by Hannah Ford
I giggled, liking the way it sounded. “Is it wrong that I like hearing the sound of that when we’re about to interview a potential murderer?”
Noah frowned. “You can’t think of it that way, Charlotte.”
“Can’t think of what what way?”
“You can’t think of Lilah as a potential murderer. You shouldn’t think of her at all, except for as a person who needs our help and deserves the best defense we can provide for her.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “But by thinking of her as a potential murderer, won’t that help me to anticipate how the prosecution might frame their case? Therefore giving us the best chance of providing the best counterpoints to that case?”
“Ahh,” he said. “Very good. But you have to remember to keep the case separate from the person. You shouldn’t think of Lilah in terms of guilt or innocence. The only things that should be labeled like that should be evidence.”
I nodded.
I liked the way he thought, and I couldn’t help but be completely and totally enraptured by him. I watched as he reached into his briefcase and pulled out a small tape recorder, set it down in the middle of the table.
“You do know that your iPhone can record things just as easily, right? And store them in the cloud?”
The side of his mouth twitched into a wry grin. “Are you trying to imply that I’m past it, Charlotte?”
“Not past it,” I said. “Just, you know, behind the times.”
“Watch it,” he said, his tone teasing. “Or I’ll have to take my displeasure out on that pretty little ass of yours.”
He reached over and picked up his pen, his shirt-sleeve sliding up a bit, revealing his taut forearm and his massive hand. I thought about his hand, slapping against my ass open-palmed, over and over again, and a blush rose high on my cheeks, as desire pumped through my body.
How the hell was I ever going to work with Noah on a day-to-day basis? Just him being near sent me over the edge. For the first time, I began to feel grateful for the BDSM room he’d set up in our office.
“This is the Lilah Parks case, first meeting,” he said into the tape recorder, following it with the date and time. “Charlotte Holloway and Noah Cutler present.”God, his voice was so commanding, so in control. I wondered if that was something that would come with experience, if I would ever have that kind of confidence in myself and my abilities as a lawyer, or if it was something that had been ingrained in him.
I felt like it had to have been ingrained in him.
He was like that in every aspect of his life, exercising precision and control.
And he was going to be my husband.
My husband.
I glanced down at the engagement ring on my finger and shook my head in wonder.
My husband.
My fiancé.
I wondered how long it would take me to get used to saying those words. And then the first, weird, little niggling doubt worked its way into my consciousness, like a worm working its way into a rotten apple. Noah and I had just gotten engaged. And instead of being out celebrating somewhere, we were sitting in a holding room of a women’s penitentiary.
Was this normal? Even the sex we’d had, while mind-blowing and amazing, had been in the BDSM room of our new office. Was it normal for your fiancé to build you a BDSM room in an office where he was going to be your boss?
Before my mind could really get going and let my crazy thoughts plant and bloom, a loud buzzing noise blasted against my ears, and a wide steel door at the opposite end of the room swung open.
A girl in an orange jumpsuit was led into the room by two beefy guards. She was handcuffed, her hands bound together by a thin braid of silver chain. A second later, I realized her ankles were cuffed together, too. She shuffled along, her dark hair falling over her face.
“Why are her ankles chained?” Noah demanded of the guards.
They looked at each other and rolled their eyes, one of those ‘lawyers are so over-the-top and full of themselves’ kind of looks, like they thought Noah was being overzealous.
“Was she violent?” Noah asked. “Did she resist arrest?”
“No,” one of the guards, the younger one, admitted.
“Unhook her ankles,” Noah said again. “Or I’ll report you for cruel and unusual punishment of a prisoner.”
The older guard sighed, the sigh of a man who’d seen everything and was just waiting for the end of his shift to come so that he could go home and eat pot roast. But he kneeled down and unhooked the girl’s shackles.
“Thank you,” she said to the guard. Her voice was sweet and sincere.
The guards left the room and the girl sat down in the chair across from us.
The first thing I noticed about her was how small she was. She was just so tiny. Delicate features, long limbs, and chestnut brown hair that was thick and lush, but in need of a brushing. Eyeliner was smudged under her deep blue eyes, and there was a faint plum-colored bruise on the apple of her right cheek.
Her lips were slightly chapped and bee-stung, but they were full and pink. If you were asked to identify someone who looked the least likely to be a murderer, it would be Lilah Parks.
“Who are you?” Lilah asked, her eyes flicking back and forth between me and Noah.
“I’m Noah Cutler, and this is my associate, Charlotte Holloway. We’re lawyers.”
“Lawyers,” she repeated the word, and her eyes got even wider, like she couldn’t believe she was in a situation where lawyers were going to have to be involved.
“Yes,” Noah said gently. “We heard about your case, and we wanted to come down and offer our services.”
Lilah shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry, I don’t have any money.”
“We’d like to work for you pro bono,” I explained.
“I don’t know what that means,” she replied. She took in a deep shuddering breath and pushed her bangs out of her eyes.
She didn’t know what pro bono meant? That seemed a little bit of a stretch for a nineteen-year-old. But maybe I was being too hard on her. Just because I knew what pro bono meant didn’t meant she did. I knew nothing about her, what her life was like, her education.
“It means we’d like to work for you for free,” I explained.
Lilah frowned and bit her bottom lip, revealing perfectly straight white teeth. “Why would you want to do that?”
“Because we think your case is going to be a big one, and we’d like to help you,” Noah said, not pulling any punches. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye, glad he was telling her the truth and not trying to pretend like we were here just out of the goodness of our hearts.
“Why is my case going to be big?” Lilah wanted to know.
Noah smiled. “Why don’t we start at the beginning,” he said. “First things first.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a sheaf of papers. “This document says that you agree that we’ll be representing you legally in this case.”
Lilah glanced at the paper, then looked back up at me and Noah. She reached down, picked up the pen, and signed the documents. “This means you can’t tell them anything we talk about, right?”
“Right,” Noah said.
She’d signed the paper without even looking at it, which made me think she might really have been naïve enough to not know what pro bono meant. Although somehow she’d known about lawyer/client confidentiality.
“So, why don’t you tell us what happened,” Noah said.
“Ry’s dead,” Lilah announced.
“Ry, that was your boyfriend?” I asked.
“Yes, Ry. Ryan. He was my boyfriend, but he’s dead now.” She was talking with a flat affect, her tone completely devoid of emotion. I glanced at Noah. Come on, I was thinking. If my boyfriend had just died, if I’d killed him in self-defense before being thrown in jail, I would be freaking the hell out. I would be crying, screaming, pleading for someone to get me out of here.
This girl was announcing her boyfriend’s death like
she was reciting a weather report.
“Do you have any idea how he died?” I asked.
“I killed him,” Lilah said simply, and hearing her say the words knocked the breath out of me. I glanced at Noah again, but he was looking straight ahead, his eyes trained on Lilah.
“You killed your boyfriend?” he asked.
“I had to,” she said. “Ry, he… he found out about some things, and he just… he was trying to… he wanted me to do things I wasn’t comfortable with.”
It was the first time her voice had betrayed any kind of emotion since she’d been brought in here, and her eyes were wide with fear.
“What kind of things?” I asked gently. If she was talking about sexual things, it was probably better for the question to come from me, a woman.
“Sex things,” she said quietly.
“He tried to rape you?” I prompted. “And so you stabbed him?”
“I don’t remember.” The fear had drifted from her eyes, replaced with something almost catatonic. A shiver of fear drifted up my spine. Something was off about this girl – a girl her size had almost been raped, and yet had somehow been able to not only fight off her attacker but kill him? Why was her boyfriend trying to rape her? And how had she been able to overpower him?
“You don’t remember?” I pushed, not even bothering to keep the skepticism out of my voice. “You don’t remember that you stabbed your boyfriend--” I glanced down at the police report in front of me—“twenty-seven times and then slit his throat?”
“I had to,” she said. “He wanted it.”
“He wanted what?” I asked.
“Charlotte.” Noah put his hand gently on my arm.
I looked at him, annoyed. What was he doing? This girl obviously had some kind of screw loose, and the sooner we let her know we weren’t buying her story, the better. We weren’t going to be able to help her if she insisted on lying to us. A self-defense case was difficult as hell to win under normal circumstances, but now this girl was trying to tell us she didn’t remember what had happened?
She was going to have to get over that, and fast.
Taking on a high-profile pro bono case was one thing. It was quite another to take on a high-profile pro bono case you had no chance of winning, with a client who was going to sabotage her own case by working against you.
Even I knew that. It was Criminal Law 101, not to mention common sense.
“Have you seen a doctor?” Noah asked her.
Lilah shook her head.
“Have you told anyone that you’re a victim of an attempted rape?” Noah asked.
I looked at him, my eyes widening in surprise. Was he really believing this bullshit? That her boyfriend had almost raped her and so she’d gone so crazy that she’d somehow overpowered him and slit his throat? And that all she had on her was a mark on her face?
I had no problem believing she was the victim of something – I knew that in these situations, the victims were made to feel as if they didn’t have a voice, and that was the last thing I wanted to happen to Lilah.
But something about this just felt off.
“Yes,” she said. “Well, no. I mean, I told them Ry came after me. But they didn’t… I’m not sure. I think I saw them write it down.”
“On the police report you mean?” I said it very pointedly, knowing that if the police had thought anything was off, if they’d had reason to think that Lilah had been raped, they would have taken her to the hospital and made sure she’d gotten an exam.
Noah gave me a pointed look right back, one of those ‘the police miss things, Charlotte, you should understand that better than anyone after what we’ve been through’ looks.
“Where’s the murder weapon?” I asked.
“Charlotte!” Noah exclaimed.
“I mean, where’s the knife you used on Ry?”
Lilah didn’t seem offended by my question, or the fact that I’d just referred to her boyfriend’s death as a murder. Her eyes kept that same blank look. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” I tried to keep from scoffing, but it was difficult.
She shook her head. “Everything just… it all happened so fast.”
“Do you know where you got the knife?” I pressed her, trying to keep my tone a little more neutral, if only because I didn’t want to risk Noah reprimanding me again.
“What?” Lilah seemed startled by this. She put her cuffed hands up on the table and steepled them, her fingertips rubbing together rhythmically, almost like a nervous tic. She was wearing dark nail polish, the kind the girls in my undergrad wore, the ones that were trying to be badass and compensate for the fact that they were upper middle class and getting a private school education.
“Ry was found in the bedroom,” I said. “It’s a strange place to have a knife.”
Lilah shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe I went out in the kitchen and got it.”
I nodded and made a note on my legal pad, making sure not to look at Noah. Did this girl really expect us to believe that her boyfriend tried to sexually assault her in the bedroom, then she ran out into the kitchen and grabbed a knife before she returned to the bedroom where she then slit his throat?
“Do they really think I did this?” Lilah asked. “Like, do they think I really hurt him?”
I frowned. “You just said that you did,” I pointed out. “You said it was self-defense.”
“I don’t know what it was,” she said. She pulled at the sleeves of her jumpsuit as much as her hands would allow her to. The bones of her wrists stuck prominently out from her skin, and I wondered how they’d even found handcuffs small enough to fit her.
“Did you have a psych eval?” Noah asked.
She shook her head no. “They gave me this.” She pushed her hair away from her face, and I tried not to gasp. A zig-zag gash ran up the side of her temple, with a line of exposed stitches sloppily holding it together. “A doctor did it,” Lilah whispered. “A prison one.”
Even I knew that was bad. If she’d seen a doctor, then she should have at least been checked for signs of trauma. Not to mention the fact that her cut was an open wound, the skin newly stitched together. She should have at least have had a bandage covering it. It was just begging for an infection.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Noah growled. “He did that to you?”
“No,” Lilah shook her head. “He didn’t. One of the girls here did, in the holding cell when I first came in. She said I was looking at her, so she slammed my head into the wall.”
The story hardly made any sense. If she’d been slammed into a wall, wouldn’t she have been a little more nervous, traumatized, something? And why had she said she hadn’t seen a doctor? Obviously she had, she had stitches.
This girl was either seriously fucked up in the head, or she was a stone cold killer.
Possibly both.
Noah was out of his seat and pounding on the door that Lilah had come through.
A guard appeared, a different one than the two who had brought her in. This one was younger, fresh-faced, his eyes still bright, his spirit not broken by the overwhelming desperation of his job.
“I want my client taken to a hospital,” Noah said. He was dialing a number on his phone, waiting for someone on the other end to pick up.
“I don’t have the authority to authorize something like that.” The guard was nervous, you could tell. I would have been, too. Noah looked like he was one step away from going unleashing the wrath of God, and I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other end of it.
“I know,” Noah said. “Which is why I’m taking care of it. I just wanted to give you the heads up. Get a transport ready.” He smiled, the smile of a man who was about to get his way and didn’t give a fuck.
An hour later, Lilah was being taken to New York Presbyterian for evaluation.
**
When we got outside the prison, the air was humid, clinging and hot against my skin. I had an uneasy feeling in my stomach, the kind of anxio
usness that settled deep into you and wouldn’t let go.
I couldn’t wait to talk to Noah about what we’d just heard. I realized we hadn’t figure out exactly how this dynamic was going to work between us. I was just a law student, after all, and he was my boss. And my fiancé.
We began walking through the parking lot to where Jared had parked the Town Car and was waiting to take us back to the city. I wondered how Jared had been able to just sit here, outside of a prison that was surrounded by deep woods on all sides, in the dark of night.
We were halfway to the car, walking along the gravelly walkway by the side of the building when I saw a figure half in shadow, hiding between two of the cars.
I reached out and grabbed Noah’s arm.
“There’s something there,” I whispered, my nails digging into him. “Between the cars.”
Noah immediately stepped in front me, shielding my body with his own. “Where?”
“There.” I pointed to where I’d seen the lurking shadow, and Noah immediately pushed me into a tiny alcove in the side of the building. “Stay here,” he instructed. “Don’t move.”
He left, and I pulled my phone out, ready to call 911.
But when he came back, he was shaking his head. “There was no one there,” he said.
“Are you sure?” My heart was pounding as I looked out across the parking lot. I was sure I had seen someone.
“Yes,” Noah said. He pointed to one of the tall pine trees, how it’s shadow fell over the parking lot, its branches turning into arms as it moved in the breeze, giving the impression of a man.
“Oh,” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry.”
“Don’t apologize,” Noah said. “It’s better to be safe than sorry.”
I nodded.
We kept walking, but a second later, Noah grabbed me around the waist and pushed me into an alley between the building that housed the administration and the actual jail.
“What is it?” I asked, my breath hitching in my chest. “Is someone out there after all?”
He shook his head, and then I saw the brightness in his eyes, the glowing intensity that could only mean one thing.
He grabbed my wrists and shoved them up over my head, the back of my hands scraping against the hard concrete of the building behind me. Noah pressed his rock hard body up against me, his hips pinning me to the wall. And then his mouth crashed into mine, his tongue driving my lips open, the brute strength of his body forcing me to surrender to him, pushing me so hard into the wall behind me that I couldn’t breath.