Scandalize Me

Today, she’d chosen to come here. He had nothing to hold over her head. He was nothing but a man. A terrible man, still drunk on his own power. But only a man. And she was different, somehow, than she’d been before, all those other times he’d made sure to run into her. Fundamentally altered, because now that the initial punch of nausea had passed, he looked...smaller. Older. And next to a man the size and solid heft of Hunter, she could see that he was frail. Breakable.

So she met that awful gaze of his without flinching, and smiled.

“What is this?” Jason asked quietly, shifting his gaze back to Hunter. “I haven’t seen you in a decade at least, and this feels a good deal like an attack. Especially given the company you’re keeping.”

“This isn’t an attack,” Hunter said in that same soft, dangerous way. “Believe me, you’ll know it if I attack you.”

“I expect this kind of bluster from Austin,” Jason said. With a certain vicious precision. “He’s always been a terrible disappointment, like so many sons are to their fathers. As I believe you have been to yours throughout your many escapades. It’s a terrible cliché. But I’ll confess, I did think better of you.”

“I can’t imagine why,” Hunter said, and now he was smiling, because they’d planned for this, too. Austin had practically quoted his father in advance. “I’ve made it impossible for anyone to think better of me. All that unsportsmanlike behavior. All the temper tantrums out there on the field for all to see and judge. My complete lack of character is my singular adult achievement.”

“Men like you aren’t expected to have much character,” Zoe agreed, in that arch way that kept her clients on edge, and appeared to have much the same effect on Jason.

“I don’t really need it, do I?” Hunter grinned at her, and it warmed her. It reminded her that she wasn’t alone here. That all of this was part of the strategy. That between them, and with Austin and Alex’s help, they’d anticipated every one of Jason’s moves. “I can let football do the talking. My throwing arm has always been pretty eloquent.”

“And that’s the beauty of it,” Zoe replied, but she turned her gaze on Jason then. “Imagine if Hunter was to stumble into a character-building scenario. Become a new man in the eyes of the world. See the light, if you will, and in so doing, unburden himself about the terrible life he’d led up to that point.”

“My own little road to Damascus,” Hunter said, because he loved his saints, and Zoe had to bite back her smile.

Jason let out a sigh. “Zoe is a piece of ass, Hunter. You’re supposed to fuck girls like this, not let them parade you around by your dick.” He shook his head, as if he pitied Hunter. As if Zoe was radioactive. “This is embarrassing.”

“Not yet,” Zoe assured him. Was he aware that Hunter had turned to stone beside her? As if he was half a breath away from tossing Jason out the window? Or did he want to provoke that kind of violence—but he did, she realized. Of course he did. Then he could call himself the victim and sue. “We haven’t even gotten to the good part.”

Jason smiled, and it was deadly.

“What do you imagine you can do to me, you little bitch?” he asked in the same voice he’d always used. So kind, so genial, and that crushing darkness behind it. “Do you really think you can threaten me? Me? You must have forgotten everything I ever taught you.”

“On the contrary,” she said softly. “This is me using every last one of those lessons.”

“Call her a bitch again,” Hunter said conversationally, still so tense and furious behind that lazy exterior that it made the fine hairs on the back of Zoe’s neck prickle, “and I’ll break every single bone in your body.”

But Jason only laughed. Still in that happy, fatherly way he always did, which made what came out of his mouth sound that much worse.

“If you’d been any kind of a man, maybe your girlfriend wouldn’t have had to prostitute herself, then kill herself to get away from you ten years ago. Should we talk about that?”

Zoe wanted to kill him then. Hunter didn’t react, but she felt the lash of that blow, the sting of it, and the urge to draw Jason Treffen’s blood hummed in her, electric and something like terrifying.

It was time to wrap this up. To be done with him.

“You’re not going to do any more talking, Jason,” she said with a grim satisfaction ten years in the making, feeling Sarah there with her and all the other girls he’d wrecked. Every one of them a part of this. “You’ve done quite enough. What you’re going to do is leave this firm. Your days as a practicing lawyer are over. You’re done.”