“How am I supposed to counter it if I don’t know what they’re saying against me?”
“They’re saying the same things they’ve been saying all week. The rhetoric hasn’t changed, and quite frankly, the fact that it’s still news and they don’t have anything new to report on it speaks volumes. Where are the interviews with Jonston, eh? You know, the ones that said that he was deliberately provoking me and how it was unfair to punish me or you because he was being an asshole?”
“That doesn’t tell the story they want, so of course, they’re not including it,” Valerie returned. She glared at her cold cup of coffee then shook her head. “Whatever. At least my parents understand the situation.”
She had taken the time to go out to the farm and explain everything to them. They weren’t happy with her choosing such a road of deception, but they did understand and didn’t scold.
“Look, I know it’s hard when people are attacking you like this, but you should just ignore them. Nothing you’re going to say will change their minds, so it’s best to just let it blow over.”
“It’s not going to blow over, though.”
Kavan checked the temperature of her coffee and took it to the microwave. “And why don’t you think it’s going to blow over?”
Valerie watched him, touched by the small gesture. Did he even realize what he was doing when he did things like that? Warming her coffee again, picking up a little extra when he got himself a treat, giving her extra space when she was frustrated, turning off the TV when she needed to stop watching the news.
He turned back to her, arching his brow, and she shook herself mentally. Right. He’d asked her a question.
“It’s not going to blow over because Governor Bloom isn’t going to let it. I’ve been under public scrutiny for a long time already. Now that things are finally going his way, he’s just going to keep fanning the flames. Have you noticed over the past few days he hasn’t said anything? I bet as soon as people start losing interest he’ll be there, saying something like, “I can’t be blamed for trusting the wrong person” or that it’s just natural for a wolf to defend his mate, and it’s going to start a whole new shitstorm.”
“So just ignore it until he does.”
“I can’t! You don’t understand. My entire life I’ve worked for this. Maybe that sounds overdramatic because I’m still so young, but when other kids were dreaming of being ballerinas or doctors and astronauts, I was studying. When they were watching My Little Pony and coloring pictures or playing with their toys, I was practicing my diction and reading about whatever trials were in the news that week. My parents thought it was unhealthy and tried to stop me until I told them that I was going to be a judge. If this is taken away from me, I won’t know who I am anymore.”
“You think I don’t understand that?”
Valerie fell silent. What did he mean?
With a sigh, he swept his hands through his hair. “The Family. They’re all I knew for so long. And even now… I don’t know who I am without them, Valerie. You say I could be a chef or an artist or any number of things but… But those are just window dressings. I can’t… I mean, I don’t know what to do with myself. Right now, all I’m doing is waiting to go back to jail. Because there… there at least I know what I am.”
“At least I got to choose mine.”
Kavan nodded.
Valerie rubbed her forehead as he brought her coffee back to her. Then she pulled the ring off her finger. She’d grown used to wearing it and when it was gone, she felt almost naked without it. “I’m done with the lying. It hasn’t helped anything, and it’s going to come out sooner or later. I can set you up with an apartment for a few days and—”
“Hey. I don’t want an apartment.” Kavan frowned at the ring. “I…”
Her breath caught in her throat. He couldn’t mean… could he? No. He didn’t want her. Sure, maybe he wanted to fuck every once in a while, but that didn’t mean anything. He was probably just as tender with all the women he was with. She wasn’t special, and it was ridiculous to think that he would want to throw away his identity for her. Didn’t he just say that without the Family he didn’t know who he was? Him giving up on the mafia was about as likely as her giving up on her judicial career.
But when he met her eyes again, he said the words that she had been least expecting to hear. “What do you think about getting engaged for real?”
“I—” Valerie cut herself off. Was he being serious right now? “Why?”
“Why?” Kavan grinned at her, that charming smile with those dimples out in full force. “Why? Because maybe I want to be engaged to you for real. Maybe I want to sleep in your bed and kiss you good morning every day and I want it to be real and not just smiles when I give you a lunch I’ve made for the sake of Camille and whoever else might be lurking.”
“But… But you’re an ex-con. Hell, you’re not even ‘ex’, you’ve still got this trial that’s going to happen sooner or later. I won’t be surprised if, as soon as I’m kicked out or I quit, you’re back in jail by the end of the week. You’re only free because someone is coming after me.” She straightened, nodding quickly to herself. Whatever he was doing, she couldn’t believe that he was genuine. It wasn’t possible. They’d only been fake engaged for a few months, there was no way he was serious about wanting to marry her after such a short time! “There. That’s a reason why not to marry. I put you in jail in the first place.”
Kavan shrugged. “You were doing your job. I can’t fault you for that.”
“I… Kavan, I can’t be with a criminal!”
And as soon as she said it, she knew what it sounded like. That his entire identity revolved around being a criminal. After what he had said about not knowing who he was without the Family, what else could she think?
Kavan drew back from her. The ring was pinched between his fingers and his lips pulled tight. His nostrils flared and for a long moment, he just sat there, staring at her while the emotion slowly closed of his face until she could have been staring at a brick wall.
“So, I’m good enough for you to pretend to be with. I’m good enough for you to have a random fuck with, but as soon as I might be something more than that, I’m scum between your toes?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“Didn’t have to. Look, I’m from the wrong side of the tracks. I get that. But I have real feelings for you. Why else would I deck a vampire in the face?”
“Kavan—”
“I like you. More than that, I care about you.” He leaned over the table, his eye sparking now. “And I’m not taking this back until I prove it and you tell me that it’s not good enough.”
He put the ring back on the table. Valerie sat there, stunned, then picked it up again. She stared at the diamonds and shook her head. “It’s not about whether or not I believe you care.”
“Of course, it is. You say you can’t be with a criminal, but I think it’s more that you can’t trust a criminal, which means you can’t trust me. I see the way you smile when we’re alone, I can smell the desire on you.”
Valerie sucked in a deep breath. “Look, I am flattered. Really, I am. And I don’t mean that you’re nothing but a criminal. I think you have lots of potential in other areas, but I think until you very clearly break ties with the mafia—”
“How do you think I’m planning on proving my feelings for you?”
“I…”
“In everything you just said about why you can’t be with me, you didn’t mention your feelings.” Kavan sat back down. “I was ejected from the Family. You know that. And you know how much they meant to me, how lost I feel without them.”
“Then—”
“Let me finish.” Kavan narrowed his eyes at her for a moment, then took in a deep breath. His hands were shaking, Valerie noticed, and he clasped them tightly together. “Lancaster contacted me last week. He wanted me to spy on you, to get information about his son’s case.”
Valerie’s eyes widened. Bet
rayal swept through her, and she clenched her hands on her thighs. She wanted to burst out, to demand to know why he was just telling her this now. Has he found something? Or does he think that by telling me, I’ll let him in closer?
“He gave me a burner phone to contact him with. He knows how much the Family meant to me and was using that against me. But now… now you mean more to me than that, Valerie. And this is the only way I can prove it. I want to help you bring him down.”
“Bring him…?”
“It will be a boost for your career.”
Valerie didn’t know how to respond. Tears welled in her eyes as she thought of everything she had said and thought about Kavan. How he was nothing but a crook, how he didn’t deserve a chance outside of jail because of the things he had done. How she said she could take one look at him and know he was going to break the law again. She felt sick to her stomach and dropped her head to her arms.
How could she have judged him so wrong?
***
Kavan’s heart pounded as his wolf paced anxiously. Why wasn’t she saying anything? And why was she hiding her face from him, her posture so dejected that he couldn’t tell what was going on in her head? He reached out, touching her hand. She drew back so quickly he could have been a snake that just bit her.
“Valerie?”
“I can’t.” Her voice broke.
Kavan’s heart plummeted. He had just laid everything out on the line. Couldn’t she at least look him in the eye when she said he meant nothing to her? That he really was just a random fuck to get her through some lonely nights. He didn’t even know why he was so disappointed; they both knew this was fake.
Maybe it was because, going into it, if one of them had done the terrible crime of developing feelings, he would have suspected that it would have been Valerie.
She straightened. Tears glimmered in her eyes and her nose was already turning red. The ring sat on the table near her hand, but she didn’t look at it or touch it. “I’m sorry. I really am. But I just can’t do this. There is too much going on and I can’t… I don’t have the mental energy right now.”
“For what? To decide whether or not I’m telling the truth or to decide whether or not your career is worth saving, not to mention putting Lancaster behind bars with his son.”
“You need to leave.”
Kavan slumped back, stunned. What was she talking about? He had just handed her the solution to all her problems on a silver platter and she was telling him to leave? She wasn’t even going to think about it? His wolf whined, tail swishing back and forth in confusion. What was the point of this if she wasn’t willing to listen, even a little bit?
“Val, do you not hear what I’m saying? We can bring down Lancaster. We can bring down his entire organization! You have to understand… this is a risk worth taking. Can’t you trust me even that much?”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with trust.”
“Like hell it doesn’t!” Kavan dug his hands into his hair, tugging at it. The sting of pain helped ground him, to keep the anger from clouding his mind. “Do you have any idea how much trust I am putting in you right now? If Lancaster found out about this conversation, then I’d be dead. You know I would. But I trust you. I care about you. I don’t want to see your career shot to hell, and I want to be something other than a dog crawling back to his master on his belly.”
His wolf snarled, not liking his choice of words, but Kavan ignored it. How could Valerie not understand what he was saying here? That he cared about her more than he did about getting back into the Family… that he wanted to see if she could be his family…
“I wish I could.” Her voice broke. “I wish that I could use this and get my career back on track. I wish that it was possible but it's not.”
“Why? You bring down Lancaster and whatever you’ve done, they’ll be forced to give you recognition for it.”
Valerie shook her head. Tears were starting to roll down her cheeks, and he didn’t understand. Kavan would have understood if she was angry with him for lying to her about his intentions, for agreeing to spy on her in the first place. But this? She was so distressed. He didn’t understand where that was coming from.
“Look.” Her voice broke again, and she breathed in deeply, cleared her throat and tried again. “I know that it has to be difficult for you to admit this to me. I know that you’re putting a lot of trust in me. And I am grateful. I just… I can’t. I can’t think about this sort of thing, and I don’t have the luxury of indulging these ideas of yours. Please. Just go. I’ll call you later. Get a hotel or something, I’ll pay for it.”
“Not good enough.”
“Kavan—”
“No!” He clenched his fists and leaned across the table, not letting her break eye contact with him this time. “You are going to tell me what’s going on, Valerie. You are acting like I just put a gun to your head. So, tell me. Is it that you think I’m lying? Is it that you think I am trying to get more information from you? What is it? Tell me!”
“It’s because of me!” Valerie burst out.
She dug her hands in her hair, her eyes wild as they rolled around the room, not seeing anything. She looked so distressed that Kavan reached across the table, intending to pull her hands from her hair. But she jerked back from him so violently her chair toppled.
“Val!” Kavan rushed to check her as she crumpled on the floor. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah… yeah.” She leaned against him as he gathered her into his arms. “No. I’m not okay. I fucked up, Kavan. I fucked up so badly. And now it’s all my fault.”
“What is?”
She closed her eyes and spoke so quietly that he had to strain to understand her. “A few years ago, my father had cancer. My parents had already given me everything to get me through law school. They had nothing left, they were already swimming in debt because of me. They were so close to losing the farm and then they’d have nothing at all. And my father… they couldn’t pay his bills. I didn’t know what to do. I was working so hard, but it was exhausting. Between the stress and work… and then Lancaster came to me.”
Kavan stiffened, already guessing what this was going to entail. But… how? How could Valerie…?
“He offered me money. He somehow knew exactly what we needed to pay off the mortgage on the farm. And once that was paid… everything else just fell into place. And all he needed from me in exchange was to throw out a case that didn’t have much weight behind it anyway. A kid got caught with less than a tenth of an ounce of marijuana on him. I would have let him go with a warning anyway. I thought… I thought that it was worth the trade. I didn’t realize that what he was really buying was something to hold over me the rest of my life.”
Kavan stiffly pulled away. Valerie tried to keep leaning on him, but he grasped her shoulders and pushed her away.
Valerie didn’t look at him, her hands limp in her lap as she stared at the pattern in the tiles. “I’m sorry.”
“So…” Kavan’s voice was gravelly with anger. He swallowed, trying to clear it out while his wolf bristled, “you’re saying that you don’t want to bring Lancaster down because he’ll release the information that you accepted a bribe… and it will ruin your career.”
“My career is ruined now anyway.”
“What is it then?”
Valerie finally lifted her head. “Because if we did that, then Lancaster would know it was you. And he’d kill you.”
Kavan growled, flinching when Valerie flinched but too angry to apologize. “What does that matter to you? You, who can’t be with a criminal. You don’t want anything to do with people who live a life of crime. Well, what do you call what you did? Isn’t accepting a bribe to let a criminal out of jail a crime in itself? So, is it that you can’t be with a criminal because two criminals in the same family is overkill?”
Valerie flinched again.
“You know…” He scrambled to his feet and backed away from her. “Out of everything I thought of you, a hy
pocrite was never one of them. I thought you were this… I thought you were everything that was right with our justice system. Fair. Caring. And now? You’re as much a liar as everybody else.”
Valerie let out a bitter shuddering laugh. She pulled herself to her feet and mopped her face off with her sleeve. “I guess I am.”
Kavan tugged at the ends of his hair. “If Lancaster already had this over you… then why did he want me to spy on you, huh? Were you not giving him what he wanted?”
“Maybe he just wanted to double-check. Make sure I was giving him everything and it was the truth.”
“You’ve been giving him information?”
Valerie flinched. “I… only a little. Only enough to make sure that he wasn’t going to release his information until I figured out what to do. But I guess now… I might as well tell everybody everything. My career is already over.”
And that was what it came back to. Her career. That was the most important thing to her. He should have known from the moment she decided to fake an engagement with him, of all people, in order to save face. Nothing was more important to her than her career. She wasn’t crying because she was distraught that she couldn’t take him up on his offer, she was crying because now she had been handed the perfect setup to boost her career and she couldn’t use it.
“Guess I’ll be taking this back.” Kavan snatched the ring off the table.
“Oh, so now you’ll take it? Guess that means nothing, it’s what I wanted in the first place.”
“Guess it is,” Kavan snapped back. His wolf howled, but he didn’t spend time trying to figure out what was wrong with it.
He stormed out of the house, leaving Valerie behind him. He didn’t stop to gather any of his things, only his keys and wallet. He didn’t even take his cellphone. If he did, he’d be tempted to call her once he calmed down, and he didn’t want to put himself through that. Anger burned through him as he drove his motorcycle, driving uptown and downtown, everywhere the bike would take him.
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