Page 104 of Claim

“This isn’t the way.” I glanced around. This was the private exit. The route only known to us servants of the court.

The man closed his hand around my arm, and I felt something sharp and pointy thrust into my side. “Yeah, it is.”

Chapter eighteen

Razor

I should’ve been used to waiting by now.

Prison trained me for it. Waiting for doors. Names. Shit I didn’t get told until it was already decided.

Still, waiting in this corridor scraped at me.

The hard bench bolted to the wall was cold through to my arse, the cheap suit Lennon had bought me with his week’s wages no real barrier. I needed to pay him back for it though. And I would. Drug and blood-free. But I had two custody screws posted up nearby, pretending not to watch me. Though they were. The hearing was done. I could walk out.

Yet I was still fucking here.

Still tagged. Parked. Not being told which way my life was about to go.

I checked the clock. Then again.

The other reason I was antsy? Cause I was waiting for Tristan.

Five minutes. Ten. Enough time for a judge to wreck or save him. Enough time for Imogen to come out and say it was all fucked up because I’d touched him. Enough time for Tristan to stand in front of me and say he wasn’t allowed to stand in front of me ever again. That I wasn’t allowed to touch him ever again either.

Yet nothing.

I slid my forearms on my thighs, eyes up. Let them think I was restless. Barristers drifted past. Clerks. Court staff. Black gowns, low voices, paper under arms. Nobody I wanted. Not the wig and gown I was hoping for.

Then Imogen appeared.

She stopped when she saw me still there. “Where’s Tristan?”

I shook my head.

Her mouth tightened. That couldn’t be a good sign.

She adjusted her gown, then her gaze snagged over my shoulder. I glanced over it, following her line of sight, and sat straighter. Fucking stupid. It wasn’t even the man I wanted. Strangely, it was his father, coming down the corridor as if he owned the fucking building. Older. Immaculate. A man who didn’t step around people cause they moved for him. Hale-Fitzroy. I hadn’t known that was coming. Tristan’s old man. On the other side of this. No wonder Tristan hadn’t come back.

I saw the resemblance straight away. Not just the eyes. The colour. The cut of him. But the restraint. The discipline. The way everything about him was sealed shut and weaponised. That was where Tristan came from.

And fuck—

I loved breaking that apart in him.

Loved the moments when Tristan forgot how to hold himself. Forgot who he was and where he came from. When he shook under my hands. When his breathing went wrecked and uneven, as if he didn’t belong to that world at all and instead belonged to me and my dirt. When all that polish cracked and it was him and me and heat and want and him coming apart, begging for more as if he didn’t care what it cost.

Seeing all that perfect posh polish standing there in his father’s face…

It rolled, old and violent, through my chest.

Yeah. Inappropriate. Considering I was sitting there tagged, waiting to hear if I was going back inside, with his old man ten feet away on the wrong side of the aisle, built to put men like me away. Didn’t change it, though. Didn’t soften it. I’d taken his perfect son and made him mine.

And I fucking loved that. Fucking loved him.

Fuck.

I love him.