Page 69 of Ink's Devil

She’ll be feeling guilty.So it won’t be much of a stretch for her to believe I want nothing to do with her. If I was in my right mind, that should be where I’m headed. I’ve got to make her believe I hate her.

I shake my head slowly. She’ll never know I’ll have done the stupidest thing in my life. I’ll claim her to get her the protection I can’t provide. Her believing I’ve cut her loose is the only way to keep her out of this mess. If she gets arrested and goes inside too, my sacrifice would have been for nothing.

Fuck being sensible. The thought of never seeing her again hurts worse than any other sentence I could be handed, but I can’t see any other way around it.

Hate. Love. One coin, two sides. She’ll never know which landed up.

“McNeish. You’re wanted.”

It was only a matter of time.

Standing, I walk to the door feeling the indignity of my pants slipping down as I’m missing my belt. My motorcycle boots have buckles so at least I don’t need to shuffle in the way I’ve seen men who are missing their laces have. Hoisting up my jeans as best I can, I straighten my shoulders and follow the guard down the short corridor and step into the room that he opens. I let out a breath as a sigh of relief when I see who’s waiting and step forward with an outstretched hand.

“Sykes. It’s good to see you.”

He shakes my hand automatically. “Fuckin’ Sunday. Why’s it always a Sunday? If you could have heard my wife—”

“What you get for us paying you an extortionate amount to be our lawyer.”

“There is that.” He nods, seriously, then points to a chair one side of the desk. “How about you sit down, and I do my job and get us both out of here as soon as I possibly can?”

Sounds good to me. Impossible, though it may be. He’ll soon be going home to his wife and me? Well, I’ll be going back to my cell, and from there to a penitentiary.

“So, Damon—”

“Ink.”

He knows us well so doesn’t argue. “Ink. What happened?” He stifles a yawn suggesting he has indeed been pulled from his bed.

“This room got ears?”

“Shouldn’t have. Lawyer-client privilege. But I do need to know everything that happened, then I can best prepare your case.”

“What am I looking at?”

Sykes shrugs. “The charge will be possession with intent to sell. You had two kilos on you. Depends whether they try to link you with large-scale heroin distribution, if that’s the case it could be anything up to thirty-two years. At the other end of the scale, the minimum is two.”

“It was heroin?” As I ask for confirmation, I huff a mirthless laugh. I hadn’t even known what was in the bag.

At my strange question, Sykes sits back and folds his arms. “Mexican brown,” he confirms. His eyes sharpen. “That you didn’t know what you were carrying suggests there’s a story there. Now give me something to work with.”

For the next half hour or so, I explain why I had been there in the back alleys behind Tits Up, and how I’d come to so briefly be in possession of two kilos of a controlled substance.

“Unbelievable,” he says at last. “You’re prepared to do serious time for a woman you’ve known only a couple of weeks? Who could be up to her neck in this business?”

“She’s not,” I say firmly. I don’t know why I’ve come around to that opinion, but while I can’t think of the explanation, I’ve become convinced there must be a good reason why she was there last night. “I don’t know what went down or why, but I do know she doesn’t have anything to do with drugs.”

He rolls his eyes as if I’m the biggest idiot he’s ever seen, and working for the likes of us, he’s seen quite a lot. “You had the bag for less than a minute?”

“Sparky will back me up.”

“You didn’t know it was even drugs.” It’s a statement, so I stay quiet.

“Right, what’s her full name?”

I don’t give him his answer but explain instead. “I don’t want her dragged into this, Sykes. I don’t want the police to get her in their sights. I can deal if I go down, she can’t.”

“She could prove your innocence—”

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