The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,139

you get my number?”

“Gentry gave it to me that weekend at Bryn Carreg. I was trying to hit on his girlfriend, and he gave me your number.”

“I wasn’t his girlfriend, and he’s trusting like that,” she said. As though I were the one who’d taken advantage of Gentry’s trusting nature.

“His lawyer called to ask me to be a character witness for his trial. Did she call you?”

“You’re kidding, right? You think anybody would want me as a character witness?” She laughed. Then to somebody else: “Yeah, that keg’s almost empty.”

“So, it’s just not your problem?” I said.

“I didn’t say that, but you’re his friend, and I’m the person who fucked up his whole life.”

“And what the hell am I supposed to say in court?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe you could say that Gentry is a really kind, decent person, who was trying to help somebody. Look, I gotta go.”

“Wow, it’s true what they say. Redheads really don’t have souls. I cannot believe—”

She hung up on me.

I worried about it for nothing, because a couple weeks after Gentry’s lawyer called me, I read in the news that Gentry had taken a plea deal. There wasn’t going to be a trial.

CHAPTER 54

Zee

I should have said no. I didn’t owe LaReigne any goddamn favors. After what she’d done, I didn’t owe her anything, but I tried to remember that not everything is about what you owe or what you pay. If nothing else, that was the lesson I should’ve learned from Gentry.

So I took the envelope and I carried it around in my purse for two months, waiting for the trial to start. Every once in a while I’d take it out and look at it. Tague. Sometimes I thought about opening it and reading the letter. A few times, I thought about throwing it away.

The first two days of Tague’s trial, I had to work.

The third day, I stayed in bed with Leon and a pile of books.

I made myself read farther into Yvain. A noble lady found him wandering in the woods and helped him get better. For a second I thought he was going to cheat on his wife, but no, he just helped the noble lady and went on his way. Then halfway through the story, the lion finally showed up! Reading that, I understood what Gentry meant about being worthy of a dog’s devotion, because Yvain’s lion was so loyal that he went into battle with him. When he thought Yvain had died, the lion tried to kill himself.

Yvain was trying to get home, but on the way he volunteered to be a champion for a woman who was getting screwed by her sister over some land. Next thing I knew, Yvain and Gawain were planning to joust to settle the argument between the two sisters. They were best friends, but they were really going to fight each other to the death. I wonder how a Love so great can coexist with mortal Hate? That was how I felt about LaReigne. As much as I loved her, I hated her that much, too.

The fourth day of Tague’s trial, I had to go, or admit I wasn’t going. Honestly, I’d hoped it would be over on the third day. They had surveillance footage of him murdering a corrections officer, and Kansas doesn’t even have the death penalty. How hard could it be to send him back to prison for the rest of his life?

I went, and I spent the morning watching the back of Tague’s head. Every once in a while he would turn to look at his lawyer, but he didn’t take notes, because he couldn’t. That was part of the defense’s argument: he wasn’t a threat to society anymore. They had medical testimony about exactly where his spine had been severed by Gentry’s sword, but the end result was that he was paralyzed from the chest down.

The closer we got to lunch, the more nervous I got. I’d decided that at the recess, I would get up, walk to the railing behind the defense table, and hand LaReigne’s letter to one of Tague’s lawyers.

By the time the judge called the recess, my foot was asleep and my hip was locked up. When I stood up, I could barely walk. I shuffled out into the aisle, but before I could take two steps, I saw her.

Rosalinda.

She was wearing a baggy blue sweater, a long denim skirt, and tennis shoes. Instead of a medieval head scarf, she had