dark office, looking around to get his bearings. He hadn’t been there in a long time, but he remembered seeing a roomful of filing cabinets somewhere along the left hallway. That door was locked, too, but he made quick work of it and turned on the flashlight on his phone. The file cabinets were arranged by subject matter and then by alphabetical order, but he had no idea where to even start.
Where exactly would Carver hide the dirt on his competition? He had probably kept most of his files in his office, but after Andrew’s redecorating, there was no telling where they were.
Beggars couldn’t be choosers, though, so Colt started at the end and decided to work outward from there. He’d been looking for about fifteen minutes with no success, other than gaining a cursory knowledge of all the major criminal proceedings in Providence for the last five years, when he heard an all-too-familiar voice.
“Looking for these?”
Colt turned around to find Jason standing in the doorway, holding up a thick tan file.
At one point, Colt might have been relieved Jason was the one who’d caught him, but given how things had ended between them, he was pretty sure he was going to end up in federal.
“I don’t suppose you’d believe Andrew gave me permission to be here?”
Jason’s blank expression didn’t change. Colt knew better than to think the veneer of calm meant he wasn’t furious. Quite the opposite. “Given the way things work in this city, you’d be surprised what I’d believe.”
“Listen, Jason—”
“Save it,” Jason said in a clipped tone. He looked Colt over, shaking his head in disgust. “In a year’s time, you went from being just another blue-collar guy interested in little more than football and cars to having your fingers in every illicit activity in the city. I guess breaking and entering a federal building is just a weekend activity for you now.”
“Technically, it’s not breaking and entering if I followed someone else in.”
“You think that’ll go over well with the judge?” Jason asked in a dry tone.
“Come on,” Colt said, deciding now was as good a time as any to turn on the charm. If there was anything left in Jason that still cared for him, he felt like shit for exploiting it, but he didn’t have any other options. The truth would only put him in more jeopardy, and Colt hadn’t gone through all that he had just to go back to square one. “You’re not going to have me arrested.”
Jason didn’t answer for a moment. He finally shook his head. “No, I’m not. But only because I know it would get traced back to Andrew.”
Colt grimaced. Well, he deserved that. “Yeah. I heard about you two. Sorry for not sending my congratulations.”
Jason’s icy stare told Colt silence was the best option right now. “I don’t know how you got involved in all this bullshit, and I stopped caring a long time ago, but you’re not going to drag Andrew down with you. Or me.”
“I don’t want to cause trouble for either of you,” Colt said, holding up his hands. “Believe me, it’s the last thing I ever wanted.”
“Let me guess. You’re doing this to protect me?” Jason challenged.
Colt hesitated. “Not this particular thing, but yeah. In a sense. The less you know about all this the better, and I know Andrew would agree.”
The other man’s brown eyes narrowed. They had fought enough times for Colt to assume he knew what it was like to be on the receiving end of Jason’s ire, but he now knew better. There were sides to Jason even he hadn’t seen before, and this was one of them. “Is that why you left me at the hospital without a word, too? Is that why you cheated on me with some bitch you barely even know? How convenient to have a vague, all-purpose excuse for every fucked-up thing you do.”
This certainly wasn’t going in a good direction. Colt knew he had to do damage control, and fast. “I know I fucked up. What I did was wrong on every level, and I handled it in the worst possible way, but I really did think you’d be better off without me. It looks like I was right.”
The rage that flashed in Jason’s eyes was proof that was the exact wrong thing to say. “Don’t,” the other man seethed. “Don’t try to flip this around and make yourself the hero. Whatever you’re hiding, whatever you have other people covering up for you,