“Yosh? Yosh Aoki?”
The guard from the visitation room calls my name. I freeze, then turn around.
I could still walk out. I’m not the one locked up. Nothing’s stopping me from heading straight for the exit. So why are my feet carrying me back to the visitation room instead?
I nod to the guards—all of them—and return to the same table I sat at minutes ago. Only now there’s a different face waiting for me, and this one isn’t smiling the way Deep Diver did when I walked in.
“What a fucking disappointment,” Terrence mutters, mumbling something up at the ceiling.
I can’t tell if he’s cursing me or asking the gods why life is doing this to him.
“What?”
“First the guy in front of me took the last chocolate pudding, and now it’s you instead of Denice.”
She must be the girl from SeaBreeze. I remember her picking Terrence up from work once.
“Sorry,” I say softly.
“What do you want, Aoki? You get the job?”
“I didn’t take it.”
He shakes his head, letting out a hollow laugh. “Of course you didn’t.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’re one big disappointment, Aoki. All that talking you do. All that showing off. How smart, how skilled, how capable you are. But in the end, you never accomplish anything.”
My breath catches, my fingers tense on the table. Terrence smiles.
I pull myself together.
He’s aiming for my weaknesses because he knows them. When the drug task force raided his studio, they also found classified patient files on his laptop. Mine included.
“You broke into Erin’s hard drive and read everything about me. My history, my diagnosis, my treatments. How many years did you get for that on top of the drug-smuggling thing?”
Terrence places his palm flat on the table and leans forward.
“First of all, Aoki, not everything is about you. I wasn’t digging in her hard drive to get that information about you. But I have to say, it was pretty good reading material during my toilet breaks.”
I am not sure if I want to choke on my tongue or scream.
“Second, I had nothing to do with those drugs. Someone planted evidence in my studio and made Deep Diver testify against me. I’m getting fucking framed for this, and I’m starting to believe it was you. So drop the act and tell me what you want.”
He death-stares me. I match it.
“You actually believe I would do something like that? How?”
Then his mouth curls into a grin. “Of course not. Like I said, you’re not capable of doing anything. I just wanted to see your reaction.”
Now I do scream and jump to my feet. A guard is coming our way.
“Out. It’s time to go.”
“Wait, wait,” Terrence tells the guard. “Give us a second.”
This is turning into a mess.
