Page 35 of His Verdict
A strangled sound, half-sob, half-gasp, escapes my lips. I flinch away from his touch, scrambling backward on the bed until my back hits the cold, hard headboard. My entire body is trembling, a violent, uncontrollable seizure of pure terror.
He doesn't try to touch me again. He just sits there, watching me, the damp cloth still in his hand. He lets me have my panic, his expression shifting from concentration to something I can't quite decipher. It isn't pity. It is something closer to… regret.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice a low, quiet rumble in the silent room. “I apologize for what you had to see. I didn't realize you were squeamish.”
Squeamish. The word is so absurd, so utterly inadequate for the soul-shattering horror I just witnessed, that a hysterical, broken laugh bubbles up in my throat.
“Squeamish?” I choke out, the sound raw and ugly. “You shot a man in the head, Jasper. You… you murdered him. Right in front of me. That’s not being squeamish. That’s being a fucking human being.”
He just nods slowly, as if accepting a valid, if inconvenient, point. “It was necessary,” he says, his voice devoid of a single shred of remorse. “Vance was a loose end. A liability. He made a choice, and he paid the price. That is how the world works, Olivia. My world, at least.”
I stare at him, my mind unable to bridge the gap between the man sitting calmly on the bed and the cold-blooded killer from the conference room. He is a monster. A monster who just apologized for upsetting me. The contradiction is a form of psychological torture. I am disgusted by him, repulsed on a cellular level. And yet… his presence is the only thing in the room. He is the source of my terror, but he is also the only solid thing in a world that has just dissolved into chaos. I am drawnto his steadiness, his absolute, unshakable control, even as I’m horrified by what that control is built on.
“You’re… you’re a monster,” I whisper, the words feeling inadequate.
“Yes,” he says, without hesitation. “I am. But I am not a liar.” He leans forward slightly, his gray eyes intense, compelling. “And I need you to see that. I need you to seeme. I need you to see all of it. The benevolent and the brutal. It’s all the same thing.”
This is what he wants. He wants a partner who understands the full scope of his monstrosity and chooses to stay anyway.
The thought is so audacious, so completely insane, that it momentarily eclipses my fear.
I shake my head, my hair sticking to the sweat on my cheeks. “I can’t,” I say, my voice breaking. “I can’t… be that. I don’t know what you want from me, but I can’t be that.”
He stands then, a look of profound disappointment crossing his features. It is a strange, quiet sadness that is more unsettling than any anger would be.
“I don't want you to be anything other than what you are, Olivia,” he says, his voice laced with a frustration that feels achingly real. “I chose you for your fire, for your mind, for the fight in you. This…” He gestures vaguely at me, huddled against the headboard like a frightened animal. “This broken, compliant thing… it doesn’t interest me. Be angry. Be horrified. Be disgusted. But for God’s sake, don’t be… blank. Don’t let this erase you. That would be the real tragedy.”
He turns and walks out of the bedroom, leaving me alone with the ghost of Arthur Vance and the suffocating weight of my own impossible situation. His words echo in the silence.
My mind is in a state of deep, profound turmoil. What the fuck am I going to do now? There is no going back. I have seen too much. I am an accessory after the fact to a murder. My fingerprints are metaphorically, and for all I know, literally, all over this. He resurrected my career, only to immediately implicate me in a capital crime. It is the most secure cage imaginable. If I run, I am not just his target; I am a fugitive.
And who is he?Mr. Donovan.The name means nothing to me. I haven't spent my life tracking the movements of billionaires and shadow-dwelling power brokers. I was a public defender. My world is one of petty crime and desperate people, not corporate espionage and cold-blooded murder in mahogany boardrooms. I have no frame of reference for a man who can shoot a CEO in the head and have a cleanup crew on standby. Who is he that he can operate with such absolute impunity? A captain of industry? A mob boss? Both?
The lines are so blurred they no longer exist. All I know is that I am trapped, not just in his penthouse, but in his life.
The next twenty-four hours are a surreal exercise in forced normalcy. I eventually creep out of the bedroom, my body still trembling with aftershocks. He is in the kitchen, calmly preparing a meal as if nothing has happened. He has changed into a soft, gray cashmere sweater and dark trousers. He looks like an ad from a men’s luxury magazine, not a man who killed someone a few hours prior.
He doesn't force me to talk. He doesn't push. He just… exists. He places a plate of food in front of me—a simple, perfectly cooked sea bass with roasted vegetables. My stomach churns at the thought of eating, but I force myself to take a few bites. To refuse would be an act of defiance, and I don't have the strength for it.
He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t try to kiss me or pull me into his arms. He maintains a respectful, almost clinical distance. He is giving me space to process, to acclimate to the new, horrific reality. The lack of physical intimacy is not a comfort; it is a strategy. He knows that forcing himself on me now will only cement his role as a monster in my mind. Instead, he is playing the part of the patient, understanding warden, letting me get used to the feel of my new, blood-spattered cage.
I spend most of the day huddled on one of his enormous sofas, a cashmere throw blanket pulled up to my chin, staring blankly at the city skyline. I feel completely detached from my own body, a ghost haunting a life that is no longer mine. He occasionally brings me water, or a cup of tea, setting it on the table beside me without a word. He is tending to me like a fragile, priceless object he has just acquired, one he doesn't want to damage further.
I sleep in his bed again that night, but alone. He takes one of the guest rooms, a gesture of consideration that is so at odds with his actions that it feels like another form of psychological warfare. I don’t sleep well. Every time I close my eyes, I see the black hole in Arthur Vance’s forehead.
The next morning, I am the first one awake. I wander into the living room, feeling like a wraith in the gray pre-dawn light. I turn on the massive television, needing the distraction, themindless chatter of the outside world to fill the terrifying silence in my own head. I flip to a local all-news channel.
And there it is.
The anchorwoman is speaking in her usual, somber-but-peppy tone. “…and in tragic news this morning, the business world is mourning the loss of Arthur Vance, the celebrated CEO of Meridian Technologies, who was killed late yesterday in a single-vehicle car accident. Police are reporting that Mr. Vance’s vehicle appears to have lost control on a rain-slicked road and went over an embankment on the Palisades Parkway. The vehicle immediately burst into flames. An investigation into the cause of the crash is ongoing.”
A photo of a smiling, vibrant Arthur Vance appears on the screen, next to a grim, distant shot of a mangled, charred luxury sedan being pulled from a ravine by a crane.
A car accident.
A cold, sick certainty washes over me. The police report, the crash scene, the official story—it is all a fabrication. A neat, tidy narrative constructed by his people to erase the ugly, brutal truth. They didn't just clean up the blood; they have rewritten reality itself. They have taken a murder committed in a downtown boardroom and transplanted it to a lonely stretch of highway, transforming a cold-blooded execution into a tragic, random act of fate.
If that is even his body.