Page 59 of Justice

“Excuse you!” I nearly choked on my coffee.

“I mean it as a compliment, cuz. You look good. But you were a tiny thing when you got out of that marriage. I mean, I used to be able to count your ribs through your shirt. Collarbone used to be sharp as hell,” he laughed.

“Yeah, well.” I set the cup down. “Turns out stress from a narcissist works better than Ozempic ever could.”

The laugh evaporated into thin air and he shook his head.

“Your hair’s different too. Longer, that color on you is different. You used to keep it short and blonde. Honestly, if I passed you on the street and didn’t know better, I wouldn’t clock you as the same woman. I doubt he would either, if he saw you walking down some sidewalk in broad daylight.”

“Okay,” I said in a curt manner. I knew the truth. Roman would be able to recognize me in full clown make-up. He knew me well. I gave him purpose. Purpose to destroy. And his entire meaning in life was destruction.

Duke studied me a second, and whatever he saw on my face made his own expression shift.

“Skye.”

“What?” I asked.

“What’s going on with you and that man?”

“What man?”

“Don’t do that.” He tilted his head, studying me the way he used to study a hand of cards before he decided to call somebody’s bluff. “Justice Banks. There’s something going on aside from Roman being in town.”

I opened my mouth to deny it, had the lie halfway built and ready to hand him. But this was Duke. Duke had pulled me out of a burning house once, in every sense of that phrase, and lying to the one person who’d earned better than that just wasn’t in me.

“It’s not what you think,” I replied but I knew I wasn’t convincing.

“Skye.” Just my name, flat, waiting.

“Fine.” My voice came out smaller than I meant it to. “I think I might be falling for him.”

Something in Duke’s face didn’t look surprised so much as resigned, like a man watching a storm he’d already tracked on radar finally make landfall. He sat back in the booth and blew out a breath, and for a second neither one of us said anything at all.

“I need to say something to you, and I need you to actually hear it instead of getting mad at me.”

“That’s never a good sign.”

“You can have him.” He nodded, like he was agreeing with somebody, though I hadn’t said a word yet. “Or you can have Keenan. But you cannot have both, cuz. This isn’t going to end the way you want it to.”

I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t, really. My throat had closed up around every argument I wanted to throw back at him, because every single one of them was a lie and we both knew it. I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that there had to be some version of this where I got to keep both things I wanted most in the world. But Duke had never once lied to me, not even when a lie would’ve been kinder, and that was exactly why I trusted him enough to keep breathing air on the same side of the law he still walked.

“And on top of all that,” Duke went on, gentler now, like he regretted the first half but needed to finish anyway, “he’s in love with a costume, Skye. He doesn’t know your real name. Doesn’t know what you did, what was done to you, none of it. Whatever he feels, it’s for a woman that only exists in that house. One day the real you is gonna walk through that door, and there is no telling which way that man goes when she does.”

“I know that,” I said.

“I’m not trying to hurt you.”

“I know that too.”

I’d known all of it from the very first night I let him touch me, had known it and pushed the knowledge down somewhere I didn’t have to look at it every day. Hearing it said plain, in Duke’s voice, at a diner table with syrup rings still on it from whoever sat here before us, made it a fact instead of a fear. Facts didn’t let you talk yourself back around them the way fears sometimes did.

We sat there a minute in the quiet that only family can share, the silence that doesn’t need filling in. Then I nodded, mostly to myself, and reached for my coffee again like my hand wasn’t shaking a little around the cup.

“Just help me get the papers together,” I said. “I’ll figure out the rest.”

“That’s all I’m asking.” Duke slid out of the booth and stood, tossing a twenty on the table before I could argue about the bill. “Get your money together, get your boy, and get out this country.”

“I will,” I said, and I meant it as a promise to myself as much as anything I was saying to him.