Total pages in book: 79
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 76203 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 381(@200wpm)___ 305(@250wpm)___ 254(@300wpm)
I said nothing to that.
Because, quite frankly, I knew he was right.
If Everleigh agreed to come stay with us, I wouldn’t be missing a chance to cook. Did that make sense when I didn’t plan on making a move on the woman? No. But neither did hiring a ridiculously expensive lawyer to defend her.
Why start analyzing my crazy-ass choices now?
Later that morning, I got word back to Simon, hearing the details about what was going on with Everleigh, his plan to get her an outfit for the arraignment, and the finer details about his payment.
Was it astronomical?
Yeah.
But worth it to keep an innocent woman out of prison, in my humble opinion.
“I don’t know what is going on with the other man caught up in this sweep,” Simon said.
“Gav,” I said.
“Yeah. But we might want to do some fishing around on him. If all blame can be shifted to him, and Everleigh seem like an innocent pawn in his empire, this case will be even easier.”
“Once she’s out, how long until a trial starts?” I asked.
“Depends on how open-and-shut the prosecution thinks their case is,” Simon told me. “If they think they have a verdict in the bag already, it could be days. If they still have some investigating to do, it could be weeks or months. Obviously, we want time to try to sort shit out. But I will know more by tomorrow,” he said. “I will keep you updated.”
“I appreciate—“ I started, but he’d already ended the call.
I took a shower, trying to tell myself that I’d done everything in my power to do, that I was just going to need to wait it out, pray for the best, and hope Everleigh was doing okay in county.
But as I got out of the shower and paced my room, looking out the windows at Shady Valley, seeing the square box that was the police department, all I wanted to do was charge in there, grab my brother, and pound some goddamn sense into him.
All things said, the bad blood between us had always come from his side. Did I occasionally feel bitterness that he let our jobs come between us? Sure. But I never felt this sort of over-the-top anger as I did right then.
He’d always been my little brother. And I cared about and protected that bond. Some part of me had been holding out for one day when he would mature enough to see how ridiculous he was being about this situation between us.
Now, though?
Now, I wasn’t sure there was any fixing this.
Not on my end, because he’d taken so much fucking glee in ruining an innocent woman’s life.
Not on his end, because I was going to spend all my time and money on proving to him how wrong he was.
Though at the end of the day, proving her innocence wasn’t about Dallas.
It was about her.
And I was going to need to find an inhuman amount of self-control before she was freed, and invited to come stay with us.
One room away.
“Fuck,” I hissed, rubbing my hands down my face.
CHAPTER FOUR
Everleigh
“Take this, and go get changed,” Simon said by way of greeting as he shoved a black garment bag at me at the courthouse.
The officer assigned to me guided me to a room where I was given a moment of privacy to change. And, let’s face it, gather myself.
I felt like I was trembling out of my skin.
I’d been on edge since the second Della and I were led off of the van and toward the county jail.
It was nothing like the prison situated on the hill in Shady Valley, looming over us, all doom and gloom and razor wire.
This was a much smaller building made of gray brick that was streaked with black from decades of rain and grime. There was still fencing and razor wire and prison guards and such, but it wasn’t as imposing as the prison in our town.
Still all the buzzing and thick, metal doors slamming was jarring as we were led inside, then went through the intake process where I was handed an orange set of clothes that sort of resembled medical scrubs, a pair of white panties that had nearly no elastic left, a bra that hardly fit, thick tube socks, and slides. I was also given extras of those items as well as bedding before I joined Della and the other women who came from other towns, and we were given a spiel and led toward where we would be calling home for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.
And, Lord willing, not a second longer than that.
I was trying to squash my internal disgust at wearing intimates worn by an untold number of other women before me. There were bigger issues to face, I reminded myself as we walked into a octagonal two-level room full of small cells and a big observation area for the guards to keep an eye on us.