[The Shifters Committee 05.0] Sensual Hero

by Rebecca Foxx

  “No. I’m sorry, Moira, but no. I don’t have time for this right now. I have to leave for the court. Michael’s lawyer called right before you and said that there is a good chance the jury is going to come back with a verdict within the next few hours. I’m going to be there when it’s delivered. Everyone else may have given up on him, but I haven’t. I’m going to support my husband, the same way I would want him to support me.”

  Kayla didn’t wait for her sister’s response, instead hanging up her phone angrily. Times like these made her wish she still had a landline, if for nothing else so that she could get the satisfactory “bang!” of slamming a phone down in someone’s ear. It just wasn’t the same with a cellphone.

  It didn’t have quite the same effect. Kayla sat there in a daze, looking down on her phone as if she thought somehow staring at it for long enough would cause it to change its message, to tell her that her sister didn’t really believe her husband was guilty of fraud and therefore deserving of time in prison. Nothing changed, however. The phone remained as it was, just a phone with no solace to provide.

  “What in god’s name am I going to do?”

  With nobody else there, with the house as silent as the grave, Kayla Bends had taken to talking to herself. She sighed, putting her head between her hands and gazing down at the wedding photo she kept near her at all times. How happy they had looked, how sure that they were bound for great things. Everyone had told them what a beautiful couple they made, something they still heard frequently in present time.

  She supposed it was true, objectively speaking. She was of average height for a woman, with ivory colored skin and deep blue eyes the color of still pools. Her hair was all long curls of a mahogany hue and she had a little smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose that Michael had always said he loved.

  Michael was tall, several inches over six feet, with thick black hair and amber colored eyes that always made her think of movie stars. It wasn’t even any movie star in particular, just that his eyes looked like something that belonged on a movie star. She had always been so in awe of the man that he was, and now she was supposed to pick herself up and drag herself to a courthouse where twelve people she did not know at all would decide the course of the rest of their lives.

  It seemed impossible, but that didn’t make it any less true. She stood, feeling ever so slightly dizzy as she did so, and collected her things. She didn’t have a choice. Time, and this case against her husband, were marching on whether she liked it or not.

  “Has the jury reached a verdict?”

  “We have, your honor.”

  “And what say you?”

  “We the jury find the defendant, Michael Bends, guilty on all counts.”

  “Thank you for your service. That will be all. So says the jury. Ballif, please take Mr. Bends back into your custody. He will be sentenced at a later date, to be set after we leave this courtroom. With that, the court is adjourned.”

  The room erupted into loud yells of what mostly sounded like approval. There were people congratulating each other, people clapping each other on the back and shaking hands. Only Kayla remained in her seat, looking about her in stunned silence.

  There had to be some kind of a mistake. They couldn’t possibly be talking about her husband. They couldn’t be talking about the man she had loved for almost half of her life, the man who had worked so tirelessly for so long just so that he could provide them with a good life, a better life than what either of them had growing up.

  But even as those thoughts crossed her mind, she watched two big, burly men stepping up to Michael and with grim expressions on their faces putting him back into his shackles. Michael’s face looked somewhere between stunned and stricken, his eyes rolling around in his head as he tried to look at everything all at the same time.

  That was enough to make Kayla stand. She had to get his attention, needed to get his attention before they took her love away from her again. Finally, at the last moment, she caught his gaze, both of their eyes filling with tears simultaneously.

  They could not speak to each other, they couldn’t get close enough, but she could see him mouthing the words “I love you” across the room to her. She didn’t even have time to mouth it back. Just like that, he was gone, and she was left to try and figure out what on earth she was supposed to do next.

  Chapter Two

  “How is that possible? What am I supposed to do? To live on?”

  “Unfortunately, Mrs. Bends, that is not really the court’s problem. They will leave you enough to survive on, of course, but as for the lavish lifestyle you have become so accustomed to, they aren’t concerned with helping you maintain that. Not if it was acquired through devious and illegal means.”

  “Wait a minute, aren’t you supposed to be our lawyer? Aren’t you supposed to be on my husband’s side?”

  “Sure, yes, and I’ll bust my ass getting the best possible situation for him, but let’s be realistic, ok? Your husband just got convicted of stealing a lot of money. I mean a whole lot of money. The courts aren’t particularly inclined to feel sympathy for you losing your millions and your mansion on the hill. As far as the courts are concerned, that money doesn’t belong to you anymore. If he didn’t actually earn it, it isn’t yours to spend. You got me?”

  If Kayla was the type of woman to yell, this was about when she would have done it. It was completely infuriating to hear a man she knew they had paid hundreds of dollars an hour speak about Michael that way. The way he made it sound, he had never considered for even a moment that Michael might be innocent.

  Couldn’t that have contributed to his conviction? Michael was set to spend ten years in jail, a decade of his life, of their lives together on a crime he was adamant about not having committed. Why was this slick, pompous lawyer not at least partially responsible for that when he so clearly wasn’t invested in her husband or in what happened to her?

  As far as she could tell, he had been utterly useless, doing nothing but draining money out of them and laughing all the way to the bank. She was losing her home, for christ’s sake. She had already looked at the sorts of places she was going to be able to afford once the court enacted its punishment, and it wasn’t good. It wasn’t just because it wasn’t what she was used to, either.

  It was a little one bedroom apartment in a part of town she wasn’t all that keen on living in while she was on her own. It didn’t have a washer and dryer, it didn’t have a gate, it didn’t have security. That might or might not be a problem for most people, but Kayla Bends wasn’t most people, at least not anymore.

  Her face had been plastered across the papers right along with her husband’s and people knew her now. They knew her as the spoiled little heiress wife of the swindler financial corporate crook, even though neither assessment was anywhere close to the truth.

  Since Michael had been convicted, she had actually had people spit at her on the streets. Complete strangers had thrown things at her as they drove by, calling her the ugliest names imaginable. Coming to the safety of her own homes had been one of the only things keeping her from falling apart, and now here she was, talking to the lawyer about how big of an allowance she would still have while the moving company callously took most of her possessions away, packing what she would be allowed to keep onto a much smaller truck.

  It was enough to break a person, but still, Kayla did not cry. She refused to, she would not give any of them the satisfaction. Instead she got up as graciously and calmly as she could, and gave the lawyer a cold smile.

  “Well thank you for your time. I can see that you believe you have done the best you could. I think I’ll be taking it from here.”

  “Wait, what? What does that mean?”

  “It means I’ll be taking it from here. I can see that you are entirely convinced that my husband is guilty, which of course is your right. It is, in turn, my right to seek different council.”

  “I don’t think that’s wise. I wouldn’t recommend it.”
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br />   “I’m sure you wouldn’t,” Kayla said, hardly able to contain her laughter at the alarming shade of purple the man was turning, “but I happen to have a difference of opinion on this subject. I believe you have been paid in full up to this point?”

  “Yes, but-”

  “No, that will be all. Good afternoon.”

  The lawyer got up, slamming his chair back and making a big show of getting all of his things in order to leave.

  Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have all that many things with him and so the show was rather less dramatic than he would probably have liked. He gave her a look like he would have throttled her if he thought he would have been able to get away with it and then huffed off towards the front door.

  He tried to slam that, too, but it was a soft closing door that couldn’t have slammed if it had wanted to more than anything in the world. Instead it closed slowly, quietly, as if it hadn’t a care in the world.

  “Damnit!” she heard him yell at the top of his lungs. Clearly, he was a man used to getting his own way. Now the laughter she had been keeping in burst out in a little frenzy, causing several of the movers to glance at her with smiles of their own. That was one thing she could say the bloodsucking lawyer had been good for.

  He had provided her with a good laugh at a time when laughter seemed nearly impossible. It was short lived, however, and Kayla stood slowly, looking around her with a feeling of sorrow and nostalgia she had never known before. She had loved living in this place. It had been more than just a lavish lifestyle or an extravagant home.

  It had been a representation of the life she and Michael had built together and conversely her being forced to move, and to move without him, no less, was a dark symbol of how everything had so fantastically fallen apart. She took one last long look, shook her head, and began to make her way towards the door the lawyer had just so dramatically made his exit from.

  It didn’t do any good to wallow in self-pity and becoming overly sentimental would just make the next steps she was going to have to take all the more unbearable. It was time for her to move on, to her new home and a new frontier she hadn’t begun to think of how to navigate. She was going to have to learn, that was all, starting with remembering how exactly she got to the new place.

  “So here’s your keys, one for the door and one for your mailbox. The mailboxes are in the hallway downstairs, number’s the same as your apartment number. Pretty simple stuff, lady, but if you have any questions go ahead and ask them. Chances are I’ll answer.”

  “Well thank you,” she said with an uncertain smile, “I appreciate it.”

  She wasn’t really sure what to make of this man, her new landlord. He was impossibly large with a long, messy beard that somehow reminded her of Santa Claus and an odor around him that left no doubt of his being a chain smoker.

  He wheezed while he walked up the stairs and spent a good amount of time cursing under his breath about things he saw around the property that he wasn’t satisfied with, but he seemed nice enough and she appreciated how blunt he was. He struck her as the type of guy who was going to tell her the truth about things and that was exactly what she needed at the moment.

  She had experienced enough cloak and dagger over the past several months to last her the rest of her life. She just wanted things to be simple, straight forward. She just wanted things to be transparent. She also wanted some time to herself, which she was thankfully just about to receive for the first time in what felt like forever.

  The landlord had very kindly walked Kayla up to her new front door, going so far as to unlock it for her and usher her inside. He did a quick walk through, making sure that everything still appeared to be in order, and then headed for the door. He was just about to leave her in blissful solitude when he turned back towards her with a furrowed brow.

  He pulled several crumpled envelopes from his back pocket, squinted down at them to make sure they were what he was looking for, and then thrust them out in her direction. Kayla stepped forward uncertainly, taking the letters gingerly as if they somehow had the potential to hurt her.

  “Here you go, I forgot about this. These letters came for you, one every couple of days over the past week. I figured I would hand ‘em to you myself, figured it must be important if they’re being sent before you even move in.”

  “Thank you, that’s very sweet.”

  “Ha!” the man replied with a laugh that shook his substantial belly, “I ain’t never been accused of being sweet, I can assure you of that.”

  “Well you’ve been sweet to me, and I thank you for it.”

  “That’s alright. It’s not a problem. You let me know if you need anything, you hear? Let me know if you have any trouble with anyone. I don’t care who you’re hitched to, you deserve to have a safe place to live.”

  Kayla found that she couldn’t speak and so she nodded her head in gratitude instead. She shook the man’s head and shut it behind him, placing her palm on the frame once it was closed. It had been a truly exhausting couple of months and even though she hadn’t wanted to move, now that she was here with the few pieces of furniture still in her possession she was more than happy to throw herself on the couch and finally relax.

  She would fall into a deep sleep, one she could already feel coming, but first she would look at the letters. She hadn’t even glanced at them long enough to see who they were from while the landlord was still there for fear of them being some kind of hate mail that would only upset her. She looked now, however, and saw with surprise that they were from her husband.

  Already he was sending her letters and she didn’t know whether to be filled with joy or to be filled with dread. She did know one thing, though, and it was something that made her feel cold all over.

  Seeing Michael’s name on the envelope had made her realize that, for the first time since all of this mess had started, she honestly wasn’t sure that she still believed he was innocent. She just didn’t know what to believe anymore.

  Chapter Three

  “Move it, pretty boy, where do you think you are, the runway? This ain’t no fashion show, and it sure as shit ain’t your fancy office. That’s right, people in here know all about you, same as the people on the outside. And I got news for you, we ain’t got no more sympathy for you than them folks out there do. No special treatment for you here, none at all.”

  “I’m not expecting any.”

  “What was that? What did you say to me, pretty boy?”

  “Nothing. I didn’t say anything. Let me get out of your way.”

  “That’s what I thought. And if I were you I would make it a habit to stay out of my way. I don’t like pricks like you. Never have, don’t plan on starting now.”

  Michael bit the insides of his cheeks to keep from saying anything in retaliation. Generally speaking, he was not a man who just sat back quietly while people tried to walk all over him. He liked to think of himself as a man of action, but things were different now.

  The world he had landed in was so completely unlike anything he had done before that he knew it was imperative for him to keep his mouth shut, whether it came naturally to him or not. It wasn’t that the men he had worked with hadn’t had the potential to be dangerous.

  They most certainly did and he could have rattled off several examples of men completely destroying the lives of other men and then laughing about it over cocktails with their buddies. Even so, this was a different ballgame entirely. These were beasts of a different nature, a nature he could not claim to understand, and bowing up to these men was liable to get him killed.

  He was smart enough to know that and so he had been doing his best to stay out of the way and unnoticed. It wasn’t that it always worked, not by any stretch of the imagination, but Michael did his best to defuse any situation as quickly as he was able and, so far, he hadn’t gotten into any kind of real trouble. He just tried to keep to his cell for as much of the time as was permitted.

  He had never expected to feel any kind of gratitu
de for a place like that little cell, but he did now. It was the place where he felt safest out of the hellhole he had been dropped into, the place where he was able to take a moment for himself. Luckily he had a cellmate who went by the name of Alistair whom he didn’t find horrifying and who allowed him his privacy.

  From what he could tell the man had been in there since god first created man, and he was an excellent source of information for Michael on the many potential errors when initiating himself into jailhouse living. The only question about his personal life that Alastair had ever asked him was both simple and impossibly complicated; did you do it?

  “What?”

  “Don’t act deaf, boy. I don’t enjoy a man who can’t stand up tall and answer what is asked of him. That being said, I will ask you one more time. Did you do it? Did you commit the crime?”

  “No. No, I didn’t commit any crime.”

  “Ha! Well then you’re just like most of the men in here, aren’t you? Never committed a crime. Your head ever get to feeling heavy from lugging that halo around?”