Chapter 1: Cross Examination

Priya Kapoor had a rule: never let the prosecutor see you enjoying yourself. It was a good rule. She broke it constantly, and only for one prosecutor. "Objection," she said, rising before Sawyer Locke finished his sentence. "Counsel is testifying." Judge Alvarez looked up over his glasses with the weary patience of a man who had refereed this particular fight eleven times in three years. "Sustained. Mr. Locke, rephrase." Sawyer didn't look rattled. He never did, which was the most annoying thing about him. He turned back to the witness, a forensic accountant with a bow tie and a nervous habit of touching his ear, and said, "Let me ask it differently. In your professional opinion, do the numbers in Exhibit 14 match the numbers in Exhibit 9?" "They do not." "Thank you." Sawyer glanced at Priya as he sat, the barest curl at the corner of his mouth, the kind of look that said *I got there anyway* without a word. She hated that look. She'd hated it since her second year of practice, when he'd worn it after winning a suppression hearing she should have won, and she'd hated it every time since, with a consistency that had started to feel less like hatred and more like a habit she couldn't kick. "Your witness," Sawyer said. She stood, buttoned her blazer, and let the silence sit for exactly two seconds — long enough for the jury to lean in, not long enough for the judge to prompt her. "Mr. Feldman, you testified the numbers don't match. Did you also testify, in your deposition, that you were given only partial records to review?" The accountant's ear-touching intensified. "That's — yes. Partial." "So when you say the numbers don't match, what you mean is: the numbers you were shown don't match. You have no idea what the missing pages might show." "I — objection," Sawyer said, already up. "Argumentative." "I'll withdraw it," Priya said sweetly, because she'd already gotten what she wanted, which was the jury doing the math themselves. "Nothing further." They broke for the day at four. Priya was gathering her files when Sawyer appeared at the defense table, tie loosened, looking like a man who'd rather be anywhere else and had chosen this anyway. "Partial records," he said. "Cute." "Accurate," she said. "You want to talk about cute, let's talk about your closing on the Delgado case. You cried. In front of a jury. On purpose." "I felt something. It happens to humans." "It happens to you when you're losing." "I wasn't losing." He picked up one of her exhibit binders, turning it over like he might find something incriminating in the spine. "I was building sympathy for a victim who deserved it." "You were building sympathy for yourself." She took the binder back. "It's a good trick. I might steal it." "You'd have to actually feel something first." That one landed closer than she liked, and she covered it the way she covered everything — with a smile that had no warmth in it at all. "Careful, Locke. Keep talking like you know me and I'll start thinking you care." Something flickered across his face, there and gone, fast enough that she could tell herself she'd imagined it. "God forbid," he said, and picked his own bag up off the table. "See you tomorrow, Kapoor. Try to lose gracefully for once." "You first." He left. She stood there a second longer than she needed to, annoyed at herself for watching him go, and told herself — as she had told herself roughly four hundred times over three years — that it was just the adrenaline of trial. That was all it ever was. Her phone buzzed. A text from Denise: *Heard you destroyed the accountant. Drinks?* *Can't,* Priya typed back. *New case came in. Guy at Whitmore Logistics, embezzlement, but something's weird about the file.* *Weird how?* Priya looked at the folder sitting on top of her bag, the one she'd been handed an hour before trial with a note that just said *URGENT — client insists on you specifically.* She hadn't had time to do more than skim it. But she'd skimmed enough to notice that two of the financial exhibits had metadata timestamps from a date after the case had already been assigned to the DA's office — which meant somebody had generated "original" records after the fact. *Not sure yet,* she typed. *Might be nothing.* It was not nothing. She just didn't know that yet. What she did know, walking out into the September evening with the courthouse steps still warm from the day's sun, was that somewhere in that logistics company's books was a discrepancy nobody had planned for her to find — and that whoever had planned this case had not planned on Sawyer Locke being the one to prosecute it, either.

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