Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (classic novels for teens .txt) 📕

“They had her place wired from one end to the other,” Caleb said. “She’s probably right.”

“But you wouldn’t know because you were in her bed fucking her instead of checking the god damned house!”

Anna exchanged an uncomfortable glance with Caleb. “We screwed up,” she said placatingly. “Nobody really believed me. You didn’t! And I certainly wouldn’t have had sex if I’d known some pervert was watching!

“Anyway, it was the truth! It had nothing to do with my belief that my father was a threat to me. If anybody influenced me, it was you, and it certainly wasn’t because we’d been intimate!”

Simon sighed tiredly. “Well, it’s done. All we can do is hope for the best.”

She glanced at Ian and then looked away quickly, but not quickly enough. Simon saw the guilty glance. “Let’s just hope he doesn’t decide to ask you if you’ve made the rounds,” he muttered. “I’m probably going to have to suspend Caleb … at the very least! At this rate, I won’t have any of my lieutenants left!”

“Suspend …!”

Caleb clamped a hand over her mouth and shook his head at her.

“I could go ahead and resign,” Ian said a little stiffly.

Simon glared at him. “That would look just fucking great! You might as well get up there on the stand and announce it!”

Amusement glittered in Ian’s eyes when Simon had stalked off. “Don’t worry about it, magpie. You handled it well. He’s just worried about the trial.”

Another week passed before they called Mrs. Bagley to the stand. Simon had calmed down when the Attorney General had apparently decided to simply ‘overlook’ the indiscretion—for the moment, anyway. He’d informed Simon not to suspend Caleb since he thought it would give the appearance of wrongdoing when Anna’s testimony had seemed to suggest otherwise.

It was the first opportunity Anna had had to thank the lady. She hugged her effusively while they were waiting to go in. “Thank you! Thank you so much! If there’s any way I can repay your kindness, anything I can do, just ask.”

Mrs. Bagley beamed at her and patted her cheek. “I don’t need anything else, deary! It’s enough to know you appreciated the effort. Really, I had to clean up my house and yard, you know! The damned city people would’ve been down before I could spit and fined me for the mess!” she added irritably.

She did so well on the stand that the prosecutor looked like he wanted to kiss her when she was finally dismissed.

The Attorney General, feeling as if he’d proven his charge of kidnapping, moved on to the much harder but far more important phase of the trial, trying to convict Miles Cavendish of terrorism. His attempt on Simon’s life was to be part of that process and the trial moved into a far more vicious stage as they upped the ante.

The Attorney General advised them that he thought the case was weak and that their chances were slim in getting the verdict they wanted, but he was willing to try since it seemed their best shot. At the least, he concluded, they could get the kidnapping verdict and he would spend years in jail. If they could convict him on attempted murder of a law officer and the murder of Paul Warner, he might never see the outside of a jail again.

Anna knew, though, that Simon desperately wanted him convicted for the murders of all the people who’d died in the bombing and the only way to do that was to convict him of acts of terrorism.

And she and Caleb might have screwed that up for him just for that one moment of pleasure!

The prosecutor’s certainty that he’d made his case in the kidnapping didn’t matter if the ‘indiscretion’ undermined the rest of the case by shedding a less than flattering light on the watchmen and their work. It made them look unprofessional and that made them look sloppy, which the defense lawyers could use to further weaken an already weak case.

Simon was going to really hate her if it was her fault they lost, and what was worse, she thought the others might, too. Maybe not at first. In the beginning they would just feel too guilty about it to want to be around her and then later, they would begin to think it was her fault for enticing them to start with.

It was the way people’s minds worked, she knew. When they couldn’t bear their guilt, they tried to find an excuse that would allow them to forgive themselves. It was part of the survival instinct, self-defense.

She had one more chance to redeem herself in Simon’s eyes, just one. She had to testify that she’d overheard her father discussing the destruction of her home and lab as part of the prosecution’s case for terrorism. Somehow, she was going to have to convince the jury that she’d been part of his plan to wipe out the mutants—an unwitting pawn, but a piece of the puzzle.

Chapter Fourteen

Anna had settled down to read for a while before she tried to sleep to see if she could ‘calm the waters’ enough to actually sleep. Between the trial, her anxiety about the outcome, and her struggle to come up with enough data on her project to help them, her mind rarely rested.

She’d thought everyone else had gone to bed and to sleep long since when she heard a tap on her door. Instantly alert and wild with the possibilities, she sat up and set the reader aside, struggling with her conscience.

She didn’t think either Ian or Caleb would dare come to her