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Savannah patted his shoulder. “She’s fine, Simon. It’s just a business meeting. Hez didn’t mean she was in danger now.”
“No one is going to stop me from protecting my mom. It took all these years before I got to live with her again, and I can’t lose her.” His voice cracked.
How had they managed to mess up this conversation so badly? They should have been paying more attention to his questions. She’d better end the discussion before she messed it up even more. “We’ll talk to your mom about it. No promises, though.”
His defiant expression didn’t change. “I’m going to look out for my mom.”
She cut her glance to Hez. They’d have to figure out something Simon could do or he’d be going rogue again, and that had disastrous consequences last time.
Chapter 13
Jess’s heart skipped a beat when she saw the text from Savannah:We need to talk about Simon. Call when you can.
She pushed back from the mahogany conference room table, drawing startled looks from the two men with her. She turned to the older of the two. “Sorry, James. I need to take a short break. Do you have an empty office I could use to make a call?”
James Hornbrook looked at her, his icy-blue eyes missing nothing. He nodded once. “Of course. The southeast conference room is empty. You can use that.”
She thanked him and walked down the hall to the room he’d indicated. Its floor-to-ceiling windows offered spectacular views of Manhattan. The familiar spire of the old Chrysler Building dominated the view to the east. The Empire State Building stood to the south, and One World Trade Center reached up above Lower Manhattan like a crystal needle. Her old Upper West Side condo and the Central Park paths where she used to push Simon in a stroller were to the north. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel them behind her. This used to be home.
She glanced over her shoulder toward the north wall of the conference room. One of James’s beloved cream-colored golden retrievers grinned at her from a large picture hung on the wall. She shut the door, but she didn’t assume her call would be private. Hornbrook Finance, LLC, was rumored to have hidden microphones and cameras in all of its conference rooms and offices, and she didn’t doubt it.
She dialed Savannah’s number and paced along one of the windows as the phone rang. Jess forced herself not to think about what might have prompted her sister’s text. If anything had happened to Simon...
Savannah finally answered. “Hi, Jess. Thanks for calling me so quickly. Hez is here too. I’ll put you on speaker.”
Jess’s blood pressure went up at the mention of Hez’s name. “What’s going on? Why do we need to talk about Simon?”
Savannah cleared her throat. “He heard Hez and me talking about the Justice Chamber, and he wants to join.”
“What? That’s out of the question, of course.”
“That’s exactly what we told him.” Savannah sounded exasperated. “But he immediately got defiant and said no one was going to stop him from protecting you.”
Hez chimed in. “And we all remember what happened the last time he tried to do that on his own.”
Jess closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead. “I’d hoped he’d learned his lesson.”
Savannah’s voice softened. “Did you ever learn not to try to protect Mom?”
The memories cut like broken glass. Pierre flaunting a new affair in front of Mom, who knew she was trapped and could never leave him. Mom escaping into booze and pills. Jessurging her to fight back, then lashing out at Pierre when her mother couldn’t or wouldn’t. Pierre casually telling Mom to “control your bastard girl.” Savannah trying to separate them before the confrontation turned physical.
Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she didn’t. It happened over and over. And all the while, Mom spiraled further down. Jess had been helpless to stop it—but she wasn’t helpless now. She couldn’t save her mother, but she could make Pierre pay for his crimes. All of them.
Jess stared out over the cityscape without seeing it. “What do you suggest?”
“Let Simon help. Keep your friends close, your enemies closer, and your headstrong ten-year-old closest of all.”
Hez laughed, but Jess winced. Savannah’s line was too close to the one she’d used about Hez. “That won’t work. He can’t help me analyze confidential financial data, and it wouldn’t be responsible to give him access to it anyway. Plus, I can’t take him out of school every time I need to make a trip to New York.” And there was no way she would let James or his minions get anywhere near her son.
Hez’s deep voice came through the line. “I can find some jobs for him to do for the Justice Chamber. He can scan documents, organize files, pick up office supplies from the storeroom, and stuff like that. He’ll be involved, but he’ll also be safe—certainly safer than if we tell him no and he decides to freelance.”
He had a point, and Jess couldn’t think of a better alternative. She sighed. “Okay, fine.”
She ended the call and turned to go back into the meeting. She had done everything she could to keep Simon outside theblast radius of the bomb she was building, but he kept worming his way closer to ground zero. First, he managed to get himself expelled from his British boarding school and wound up in Nova Cambridge. Now he would be working with Hez at the Justice Chamber, which was the second most dangerous place he could be, regardless of what job Hez gave him.
The most dangerous place for Simon was with her, of course. She wanted that with all her heart—and had to fight against it with all her strength. They would be together when all of this was over. Until then, she had to keep him safe.
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