Neil gave a quick nod, and then focused on the open space in the foyer. “Claire and Cooper’s replacements are here.” Without saying anything else, Neil stepped away.
Behind him, Fitz walked up with two cups of coffee, handed one to him. “You look like—”
“Shit! I know.” Leo accepted the coffee and added the new caffeine to the old. “Thanks,” he muttered, putting the cup to his lips.
Leo was halfway through his coffee when the lawyers arrived.
Mykonos had three high-profile, high-dollar, and high-attitude attorneys wearing suits that cost more than Leo made in a month.
It was nauseating.
Whoever said crime didn’t pay had their head up their ass. As that thought drifted through Leo’s mind, he followed the district attorneys into the courtroom and took a seat. One look at the victim . . . the twenty-year-old girl who’d lost her dignity, her innocence, and any value she had for her own life reinstated Leo’s desire for cheap suits and the path for right versus wrong.
Marie Nickerson had been sold into the sex trade at the age of sixteen.
Human trafficking took the form of a boyfriend who convinced her to join him in Vegas with a fake ID and the promise of a good time. Next thing the girl knew, she belonged to Mykonos.
And when she tried to escape Mykonos and the life he’d forced upon her, she was rewarded with attempted murder and dismemberment.
Her physical wounds had healed. The bruises gone, her hair grown back. But if you looked close enough, you saw a thinning at the base of her skull where the burn was too deep and the hair wouldn’t regrow.
Then there was the look in her eyes.
Empty.
Soulless.
Her eyes tracked Mykonos with palpable fear.
Every second of the trial was one second closer to her throwing in the towel and backtracking on her testimony.
Fear stopped victims from righting wrongs every second of every day.
The way Mykonos stared at Marie would make most people shrivel into a ball of dust as if Medusa herself had narrowed her gaze on them.
Every once in a while, Mykonos splayed his lies for the jury to hear, his easy smile and charming personality weaving a tale just as fanciful as Cinderella’s. Only he used broad strokes to describe his role as fairy godmother giving a young woman a home and security even though she was unfaithful to him. The defense’s case was based on a relationship where Marie was in the wrong, addicted to sex and drugs, and Mykonos was the hero.
But today was about cross-examination and closing arguments. His story wouldn’t hold up.
Or so Leo hoped.
The district attorneys wanted Mykonos and all of his kind exiled from Las Vegas as soon as humanly possible. He, and those like him, soiled the already slippery landscape that encompassed the Vegas lifestyle. Gamble, drink, have sex with strangers . . . but leave the kids out of the equation. Nothing infuriated the powers that be more than sexual predators targeting children.
No matter how much Mykonos tried to convince the jury that Marie was an adult, one look at her said something different. Yes, she was twenty now . . . but the photographs of her at sixteen running for her high school cross-country team painted a different picture.
All of those visuals were courtesy of Neil and his team.
The evidence against Mykonos trumped everything his fancy-suit-wearing attorneys could come up with.
The only way the jury would deliver anything but a guilty verdict would be with someone fucking with them. Which was where Navi stepped in.
The jury, however, had been sequestered for the duration.
And hopefully that safeguard hadn’t been compromised.
The courtroom filled, the doors closed, and the judge made his way to the bench.
CHAPTER FOUR
Life exploded in her brain like brief psychedelic, drug-induced, painful flashes on a movie screen.
Bright lights hovered over her face. Voices echoed, and machines made unfamiliar noises.
And when she tried to take a breath, the pain blurred her vision until she fell back into the darkness she’d crawled out of.
The next time the movie aired, it was darker. Quieter.
Something obstructed her ability to breathe. When she reached for the thorn in her side, her hands were too heavy to move. Even opening her eyes wasn’t a possibility. Tiny slits of light passed before her as if she were inside a dark closet looking at the draft space at the bottom of the door.
A voice spoke in soft tones before a feeling of warmth flushed through her body and the worry