Royal doesn’t smile, but I catch the smallest shift in his gaze, like he files that away under useful information. “Court’s Thursday,” he says. “Nine a.m. Pearly Gates will pack the benches like it’s Easter.”
Legend nods once. “We don’t show up in cuts,” he says. “No intimidation. No posturing. We don’t give them a picture they can sell.”
Holler’s eyebrow lifts. “And if they already decided the picture?”
“Then we don’t color it in for ’em,” Legend replies, and the room goes quiet in the way it does when a man says something everybody knows is right, even when it tastes like losing.
I offer to go with her, anyway. She shakes her head at the front door like she can read the fight in my body before I speak.
“I’m not hiding behind you,” she says, calm as you please, and that shouldn’t hit me the way it does, but it does, because there’s pride in it and steel in it and the kind of stubborn that gets women killed in this town if they don’t have somebody behind them who’s willing to be worse.
At the courthouse she walks in alone, chin up, shoulders set, not defiant, not fragile, just steady, like she’s walked into worse places than a hearing room and come out breathing.
Pearly Gates fills four rows like the town. The Reverend sits in the front, and a county prosecutor flips through files like he’s bored, like he’s already decided what he wants the day to be.
Brittany sits straight in the chair, hands folded neatly, and if she’s scared it doesn’t show in her posture. They ask about the lake. They ask about Bethany. They ask about the club. This ain’t about what happened at the pawn shop.
“Did Mr. Coplen ever threaten his wife?”
“No,” Brittany answers, clear and steady.
“Did he instruct you to lie?”
“No.”
“Did he ask you to hide evidence?”
“No.”
They circle back like buzzards, again and again, trying to bait her into a mistake they can call a confession.
“If the club was involved in her disappearance at the lake, you would tell us, correct?”
“If I had evidence,” Brittany says calmly.
“And do you?”
“No.”
She doesn’t look at me once. She doesn’t need to. She ain’t performing for me. She ain’t trying to get rescued.
When it’s over, she walks out past the Reverend without flinching. He murmurs something under his breath as she passes, probably scripture, probably poison, probably both, and Brittany stops like a switch flipped.
She turns. Looks him right in the eye. Smiles, small and sharp.
“You don’t scare me,” she says softly.
The hall goes still, even the prosecutor’s page-flipping slowing down like he can’t help but listen, and then she walks out, no dramatics, no applause, just quiet steel, the kind that doesn’t bend because it already knows what it is.
Royal watches her from across the hall, and when we’re outside he claps me once on the shoulder, brief as a stamp.
“She didn’t fold,” he says.
“I told you,” I reply.
He nods slowly. “Yeah. You did.”
It ain’t just the courthouse. It’s what she does after, like she decided she’s done letting Hell write her story.
