The Helford Trials (Helford #3)

Chapter Two

I should not have been surprised at all to know he was Helford’s.

My father was working with Woodburn to move the trials into motion, to start the prosecution of the guilty and the wronged all over the country, but Woodburn would soon have this own trial. He would soon be in front of his own firing squad, and it was a wild card to know what would happen. Really, this was my father’s mission, his pursuit. And I didn’t know if he was doing it for me, my mother, or himself.

Valerie reached over and squeezed my hand, watching the proceedings coming to an order in front of us like a hawk. I squeezed hers back, helplessly offering her the strength she needed, but even I didn’t know if I would be able to make it through this.

Not a word had yet been spoken, and I could already feel myself screaming. My father, as if sensing this, reached over and mindlessly patted my arm, not looking away from the committee, waiting for the first domino to drop and begin the chaos of our next several months.

“The committee will come to order,” the middle judge, an elder man with silver hair and a sharp face, called once the room had settled, and he would be heard. His eyes cut to Milton, and to the Underground representation, a woman named Marlisse Parsons, and I took a deep breath. “Today we are meeting on the grounds of the espionage and crimes committed by the man Shawn Masterson, whose birth name is currently unknown. Please bring forward the first witness to be sworn in.”

And that was how it began.

*

Really, for me, the trials started with the explosion.

That night, in France, there wasn’t much to do but run. Run, the direction not mattering, the enemies pouring in from all sides. We had been so trapped. I had watched one of the best friends I had ever had get shot in the head from point-blank range, and then I had felt the paralyzing horror of seeing Caitie standing there, paling before our very eyes, clutching a knife that was stuck out of her abdomen.

Not even my nightmares could live up to the horror of that night.

I remember when Caitie told us that we should split up, that we would draw the enemies closer to her and further from the rest of us. Caitie had had this spark in her eye that she sometimes got, this wicked gleam that told me that this was her training speaking, but I could see the resignation set in her shoulders, the acceptance that she was going to die. There was just this way that people wore their grief—I had seen it written in my own father’s body language for the majority of my life. Seeing it in Caitie was something worse than helplessness.

If the bravest person in the world was scared, if Caitie Alastair didn’t see a way out, I didn’t believe there would ever be an escape.

And there wasn’t. I should have known, from the very beginning, that I wouldn’t ever really leave Paris.

I remember sitting in the streets, Meade sitting next to me clutching at his gun like it was the last gospel he would ever know, Valerie on his other side with her head in her hands and her shoulders shaking with the strain of holding in her sobs. She tried to be strong, tried to be that way for so long, but it wasn’t until the night gave way into a painfully bright morning and a black car pulled up in front of us and Jasper Woodburn stepped out that it was lost. It wasn’t until then that I had realized what had happened, when I had really grasped the reality of the situation and the flames that had licked toward the night sky, and Meade and Valerie hadn’t even been able to react before I had launched forward and punched Woodburn in the face.

I didn’t just punch him once. I punched him again and again and again, and Valerie yelled and Meade had to pull me off of him, my hands covered in blood and knuckles broken and shaking, tears rolling down my face. Woodburn hadn’t said anything. He had just pushed himself onto his feet, wiped the blood away, and slurred out an order for one of his cronies to collect any bodies.

I don’t know why it had taken until then for everything to sink in, because I had definitely felt that horror when the building went up in smoke, and I definitely felt the shockwave that came with knowing, but it was like it had all been dulled. Muted. And then the sound was turned back on, and all I could hear was myself screaming, cursing Woodburn and Caitie and Shawn fucking Masterson.

And then the agent had come back with the news that there were barely any bodies to be found at all, and I was just—tumbling down.

In my honest option, that’s when the trials started. That was when we were all standing in front of a judge, pleading our case, and nothing was heard. We were left to our own devices, left to running and dying and mourning for the ones who didn’t survive the night, and I wouldn’t be happy with any of these trials, because it wouldn’t do any of it the justice that it deserved. There was no verdict that would make it better for those of us that lived it.

So, in some ways, I didn’t think there should be trials. I really didn’t, not for this. Not for people who were so obviously guilty, not for people that didn’t deserve the time and media to be wasted on them. There shouldn’t be a trial for Caitie, because she had already given enough. There should only be trials for the real murderers, the men in suits that sat back at a safe distance and let soldiers die for them in a battle that need not be fought. Jasper Woodburn deserved this trial more than anyone ever would.

My father had written it off as a formality. I had written it off as bureaucratic bullshit.

But then I took a step back, and I considered.

I couldn’t have Caitie back. These trials weren’t going to help her come home, or make the facts of her death any better. They weren’t going to make Valerie more alive, and they wouldn’t make Meade feel any less guilty. They didn’t seem like they were going to do anything. But then we put Caitie and Parker into the ground, and we had a few weeks of wondering where we were going to go now and to get our feet back on the ground, and now. Now it was different.

I didn’t want blood to be on my hands. But I did need to feel that feeling of justice that I got that morning with getting those punches in, that feeling of finally having a piece back of what I had lost. So I was sitting in on the trials, the major trials that I needed to know the verdicts of, and I was going to respect the endgame. But everyone walking into that trial knew who was guilty, and who was not.

It was all a matter of time.

The trials were only a formality, almost a symbol of what had begun the night Caitie died. It was our closure, and it was our justice. It was what we couldn’t have anymore with shooting a gun—it was the only thing we had left, our only form of coping, and I think we were all going to cling to it the only way we could. Whether it was like Valerie, who wanted it over, or Meade who wanted to be pardoned. Whether it was like me, who just wanted to see some good come out of all of this bad.

Whether it was like my father, who was chasing after ghosts long since put to rest.

Whether it was like Lys Asbury, a Four Corner stronghold, who just wanted to watch it burn.

Whether it was like Jasper Woodburn, who wanted it all to go his way.

We all were going into this trial for different reasons, but we all wanted the same outcome. We all wanted today to end with a guilty verdict.

And that was why I was here.

I sat back as the trial for Shawn Masterson began, and I wrote it all down.