m not sure, kitten. We’ll ask your team when we get there.”
His team were meeting us at the courthouse. We were set to arrive in the back, and I wouldn’t be allowed to leave the car. I knew the moment I did, I would be arrested. Victor Pemberton and his team had been paying for the ads that pushed my faceand the narrative that I was a highly wanted criminal—and they weren’t far wrong. Ezra knew what I’d done, the lives I’d taken, and he was okay with it. That was all that mattered, and all I cared about.
As we got closer, the static of the radio crackled. “We’re all clear,” Donovan said.
“No signs of anyone. But there are an awful lot of officers around.”
“What does that mean?” Ezra whispered, wrapping his entire body almost around my arm. “I don’t wanna go. Please, I want to stay with you. Please.”
I also didn’t want to leave him. The idea that anything could happen in that court room... I didn’t want to leave him for even a second. I grabbed the radio. “Can someone prepare an officer’s uniform for me? My size. Large.”
Runa came through. “I’ll have it couriered over. And I’ve still got your back.”She’d organized a lot of this from Sanctum, but it pained me to know she wasn’t in full belief of this relationship—or of my ability to have a meaningful relationship that wasn’t going to end in pain and agony.
Ezra clenched around me tighter. “You’re gonna come with me?”
I looked around the inside of the car. The driver was one of Sanctum’s workers, dressed in their signature pale blue shirt—almost blending right in, and always so quiet. Sometimes eerily. There was space in here where I could change, and hopefully manage to be outside where I could be with Ezra when I was needed the most. “I’m gonna try,” I told him. “No, I will.” It had been months since I’d been really out in the field, and it was strange now, considering this was a job. I was strapped with a gun, and the target was Victor Pemberton—but I wasn’t going to kill him, he deserved to rot.
***
There were reporters everywhere, waiting at each of the SUVs, trying to see who was inside. The big case going on in the courthouse hadn’t been kept secret. It seemed in my lack of wanting to watch the news, or even acknowledge the world outside, I’d managed to overlook how people would react, and they were animals. Ruthless, trying their hardest to get exclusive photos, names, anything they could get their hands on.
Our car evaded most of it by going in a different direction. We stopped at a traffic signal, and someone approached the driver’s side. It was the person delivering the clothes I’d asked for. Ezra’s heart was practically in his mouth. He was taking deep breaths, each one of them louder than the last.
“This is all going to be okay,” I told him. I could be sure of that now.
The second time we stopped, I was switching shirts and placing the police officer epaulettes in place, hoping nobody would see that I was a higher rank than I’d potentially dressed for. But that second stop was when Ezra’s legal team and the eye-rolling Riley climbed in—they were still helping me get over my bad PR.
“I don’t want to see you,” they said.
