by Alexis Davie
People began to leave the breakroom, Piper included, walking on shaky legs back to her office. It was only once she was seated back behind her desk that she allowed herself to smile. She had been right all of those years ago when she had insisted to her boss that James was innocent. And although he had lost ten years of his life, at least now he would be freed and, Piper imagined, given a very hefty payout as an apology from the state. It would never be enough to replace that lost time, but it was still likely more than James had ever allowed himself to dream of once he had lost the appeal.
A knock sounded on Piper’s open office door and she looked up to see one of the secretaries standing there.
“Mr. Brown wants to see you,” she said.
“Thank you,” Piper said.
She got up and began to follow the secretary to Mr. Brown’s office. Piper could feel dread in the pit of her stomach. She was going to get dragged right over the coals for this—an innocent man had gone down for murder on her watch, and as if the guilt of knowing that, which Piper had carried with her for the last ten years, wasn’t enough, now she was likely going to be fired for it too.
Mr. Brown’s secretary knocked on his office door and announced Piper, and then she stood back and let Piper enter the office. Mr. Brown stood up as Piper went in.
“Firstly, let me apologize for doubting you when you told me James Pearson was innocent. I couldn’t see past the DNA evidence and I should have trusted your judgment more,” he said.
He nodded for Piper to take a seat, which she did. He retook his own seat behind his desk. Piper’s head was spinning. An apology had been the last thing she was expecting.
“And secondly, I need you to know that conviction wasn’t your fault. The only person responsible for any of this is the ex-DA who took the law into his own hands. No one could have gotten Mr. Pearson acquitted in the face of DNA evidence that placed him at the scene,” Mr. Brown went on.
“Wait,” Piper said. “I… I don’t understand. I thought you were bringing me in here to fire me.”
“To fire you? No. God no, Piper. You’re one of our best lawyers and like I said, this wasn’t your fault. No one would have predicted this. I wanted you to know that, but there is another reason for me calling you in here,” he said.
“Go on,” Piper said, her suspicions raised.
“Well, upon his release, Mr. Pearson talked to one of the reporters for a big news channel. Amongst other things, he told her how his lawyer always believed in his innocence. And she wants to interview you and get your take on things. I’ve told her to stop by at two o’clock this afternoon. That will give you time to go back over the case file and get everything back in order, right?”
Piper knew she didn’t need any time at all to go back through the files. She had never forgotten a moment of that case. She had never allowed herself to forget it for even a second. It was always there, gnawing away at her subconscious. But she didn’t think doing a TV interview was a good idea.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Mr. Brown,” she said. “Doing an interview, I mean. What can I add that hasn’t already been said?”
“Oh, come on, Piper. You’re always going on about how the system is geared to convict people once they’ve been accused of something. How hardly anyone gets a completely fair trial because the jury already thinks of them as guilty. And how the DA and the police are treated as heroes, untouchable, and they can do pretty much anything without it having a negative effect on their cases, but defense lawyers have to be on their toes all of the time. This is your chance to get all of that out there, to talk about why the system needs to change.”
“And of course it won’t hurt that the firm gets some good publicity out of this,” Piper responded.
“A happy accident,” Mr. Brown said with a wide smile that told Piper it was anything but an accident, happy or otherwise.
“Let me think about it,” Piper said.
Mr. Brown shook his head.
“Look, Piper, I made this sound like a request because I honestly thought you would jump at the chance to get your story out there. But let me be clear about this. This isn’t optional. You will be talking to that reporter when she gets here,” Mr. Brown said. “And the interview will be going out live, so you had best get your head together.”
“Then I guess I’d better go and brush up on the case,” Piper said coldly, standing up fast.
She had to get out of there before she said something that would get her fired. She wasn’t in the least bit impressed with being forced to do the interview, but she knew she really had no choice. Not because of Mr. Brown. She could walk into a job at any defense firm in New York tomorrow. No, she owed this to James, and to all of the people like him who had been wrongly convicted and had no one to speak out on their behalf.
Piper yawned as she brewed a pot of coffee. She made her way outside to collect her morning newspapers. She knew the interview yesterday had gone well and she was kind of looking forward to reading about herself in the morning’s newspapers. Piper Lee, the voice of the wrongfully accused.
The reporter who had conducted the interview had been open and attentive, and it had seemed to Piper that she really wanted to hear what she had to say, and consequently, she asked insightful questions and gave Piper time to expand on her answers. Piper was confident she had made a good impression, talking about the reforms needed within the criminal justice system to ensure something like this never happened again.
She flipped through the papers as she came back into the house. The first one had her on the front page sparking a debate about criminal justice and exactly what could be done to make the system fair. That was the only one that talked about the actual interview. The rest of the papers, tabloids mostly, instead focused on Piper herself and how she hadn’t aged a day since the original trial. She felt her enthusiasm for this story fading as quickly as it had come. Maybe even quicker than that.
She set aside the one decent story for later. Right now, she had to see how badly the tabloids were tearing her apart. The first one she read talked about her white privilege and how she clearly wasn’t as worried about all of this as she claimed to be or she would be showing the signs of strain and she most definitely wasn’t. The second one compared side-by-side pictures of her. One was a still taken from yesterday’s interview, and the other one was from outside of the courtroom at some point through James Pearson’s original trial. They had some skincare expert discussing her possible skincare routine, and how even the best routines didn’t explain how there was no aging of her skin whatsoever.
The third headline Piper read made her stomach turn over. In large, shouting letters, the headline screamed “Vampire Lawyer Talks About Justice”. As she skimmed through the article, it was clear they didn’t really think Piper was a vampire—it was just a way of littering the article with cheap jokes about blood-sucking lawyers, but still, it would get people talking.
And the last thing Piper wanted was people talking about her agelessness. She hadn’t spent the last century and a bit moving from state to state so people didn’t realize she wasn’t aging and not drawing attention to herself just to have this brought up now.
That was one of the major downsides about being a bear shifter. Piper, like the rest of her kind, had stopped aging when she hit thirty. It had seemed great at first, but Piper soon saw the downsides of it. Her pack moved around regularly, and she was never able to put down any real roots anywhere.
Oh well, she thought to herself. At least they’re saying vampire. I can disprove that one easily enough. I love garlic, I have a reflection, and holy water won’t do anything other than dampen me.
Still, though, it gave her a bad feeling in the pit of her stomach, and when her cell phone rang and she saw it was her pack’s alpha calling, she knew she was in big trouble.
2
Three Months Later
Piper wondered again how it had all gone so wrong so quickly. While she was still glad James Pearson had
finally got the justice he deserved, his release had been the start of the end for her. The tabloids kept talking about how ageless she appeared, and even her colleagues at work had started making comments about it.
The call she had received on the morning the story of her being a vampire broke was her alpha. He had called her and warned her to get a handle on it. The last thing he wanted was undue attention being brought onto the pack. She had reassured him she would, and when she was contacted to appear on a chat show, she agreed, and she humored the host and went through a bunch of tests to prove she wasn’t a vampire. It was all a big joke, of course, but to Piper, it really wasn’t. She knew it wouldn’t take long for the speculation to start widening, and she knew what her alpha’s real worry was. That a hunter would put two and two together and turn up in New York looking to hunt them all down.
No amount of trying to turn the conversation back to the real issue at hand had been successful and Piper had given up trying, instead attempting to fade into the background. That didn’t work either—the tabloids began talking about how they had exposed her and now she was hiding away. It didn’t matter how ridiculous their assertions were, people were lapping it up, loving the unexplainable nature of the story.
It reached a head a couple of weeks after the initial interview and her alpha had come to her apartment and told her that regretfully, he had made the decision to ask her to leave the pack. She had been upset, of course—she had been friends with the pack for almost seventy years. They were family to her. But she knew he was right. The last thing she wanted was for her newfound fame to bring danger down on the rest of the pack.
The alpha had informed her that the pack would be moving on without her. He didn’t tell her where they would be going to, and he made it abundantly clear to her not to try and contact any of them again.
Piper knew then she would be leaving New York as well. The only thing tying her to the city was her job and her pack. She could work as a lawyer anywhere in the country and now that her pack was leaving, there was no reason for her to stay there.
Within a month of the scandal, Piper had moved to Bethany Beach, a small town on the coast of Delaware, where she had opened her own small law firm—‘small’ being the operative word. She operated out of a two-room office and there were only herself and Kara, her secretary-slash-investigator, working there.
Really, she could have done without the office and operated out of the spare bedroom in her small, beachfront house and she definitely could have done without Kara and just answered the incoming calls herself, but she wanted to look like a professional operation and that meant she needed premises and staff.
So far, her cases had all been small demeanors, things that got handled out of court. In fact, in the two months she had been in operation, she had only been to court once, and that had been a very quick hearing where she proved a client innocent of the crime he had been accused of by showing the judge CCTV footage of him in a bank at the time of the crime, nowhere near the store he had been accused of shoplifting from. The case against her client was thrown out and that was the end of it all.
Piper missed the thrill of the courtroom, the questioning of witnesses, the dance of leading the jury through her client’s version of events. She missed the passionate opening and closing speeches, and she missed the rush of adrenaline as the jury trooped back into the courtroom and gave their verdict.
Still, she knew she had done the right thing. She was safe here. Bethany Beach was hardly a hub of crime and she was unlikely to get caught up in anything that made more than a line or two in the local rag, let alone made national news. That suited her down to the ground right now, although it bored her somewhat.
She had even debated starting to take on divorce cases or contract cases, just to fill her time in a bit. It wasn’t like she needed the money—she had plenty of savings to see her through, and the property she had bought here had cost less than half-a-million dollars, which left her with more than a million in profits from the sale of her New York apartment. She just needed to feel like her life had a purpose, and right now, she was struggling to find it.
She had already decided she would stay in Bethany Beach for a decade or so, and then move back to the city where she could get her teeth into some real cases. Maybe Chicago, she thought. She would need to change her identity; she couldn’t risk the old stories resurfacing, but that wasn’t hard to do. The whole pack had done it every time they moved to a new place and Piper knew exactly how to do it. And how to do it so well, no one would suspect she was the same woman.
She supposed in a way that gave her a purpose, a goal to look forward to, but ten or more years was a long time to spend on settling parking ticket cases. The most interesting case she had worked on since she got here, other than the shoplifting case, was a property dispute—the sort of case she would have back-heeled onto an associate at her old firm so she could work on real cases.
How times have changed, Piper thought to herself, looking out of her office window onto Main Street.
3
Piper was pulled out of her miserable musings when Kara came into her office.
“I have a Nancy Maynard on the line,” Kara said. “She refuses to talk to me, says she only gets one phone call and she won’t waste it talking to a secretary.”
Piper sat up straighter, her attention well and truly caught. It was like her own boredom had somehow brought an actual criminal case to her door. Nancy Maynard had to be in police custody to have said she only got one phone call.
“Thanks, Kara. Put her through to me, please,” Piper said, trying to hide her excitement from Kara.
Kara nodded and left the office. Within seconds, Piper’s desk phone rang. She snatched it up.
“I’m putting her through now,” Kara called.
There was a click and then Piper heard noises that told her the call had connected her to a place where people were moving around and talking in the background. She had been right. Nancy Maynard was in the police station.
“Ms. Maynard? This is Piper Lee. How can I help you?” Piper said.
“Are you a lawyer?” Nancy asked.
“Yes,” Piper said.
“Good. Because these bozos here think I’ve been selling smack to kids. Me. I have tried to tell them I don’t have any idea what they’re talking about, but they won’t listen,” Nancy said.
“Ms. Maynard, listen to me,” Piper said, her pulse speeding up slightly as she took in the details of Nancy’s case. “I will be on my way to the station the second we end this call. Do not say another word to the police until I get there. Is that clear?”
“Yes. Thank you,” Nancy said.
The line went dead and Piper jumped up from behind her desk. She grabbed her jacket and her purse and headed out of her office. She called out to let Kara know she was heading down to the police station and then she rushed to her car and drove straight to the police station, forcing herself to stick to the speed limits. Getting arrested for speeding on the way to see a client for the first time, or anytime really, wasn’t a good look for anyone.
Piper finally reached the police station. She parked her car and strode into the building. Forcing herself to look casual, like she wasn’t glad of something to break up the monotony of her days, she walked up to the front desk.
“I’m Piper Lee. The lawyer for Nancy Maynard,” she said to the desk sergeant.
“One moment, please,” the desk sergeant replied.
She typed quickly into her computer, then looked back up at Piper.
“She’s in interview room one. It’s through the double doors and then the first right,” she instructed.
“Thanks,” Piper said, already making her way through the double doors.
She got to the first door on the right and pushed it open. She entered the interview room, taking a quick look around. A video camera was set up and two people sat opposite each other at a table. One was a woman, presumably Nancy Maynard. She looked to be in her early fo
rties with black hair that was starting to turn grey at her temples. She was dressed in a pair of black trousers and a pink blouse. Nothing about her screamed drug dealer. She looked normal, respectable. Piper knew that looking respectable didn’t always mean people were, though.
Piper turned her attention to the cop who sat opposite Nancy. Her heart skipped a beat when she looked at him and she felt her palms growing sweaty. He was nothing like she had imagined the chief of police of a small town like this to be. Admittedly, the vision she had in her head was a stereotype—a bumbling, middle-aged man who wanted to feel like he had a bit of power and was likely overweight.
Instead, she saw a man who looked no older than around thirty or thirty-one. Even sitting down, Piper could tell that the police officer was tall. His shoulders were wide, his chest and arms toned enough that she could see the muscle there through his shirt. He had black hair cut very short and when he turned to look at her, she saw he had warm, brown eyes. The kind of eyes she could lose herself in. She felt her core pulsate just looking at him, the bear inside of her stirring and her mind instantly imagining this man running his hands through her hair and over her body.
“Who the hell are you?” the man demanded in a low voice that screamed sex to Piper.
She felt herself blushing slightly and then reality hit her and she remembered where she was and why she was here. She cleared her throat, trying to ignore the tingling sensation between her legs.
“I’m Piper Lee,” she said. “Ms. Maynard’s lawyer. And if you don’t mind, I would like a moment alone with my client.”
The man stood up.
“Knock yourself out,” he said with a cocky grin that should have angered Piper but instead sent a shockwave through her already tingling center.
Piper’s bear stirred again and she pushed it down. The last thing she needed was to lose control of herself here.