Page 100 of Claim

Fuck. It hit me. Loved.

Bollocks.

I dipped down to catch his eye, lowering my voice so only he could hear. “Think of the lake.”

Tristan frowned. “What?”

“Remember that I jump in. No matter the danger. For you, I’ll jump right in.”

I hope he got the rest. Read between the lines or whatever. The part I didn’t say. About what happens when someone puts their hands on what I care about. And yeah, maybe it was inappropriate. Given where I was standing. What I was accused of. But I needed to give him something.

A line back to me.

A reminder that he wasn’t alone.

Proof that he was mine.

His hand twitched. Once. As if he wanted to reach out.

He didn’t.

Chapter seventeen

Tristan

Four weeks was a long time to make myself scarce.

Longer, in some ways, than when Razor had been inside. Back then, the distance had been brutal but defined. Bars, walls, rules. Now he was out. Within reach. And knowing I could see him but choosing not to was a different kind of torture. One I hadn’t anticipated.

So I didn’t let myself think about it.

I worked.

I buried myself in Chambers, in drafting and prep, in the clean, orderly grind of cases moving me only from court to home and back again. I drafted Razor’s plea for the Plea and Trial Preparation Hearing, losing myself in the precision of it. The language. The framing. The discipline required not to bleed into it.

I narrowed my world deliberately. No family dinners. No Hale-Fitzroy obligations. No unnecessary appearances that might put me in the same room as Lord Wolfe.

Or worse, my father.

Because, of course, his name surfaced in the CPS papers. I should have seen it coming. Difficult cases like this always circled upward, and my father was still top dog. Consulted first. Trusted last. Now stepping in properly. Who better, after all, to front a prosecution built on intelligence, inference, and confidence rather than evidence? Who else could take a case with nothing tangible and make it feel inevitable? Win it, not because it’s proven, but because it’s decided.

Charles Hale-Fitzroy.

Amelia and Mother kept me updated on his recovery. He wasn’t in the clear, but the treatments were working well enough to keep him upright, focused, convinced he was fighting the good fight. They both avoided work talk with me, and I was grateful. I doubted they understood anyway. How soon, I’d be standing on the opposite side of a courtroom from my father, the way I’d always hoped I would.

I never imagined it would be to defend my gangster boyfriend, though.

But life, it turned out, had no respect for expectations.

It meant I stopped sitting beside him at the Royal Marsden, too. My absence was noticed, remarked upon, then expected. I knew as much when the message came through on one of my usual days to sit with him, the one I’d begged to have and had spent months playing the dutiful son on.

I assume you are not here as you are instructed on the Slade matter. However, we should talk. Not about the case. About you.

I read it twice.

Had Wolfe already been in his ear? Had he suggested I was more entangled in the Slade matter than professionally appropriate? Wolfe wouldn’t have proof—of that I was certain. And my father wasn’t a man who acted on rumour alone. He was a lawyer. He demanded structure. Corroboration. Circumstantial weight built from more than a single whisper, no matter how elevated the source.

Still, he’d won cases on far less.