Chapter 232
He watched the determination settle into her face like stone. He knew that holding her here would only confirm everything she believed about him. It was a risk — a monumental one — but he released her wrist.
“Fine,” he said, his jaw tight. “Vance is waiting downstairs. He’ll take you. I’ll have a team follow at a distance. You won’t be alone out there.”
“I’m never alone,” Cailin said, already moving through the door. “I’m going to war.”
The VIP suite at Mount Sinai looked less like a hospital room and more like a war room for the morally bankrupt.
Charla lay in the bed, propped up by a mountain of pillows. Her hand was heavily bandaged — a stark white reminder of the finger she no longer possessed. But her face wasn’t twisted in pain. It was arranged into a mask of calculated tragedy.
“I just wanted to talk to her,” Charla whimpered, dabbing at perfectly dry eyes with a tissue. “I told her I forgave her for everything, and then she just… snapped.”
Three lawyers in Italian suits scribbled furiously on yellow legal pads. These were Preston Holloway’s personal attack dogs — men who billed more per hour than most people earned in a month.
“She pushed you?” the lead lawyer, a shark named Sterling, asked. “Explicitly?”
“She grabbed me,” Charla said, her voice trembling with practiced precision. “She said, ‘If I can’t have him, no one can.’ And then she shoved me. I tried to hold on to the railing, but she struck my hands.”
Gregg English stood by the window, nodding grimly. “We have witnesses who saw her aggressive behavior earlier that night. She’s unstable.”
“And the phone?” Sterling asked. “The defendant claims she has a recording.”
Gregg made a dismissive gesture. “Her phone went missing during the commotion at the hospital.”
“Perfect,” Sterling said. A predatory smile settled on his face as he closed his notebook. “If the phone was never recovered by police at the scene, the chain of custody is completely broken. Any audio she attempts to present can be dismissed as doctored or AI-generated. She has no legally admissible evidence.”
Charla exhaled a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. She was safe. The recording was legally useless.
“Make sure she rots,” Victoria hissed from the corner, clutching her pearls. “I want her in federal prison. I want her children in foster care.”
Outside the room, Hilliard stood beside the observation window. The blinds were partially open. He watched the performance with a face made of stone.
Gavin stood behind him. “Sir, are you going to intervene? They’re fabricating a narrative that could put Ms. Morton away for twenty years.”
“No,” Hilliard said. His voice was cold and detached. “Let them build their tower.”
“Sir?”
“If I stop them now, they’ll just try again in the shadows,” Hilliard said, turning from the window. “Let them put it all on record. Let them lie under oath. Let them believe they’ve won.”
“And then?”
“And then,” Hilliard said, a dark glint moving through his eyes, “we let gravity do the rest.”
Across the city, in the dim light of the Brooklyn safe house, the atmosphere was electric.