Three Ruthless Bikers : One Temptation

CHAPTER THIRTY — Two Weeks

LENA'S POV

Helen arrived at the compound in person three days before the trial, which told me how seriously she was taking the preparation.

She set up in the conference room with files spread across the table and a laptop open to what looked like a list of every possible question Edmund's lawyers might ask. She was sharper in person than she had been on video calls, quicker, more direct, the kind of person who did not waste words because she had too much work to do to spare them.

"We are going to run through this multiple times," she said, looking around the room at Ghost, Axel, Rook, David, and me. "I need Lena comfortable with every difficult question before she sits in that chair. The first time she hears these questions cannot be from opposing counsel."

"Start whenever you are ready," I said.

She started immediately.

"Miss Graves, is it true that you have been living with members of a known criminal organization since the day of your wedding."

I had been told to answer honestly and directly, without defensiveness. "Yes," I said. "The Iron Grave Motorcycle Club took me in when I had nowhere else to go."

"Is it not true that you went willingly with a stranger you had just met on a public road."

"Yes," I said. "I asked him to take me. I was running from a forced marriage to a man three times my age who had purchased me from my family."

Helen nodded once, satisfied, and moved to the next question without pause. "Is it not true that you are currently pregnant with children whose paternity is in dispute."

"The DNA results confirmed Edmund Hale is the biological father," I said. "There is no dispute about that. There is a dispute about what rights a man who committed assault has to children conceived through that assault."

Helen's eyebrows lifted slightly. "Good," she said. "Direct. Do not let them soften the language. If they say relationship, you say assault. If they say complicated circumstances, you say exactly what happened. Clarity is your strongest weapon in that room."

Axel, sitting at the end of the table, had his arms crossed and his jaw tight. "This is brutal," he said. "Watching her answer these like they are normal questions."

"They have to become normal to her by Thursday," Helen said without looking up. "Or they will catch her off guard in front of the judge, and that is far worse."

We continued for two more hours.

By the end my voice had gone slightly rough from talking so much, but something else had happened too. Each question had stopped landing the way it had at the start. The sharp edges had worn down through repetition, not because the content had changed, but because I had practiced standing inside it without flinching.

That evening Ghost found me sitting alone on the back steps, the same spot where he had felt the babies kick for the first time.

He sat down beside me without a word, the easy familiarity of a man who no longer needed permission to simply be near me.

"How are you feeling," he said.

"Tired of talking about Edmund," I said honestly.

"That makes sense."

"Helen says I did well today."

"You did," Ghost said. "I watched most of it from the doorway."

I looked at him. "I did not see you there."

"I know," he said. "I did not want you performing for me. I wanted to see how you actually handled it."

"And how did I handle it."

He considered the question seriously, the way he considered everything. "Like someone who has already survived the worst version of these questions," he said. "Real life. Not hypothetical. By the time you get to that courtroom, nothing they ask is going to surprise you the way it would surprise someone who had not lived it first."

I thought about that. About the strange advantage of having already survived the thing they were trying to use against me.

"David has been quiet today," I said. "I noticed at lunch."

Ghost nodded slowly. "He is preparing his own testimony," he said. "Twelve years of evidence, and he has to compress it into something a courtroom can absorb in a limited amount of time. That is its own kind of pressure."

"Is he ready."

"He has been ready for twelve years," Ghost said. "He is just nervous about the delivery now that the moment has actually arrived."

I understood that completely.

Two days before the trial, Helen ran a final mock cross examination with the most aggressive questions she could construct, designed specifically to rattle me the way Edmund's lawyers would likely try.

"Is it not true, Miss Graves, that you have a financial incentive to discredit Mr. Hale, given the multimillion dollar foundation that bears your family's name and benefits directly from his downfall."

I felt anger flare hot and fast, exactly the reaction she had been trying to provoke.

I took a breath before answering, the way she had taught me.

"The foundation did not exist when I said no at that altar," I said evenly. "I had no financial incentive then. I had nothing. I ran with bare feet and no plan. Everything that came after, including the foundation, was built from surviving what he did, not from planning to profit from it."

Helen smiled slightly, the first real smile I had seen from her all week. "That," she said, "is exactly the answer. Calm, factual, and it reframes their accusation as evidence of your resilience rather than your motive."

Ghost, watching from the corner of the room, exhaled slowly.

"She is ready," he said.

"She was ready before we started," Helen said. "We just needed her to know it."

The night before the trial I could not sleep.

Not from fear exactly. Something closer to anticipation, the particular restlessness of standing at the edge of something that had been building for months and was finally about to arrive.

Ghost found me awake near midnight, sitting up in bed with the lamp on low.

"Cannot sleep," he said, not really a question.

"No."

He came and sat on the edge of the bed. "Tomorrow does not have to be everything," he said. "It is one day. One part of a much longer fight. Whatever happens in that courtroom does not undo everything we have already built."

"I know," I said. "I am not scared of losing. I am scared of having to say it all out loud, in front of him, with him sitting right there."

Ghost took my hand. "He does not get to make you small in that room," he said. "Not after everything you have survived to get here. You walk in standing exactly as tall as you have been standing since the bridge."

I held onto his hand and let that settle into me.

"Will you be there," I said. "Tomorrow. In the room."

"I would not be anywhere else," he said.

Axel's voice came from the doorway, where he had apparently been standing for who knew how long. "Same," he said.

Rook appeared behind him a moment later. "Same," he echoed.

I looked at the three of them, gathered in my doorway at midnight the night before the hardest day of this entire fight, and felt something steady settle into my chest.

"Okay," I said. "Tomorrow then."