Page 16 of Claim

One thing was now beyond dispute.

Richard Slade no longer had counsel. Not because of an oversight or a clerical delay, but because no one was willing to take the brief. The absence wasn’t accidental. It was strategic.

The why was easier than the how.

Visibility. Pressure. The understanding that stepping in would invite the wrong sort of attention.

I knew what happened when a man was left in that position. How time distorted. How urgency thinned, then vanished. How waiting itself became a punishment. I’d written about it. Argued it. Reduced it to footnotes and precedent.

Razor would now live it.

And I knew with a certainty settling cold in my chest, that it had very little to do with what he was guilty of, and even less to do with what he wasn’t.

I crossed the room and sat at my desk and opened my laptop. I couldn’t act. Not yet. I had to watch. Wait. To give the system precisely the time it was demanding.

The same thing Razor was being forced to do.

If nothing changed in the coming days, that would be the proof. And when I moved next, it would be deliberately.

There were, after all, advantages to being a Hale-Fitzroy.

And for the first time, I intended to use one.

Chapter FOUR

Razor

The crying was pissing me off.

It wasn’t loud exactly. Nor even hysterical and, trust me, there’d been a few of those floating round the wing at night. But this was the steady, leaking kind. Breath catching, nose pulling in air too fast, the sound of a man realising too late that this place wouldn’t bend around him.

I ignored it for as long as I could.

Then, for the first time in fuck knew how long, I slammed my palm down on the rail of the bunk below.

“Hey,” I said. “Shh. I’m trying to fucking read.”

Silence.

A sniff. Another.

Colin shifted on the bottom bunk, the mattress squeaking under his weight. “Sorry.”

I tucked one arm behind my head and reopened my book. Jack Reacher was mid-monologue, about to break someone efficiently and without remorse. It wasn’t great literature, but it was familiar. Predictable. Men like Reacher survived because they understood systems and violence and when to keep their mouths shut. I could work with that.

I kept reading.

“How do you…” Colin broke through again. “…stay so calm?”

I closed my eyes.

For fuck’s sake.

Just because I’d spoken didn’t mean I wanted a conversation. It didn’t mean we were doing this now. I opened my mouth to tell him exactly that, but the word that came out wasn’t the one I’d planned.

“Survival.”

It wasn’t even mine. I’d just read it. Reacher had said it two lines earlier. But it fit well enough, and that was good enough for me.