Famished, Meghan O'Flynn [free ebooks romance novels .txt] 📗

Ashley Johnson felt the hatred the moment she stepped inside the courtroom from the door behind the judge’s bench. It thickened the air, choked the breath from her lungs, and severed the hope that she’d managed to scrape together while waiting in her cell. There was no hope in this room. Just anger. The cuffs on her wrists jangled obscenely in the condemning hush of the courtroom.

They might as well kill her now. It would be preferable to the slow agony she would suffer imagining every major event in her daughter’s life—her birthdays, her college acceptance letters, her wedding—from inside stone walls.

The jury’s eyes burned into Ashley from their box on the right side of the room, and her legs tried to buckle. Maybe she deserved some of their judgment. It was true that she’d made some bad choices.

The choice to be with Derek was the worst one of all.

She tried not to look at the front of the courtroom as she passed, tried not to see the stand where Derek’s dead body had been turned into a poster, his sightless eyes watching and accusing her even through the film of death. The wall behind him was splattered with the bloody remains of his skull. Every time, she tried not to look, but every time, she failed.

Frank Griffen sat, shoulders square, mouth set, his black-rimmed glasses frozen halfway down his nose. But his pinky fingers twitched like he could feel the energy too. Not that he ever sat perfectly still—his mouth or fingers or eyes, something was always moving. He wouldn’t have been her first pick for a defense attorney, but she was broke. And he was good enough. If he got her out of there.

Eyes forward, don’t look at the jury. Don’t look at the poster. Don’t look.

Behind Griffen, Detective Eddie Petrosky frowned, squinting—agitated. Griffen said the detective’d had that look since some serial killer had gotten away on his watch last year, but to Ashley, those lines of irritation on Eddie’s forehead showed that he gave a shit. Down the row, Dr. McCallum, the shrink who’d interviewed her before the trial, sat watching, his enormous belly squished against the back of the pew in front of him. He had deemed her depressed, testified that she’d likely been suicidal the night Derek died. He hadn’t been wrong. She had often prayed for death though she’d never come close to acting. It was a fantasy, slipping away when things got too hard—but not a fantasy she wanted to embrace.

Her feet seemed stuck to the floor as she scanned the rest of the crowd. Her caseworker, Diamond’s caseworker, sat in the back. Some lady in a short skirt sat across the way, maybe a hooker waiting on her own court appearance. The one person who might’ve offered her hope, or at least a reassuring smile, was nowhere to be found. He’d visit on his own time, he’d said, and if she tried to stir things up without his consent, he’d leave her to die in prison. She couldn’t even think his name, for fear it would tumble out of her mouth. The guard behind her coughed, probably annoyed that she’d stopped in the middle of the courtroom, or maybe he was trying to remind her to move.

Then she saw her. Diamond entered the courtroom, her baby girl, already grown bigger in the months since Ashley’d been locked up. And with her, Ashley’s dead boyfriend’s mother: Lucinda Lewis, Diamond’s grandmother, if you believed the birth certificate. Lucinda glared at Ashley.

Ashley resisted the urge to run to her baby, to kiss her and hug her and tell her everything was going to be okay, that her mommy was coming home soon, and they’d be a family again. She wanted just one moment with Diamond. To smell her. To hold her. Instead, she watched her baby pass her by and disappear behind Lucinda as the woman turned to the seats. Ashley’s chest constricted.

Derek’s idiot brother, Trey, had shown up today too, his red bandana tucked haphazardly into his jeans pocket. Derek’s aunts held hands as they followed down the aisle after Lucinda and slid into one of the long benches that held families like church pews—the law’s last shot at redemption in a city where there was more blood than holy water.

The guard prodded Ashley forward so hard she stumbled into the table where Griffen sat. He jumped up and helped her to her seat, and she sank into the chair next to his, noting that Griffen’s bony nose was leaking again.

He swiped at his forehead and then his nose with an orange handkerchief, then shoved it into his pocket more violently than seemed necessary. He didn’t look at her, but she could see the tightness of his mouth. Not a good sign.

Tears burned behind her eyes though she wouldn’t give anyone the satisfaction of watching her cry. Not the jury and definitely not the prosecution. She didn’t want everyone to head home tonight feeling superior because of her pain. It was bad enough they were all free while she was locked in a cage, especially when she didn’t deserve to be there.

She’d made bad choices, that was true. But she wasn’t a killer.

Her throat threatened to close on her, and she swallowed over the tightness, trying to remember what Eddie had told her. We’ll figure it out, Ashley. I’ll find a way.

But he hadn’t. Neither had the one she’d expected to get her out of this mess; the one who was supposed to care. But maybe he’d been a mistake too.

Where is he?

Like a shotgun blast, the bang of a gavel reverberated through Ashley’s shoulder muscles and shivered down her back. Church was in session. She relaxed her fists in her lap and raised her eyes to that fat bastard judge, Clarence Delacour.

“We have already heard from the prosecution. Are you ready for closing arguments, Mr. Griffen?”

Griffen stood and walked around the table, buttoning the front of his suit jacket with twitchy little movements. He was barely taller than Ashley herself, but the set of his shoulders was rigid and determined, and this made him seem much larger. He walked to the jury box and put his hands on the rail, his grip soft like he was polishing the wood with his index finger instead of making a point.

Ashley tuned out after his “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury.” She knew there was reasonable doubt, or at least Griffen had told her there was. But she also knew what the prosecution thought: that she’d come home, found her daughter injured, and bludgeoned Derek in the head with a blunt object, probably the hammer she’d used to hang a picture earlier that morning. A hammer that was now missing, which Griffen had assured her, was a good thing. Defendants had been released for less.

Ashley’s neck was damp with perspiration by the time Griffen