Total pages in book: 57
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 54871 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 274(@200wpm)___ 219(@250wpm)___ 183(@300wpm)
"It's called… The Scales. And it's… for me, anyway—" he's looking right into my eyes now, "—it's… bliss.
Chapter 11
Caleb
Scarletta's looking at me in a way no one has ever looked at me before.
Not with fear, though she should be afraid.
Not with judgment, though I've just handed her every reason to condemn me.
She's looking at me with recognition, like she's found a puzzle piece that finally fits into the jagged hole she's been carrying around her whole life.
I understand her shame because I've lived with my own version of it since I was old enough to understand that the thoughts inside my head weren't normal.
"I always knew I was different too," I tell her, and the words feel strange in my mouth, foreign, like a language I stopped speaking years ago. "Even as a kid. The other boys were obsessed with baseball cards, and video games, and whatever cartoon was popular that week. I was obsessed with the news."
Scarletta's lips curve into a small smile, the first genuine expression of lightness I've seen from her since she safe-worded. The sight of it does something complicated to my chest, a warmth spreading through tissue I'd assumed was calcified beyond repair.
I find myself returning the smile, which is its own kind of revelation. Smiling is not something I do. Smiling is a social performance, a mask people wear to signal approachability, and I've never had any interest in being approached.
But this smile happens without my permission, pulled from somewhere deep by the simple fact of her amusement.
"Yes, fine," I admit. "A child obsessed with the news is objectively strange. I'm aware of how that sounds. But it wasn't the politics that drew me in, though there was certainly a political component to what I was noticing. And it wasn't the crime itself, though crime was at the center of everything."
I pause, organizing my thoughts into something coherent, something that will make her understand the architecture of the man holding her.
"It was the injustice," I say. "Watching people get hurt with no consequences for the ones who hurt them. Just victims. Victims everywhere I looked, on every channel, in every newspaper my father left scattered around the house. Children who disappeared and were never found. Women who were assaulted and watched their attackers walk free. Families destroyed by drunk drivers who served six months and went back to their lives like nothing happened."
Scarletta's body has gone still against mine, her breathing shallow as she listens.
"Somewhere along the line, the police stopped being about finding criminals and stopping them from hurting more people. They became revenue generators, traffic stop quotas, civil asset forfeiture machines. The legal system stopped being about weighing evidence and finding truth, and started being about who could afford the better lawyer, who had connections to the judge, who could drag proceedings out until witnesses died, or gave up, or forgot."
I can hear the anger bleeding into my voice now, the cold fury that's been burning in my chest since I was twelve years old and watched a man who'd molested four children walk out of a courtroom because the prosecutor made a procedural error.
"America has a third-world justice system," I tell her. "We pretend otherwise because we have marble courthouses and Latin phrases carved above the doors, but the reality is that criminals with money walk free while their victims live in fear for the rest of their lives. The scales of justice aren't balanced. They're bought and sold to the highest bidder."
Scarletta's hand moves against my chest, not pushing away but pressing closer, like she's trying to absorb the vibration of my anger through her palm.
"My grandfather left me a trust fund," I continue. "It wasn't my father's money, which meant my father couldn't touch it, couldn't control me with it the way he controlled everything else in my life. I used that money to start an investment firm while I was still at Harvard. Venture capital, private equity, finding undervalued companies and either buying them outright, or taking strategic positions that gave me leverage."
I watch her face as I explain the mechanics of my wealth, looking for the flicker of greed or calculation that I've learned to expect from people who discover what I'm worth. I don't find it. She's listening to understand me, not to assess my value as a resource.
"I was a billionaire by twenty-eight," I say. "Self-made, more or less. The trust fund gave me the initial capital, but I multiplied it by a factor of forty through my own decisions, my own analysis, my own willingness to make moves that other investors were too cautious or too stupid to make."
I pause, letting the weight of what I'm about to say settle between us.
"That's when I started The Scales."
Scarletta doesn't flinch. She doesn't pull away or ask me to stop talking. She waits, her body warm and trusting against mine, her attention completely focused on the words coming out of my mouth.