Chapter 24 · The Irreversible Trap

Chapter 24: The Irreversible Trap

"Play it," my father says, and the courtroom screen lights up with my own voice.

"I just need her gone, Mom. I just need the money." The audio crackles through City Hall's speakers, tinny and wrong, but it's my voice. Spliced from somewhere. Stitched into a sentence I never said in that order.

The room sucks in air like one lung. Cameras swing toward me. Flashbulbs go off so fast it feels like strobing lights at the end of the world.

"That's not—" I start, and my own lawyer grabs my wrist under the table, hard, a warning.

"Don't," Luca says low beside me. He hasn't moved. His hand rests flat on the table, two inches from mine, close enough that I can feel heat coming off his knuckles. "Not yet."

My father stands at the podium in his navy suit, candidate pin catching the light, and he looks at me like I'm already convicted. "That recording was pulled from my late wife's hospital room security system. June Pell poisoned her own mother to inherit the Pell estate before I could contest the will."

A woman in the gallery actually gasps out loud.