Sun In The South

Monterrey had its laws wrapped in a box of sophistication, and was ready to be served on the table before the judges in the courts of the city, with its 'barista' being Yvonne Perez. If that made sense. A determined lawyer. A single mother. An elegant single woman. The thirty-one year old hard-worker had her firm brimming with clients in need of the services she rendered with ease, and she was always ready to hand it to them. She had her whole life all figured out on paper and signed. It was perfectly imperfect. But her undoing was her need for love—to fill the void in her heart. She didn't know how that void, and striving despairingly to suffuse it, had landed her into a huge dilemma. Still feeling like she had it under control, her erected facade of a well designed life was in the aura she marched into every space with. Jacket, pants, and pumps...Very fitting for a Monday case. The open hall in the Pearl of Eve & Associates firm was thick with legal practitioners; barristers, counselors…etcetera, and they were being aided by legal secretaries, record clerks, and the general and operations managers. Yvonne braced herself for the morning with a customary exhale as she walked through those giant doors and gracefully sauntered down to her office, just around the corner. For a criminal defense attorney, she looked rather sophisticated, her elegance absorbed too much attention, and her net worth was grist for the gossip mill. Bringing the cup of coffee in her hands down to the worktable before her, she speed-dialed her secretary. "Anne, schedule the appointment with Devin right away—" "There's a more important case than Devin's flaccid wife that didn't get horny for him." The unexpected voice made her jump and remove her finger from the speed dial machine. 'Horny' wasn't a word used quite often in a law firm. Passionate was more like it, but who was to control this morally decayed guy? Yvonne rotated almost one-eighty degrees until she was facing the door and staring at the man who just spoke. He had a folder in one hand and he fiddled his pen with the other. She rolled her eyes and urged him to pass the case, and even then, he stood straight and made no attempt to move. Since he didn't care about Devin's wife's libido before he stabbed her in a mindless rage, something else should have mattered to him. "Tell me about Jane's reaction when you served her the subpoena?" Yvonne probed. "Not even close," Javier chagrined. "It has nothing to do with what's in my hands, anyways." He scratched his stubble and finally moved from his spot but didn't walk past the center of Yvonne's large office. There was an electrifying pause for a moment. Sadly, Yvonne had a little clue about what Javier was trying to adduce the moment his eyes hardened on hers. She was in a lot of trouble and playing a determined-worker wasn't going erase her mistake that had started growing legs and crawling its way out of the secret box she was shoving it into. "When were you going to tell me that you were not only being blackmailed, but had been crediting your blackmailer weekly and almost daily now for the past four months?" Then, the air was stiff. Unlike what Yvonne had thought, Javier knew a lot more. She'd been hiding the issue from him for so long and couldn't even remember how she got here. But one thing was certain, she was a few hundred dollars away from bankruptcy and out of the firm for good. This, Javier had learned the night before, after he'd stumbled into exchanged texts from an unsaved number on her phone. He'd spent the night digging out facts to back up his confrontation, because Yvonne was a sheer pretender, liar and an actor. There were three different slips in the folder he held, one of which contained a lot of evidences against whatever she might have been planning to say in her defense; that was what a defense attorney did anyway. Smacking the file on her table with anger, he poked at the first line and ran his index down subsequent lines. "All these"—his voice was hard, joviality suddenly a thing of the past—"texts, calls, debits, confirmation from recipient, unexplained multiple funds withdrawals from the firm and even loans—are these why the company has been late on salary this month, because you've been loaning from it to pay your swindler?" Jesus Christ. Something immediately clogged her throat. How was he so fast at digging out the hush-hush content of her life? She couldn't answer him. Her throat was dead stiff. Matter of fact, she had nothing to say. If he had stated all this and she wasn't imagining it, then he knew everything. There was no use trying to explain anything else. Swallowing hard, she finally opened her mouth, deciding to come clean about how she got here, but Javier threw in his question first. "What does the guy have against you?" He threw his head sideways in utter confusion. "Because the Yvonne that I know doesn't just let a guy come take what she worked so hard to acquire. It's the future of Pearl of Eve we're talking about here." Her answer was too heavy to blurt out just like that. What would he think of her? She eventually managed to muster the courage to tell Javier the truth. There was an overtone of disappointment in her scratchy voice as she said, "Some naked photos of me." "My god, Eve," he yelled, letting out the frustration on his short hair strands, yanking a handful of it. "How could you be so careless—" "It wasn't like that." Shame hooked her voice. "I don't even know how he got them, but I do know what will happen if they get out to the public." A scene flashed before her dazing vision. "What would people say?" She scoffed. "Yvonne Perez, the most responsible lawyer in Monterrey, involved in s****l scandal, her naked pictures have gone viral." She mimicked the gesticulation of a reporter. "Come on, what would you have done if some freak had a picture of your c**k on her laptop and wanted to send it to the media?" "I wouldn't get that careless in the first place," he maintained, eyes shifting hither and tither, unable to believe what he was hearing. Yvonne shook her head, relinquishing the urge to argue with him. She could strangle him if he dared to lay a blame right now. "On the flip side of that, there's been a meeting. The managing director has called a meeting." He was pointing outside her opened office door. "I suggest you leave everything you got here—" "You didn't f*****g send those receipts to him, did you?" Her jaw dropped. "I didn't need to. Today marks the first quarter of a new month. People are asking why they've still not received their cheques. The financial secretary is on a hot seat, because...you know why. Lawson is terribly angry right now, how could you pick personal interest over the firm's?" He didn't expect her to answer it. He kept bashing her, "The board should have been aware of it, even if not your bizarre secret, but the loan. I should have been told, damn it. How the f**k do you take nine million dollars without telling anyone?" He had started to yell, not just scaring Yvonne, but frustrating her as well. Then he brought down his voice, "In all of this, though, I've been very nice enough to tell the board of directors not to be too hard on you." Blowing out hot air of terror, she brushed her hair off her face and collapsed on her chair. "I'll be there in a minute," she told Javier dismissively and expected him to give her a little privacy, which he did after a few seconds. He closed her door quietly and she immediately flung the receipt of her deceit off her desk, brimming with rage. She groaned, her umber hair brushing on and off her face. She wished she could get a hold of the bastard that was ruining her, and, alarmingly, wanted to wrap her hand around his throat to kill him. He was being irrational. He didn't even have an axe to grind with her, so what was his aim, asides money of course? She'd given him so much money that she'd lost count. Javier had said nine million. Did Dave Collin want to build a bank with her hard earned money? All these thoughts were making her sick to the stomach. She was boiling and still fighting to quench the fire burning in her—a fire that made her want to scream. Facing the board of directors was even harder than finding this mysterious Dave Collin guy. Was that even his real name or a part of his subterfuge to get her to trust him? She was nothing more than two very short words: Done for.