Page 42 of Justice

I knew right then. Standing in the wreckage of my life, I knew. There was only one person on this earth with access to my devices, my files, my body, and the cold patient cruelty to use all three at once. He hadn’t just beaten me. He’d made sure the world watched him do it, and made it look like I’d done it to myself.

I opened my eyes in a dark bedroom in Potomac and swiped the tears off my face before they could fall.

That was a long time ago. Another woman’s life. I wasn’t her anymore, the shark in the silk blouse. I knew better now.

I closed the laptop and set it aside.

But I decided I was going to that party. Two nights from now. One good night, borrowed against a life that owed me at least that much. I was going to put on a dress and stand in a beautiful room and, just for a few hours, be a woman who got to want things.

I’d earned that. God knew I’d earned that.

22

SKYE

I almost didn’t recognize the woman in the mirror. This is who I used to look like before my life went to shit.

Aubrey let me borrow this dress she bought well before the twins were born. It was a deep wine red satin that poured over me like water, a corset bodice laced up snug with panels of lace let into the sides with thin little straps.

It hugged everything I usually kept hidden under scrubs and swallowed up under athleisure, every curve I’d spent years trying not to have anybody look at too long. My hair was up. A little gold at my ears. I looked like somebody. I looked like the woman I used to be before the world took her apart, except softer now, fuller, marked by everything that had happened in between.

I turned to the side and almost lost my nerve. Then I decided I didn’t care. For one night, I was going to have eyes on me.

“Miss Skye.” Dream’s voice came from my doorway on a gasp, and I turned to find her and Rita both standing there, Dream’s mouth hanging open, Rita leaning on her cane with a knowing little smile. “You look like a princess.”

“A princess.” Rita snorted. “Baby, that’s a Queen right there. Ain’t nothing princess about that dress. Turn around, let me see you.”

I turned, feeling foolish and warm at the same damn time, and Rita nodded slow like a woman appraising something valuable.

“Mm. Yeah. You wearing that dress, it ain’t wearing you. Good.” She pointed the cane at me. “Now you go on to that party and you have yourself a time, you hear? A real one. Lord knows you earned it working in this house like a mule.”

“I don’t work that hard.”

“You work harder than anybody in it.” She said it plain, no joke in it, and it landed somewhere soft and unguarded in me before I could put a wall up against it. “Go have your night, baby.”

Dream came and pressed her little body into my side, careful of the dress, and looked up at me. “You’re the prettiest lady in the whole wide world.”

I bent and kissed the top of her head, and for one dangerous second the ache of her rose up in me so strong I had to breathe through it. Every time I hold this child. Then I set it down, because I was good at setting it down, and I straightened back up and smiled.

“Y’all are gonna give me a big head. Go on, let me put the final touches on my make-up.”

The caregiver from Aubrey’s agency would be here in about 20 minutes and then it would be time for me to head out.

The doorbell rang while I was still upstairs, and by the time I came down Kira was already standing in the foyer.

She was here for Storie. Justice wasn’t home, he was already at the casino, so it was just me coming down those floating stairs into a foyer that held Kira and all the perfume she’d arrived in.

She heard my heels on the wood and turned. Her eyes traveled over me, taking in the dress, my hair, all of it. Her mouth tightened before she could stop it. She hadn’t expected me to look this good, and judging by her face, she wished I didn’t.

“Well.” Her smile came a half-beat late. “Look at you. You’re going out?”

“Yeah, there’s a party at the casino.” I kept it pleasant.

Her face slipped and she fixed it quick. Not quick enough. Because she hadn’t been invited. She was standing in the foyer picking up a child for the weekend while the help went to the party, and it was written all over her before she could tuck it away.

“That’s nice,” she said, in the tone women use when a thing is not nice at all. “He didn’t mention it.”

“Did he not?” I let that sit there, soft as anything.