Guilty by Karen Robards

didn't even feel the need to keep his bulk between her and the door, told her that he didn't fear she would make a run for it.
    And he was right. Their shared past held her in place like invisible, unbreakable strands of spider silk.
    "I can't do that." Her tone was abrupt. No need to pretend they were friends. They had never been.
    "Don't give me that."
    Apparently satisfied with his cleaning efforts, he let the murder weapon slide to the floor beside Orange Jumpsuit's leg without touching it again. Then he picked up Orange Jumpsuit's dropped gun in its place. He stood, his size menacing in such tight quarters. He held the gun negligently, not pointing it at her, but still...
    She had always been ninety-nine percent certain that it had been Mario who had pulled the trigger.
    Kate had to fight the instinctive urge to step back a pace. That was Kate's natural reaction to a thug with a gun, anyway. But Kat—and she had once been Kat—had never backed down from anybody in her life. And it was Kat, who she discovered in that instant was still alive and well and functioning inside her body all these years later, who kept her standing tall, standing her ground.
    "So you're a big-time prosecutor now. Hey, girl, I'm proud of you!" Mario smiled at her and gave her shoulder a gentle, "good going, good buddy" kind of punch. When that didn't elicit anything more from her than a narrowing of her eyes, he dropped the good-buddy act and continued in a harder tone: "That's good for you, and I'm thinking it's even better for me." "Are you? How so?"
    "I'm looking at some hard time here, twenty-to-life, for nothing. Nothing. Violating probation. Possession of a firearm. Persistent felon." He grimaced. "Bullshit charges, but looks like they're going to stick. Assholes wouldn't even let me post bail. For nothing, I'm stuck in jail, right, probably till I'm so old my dick shrivels up. When these guys started hatching their little get-out-of-jail-free plan, I told 'em, hell, yeah, count me in. But they were idiots. They blew it. Nobody was supposed to get killed. Guy on the outside was supposed to drive up under the window with a U-Haul. The plan was to blast out a window, leap down onto the truck, get inside, and haul ass. Once Soto shot that judge, far as I was concerned it was all over. I knew they'd hunt us all down to the ends of the earth. I aborted the mission. I was unclipping the keys from that deputy's belt so I could get the hell out of this hallway when Rodriguez here came back in with you." He smiled. "I took one look at his little prosecutor friend, and I couldn't believe my ..."
    Brriing.
    The phone's shrill summons had sliced the tense atmosphere like a knife. Kate had jumped, looking at the phone with horror. It was almost certainly the cop in the courtroom outside. Her lifeline, but also, now, in a new and terrible way, her enemy.
    "Bottom line is, I came up with a better plan," he continued, ignoring the ringing phone. "Want to know what it is?"
    "What?" It was all she could do to get the word out. She already knew, she already knew. ...
    "You. My old friend Kitty-cat. 'Member that security-guard dude we took down that night in Baltimore?"
    Oh, yeah. His name was David Brady.
    Brriing...
    As the phone rang again, Kate practically jumped out of her skin. Her nerves were twitching, her heart thumping, her blood pumping so fast that it was all she could do to stand still. This could not be happening....
    Do not show fear.
    "I had nothing to do with that."
    He smirked. "Baby, you were there just like the rest of us. You know the law better than I do. You know that's all it takes. Somebody lets the cat out of the bag, we're looking at Murder One."
    He's right. Oh, God, he's right.
    Brriing...
    "I was a kid! Fifteen. And I didn't even go inside the store."
    "Doesn't make you any less guilty."
    Youth is a mitigating circumstance.
    But as she'd learned later, David Brady had been an off-duty cop. Justice tended to come down hard on