 by Jessica Gadziala.jpg)
Total pages in book: 80
Estimated words: 77579 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 77579 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 388(@200wpm)___ 310(@250wpm)___ 259(@300wpm)
Until she puts some pieces together that has her not only thinking that Cosimo Costa had done something for the greater good, but that she couldn’t let him go to jail for it.
She had no regrets about deadlocking the jury until someone involved with the trial started to come after her.
And the only person she had to turn to for help was the man she’d saved from life behind bars…* Each book in this series can be read as a standalone *
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
Halle
I didn’t have time for this.
Though, as I sat in a seat in the jury box with eleven other people with equally disgruntled faces, I guess we all felt that way.
We didn’t have time for this.
We all had work and families and pets and lives to get back to. No one sitting here could afford to be forced into this box, day in and day out, for weeks, possibly months, all to get paid, what, pennies a day?
Get freaking real.
Besides, after having to sit through the damn questioning process with all these people, I had decided that the general populace was entirely too stupid to be trusted to make judgments on crimes that would result in people going to prison for years, or the rest of their life.
When one of the attorneys asked an unexpectedly unusual question during voir dire—Who, living or dead, would you like to have dinner with?—the guy who was currently sitting several seats down from me had answered—with a straight face—John McClane. And he was accepted. Despite the fact that John McClane was neither living nor dead since he was a fictional character who did not exist at all.
This was a job meant for law students.
Or people who had common sense at least.
I remember reading once that lawyers and prosecutors alike didn’t like jurors who are too educated. They almost always preferred those without college degrees. And especially those who didn’t have advanced degrees.
I guess they figured that lesser-educated people were easier to sway toward their side.
They didn’t count on people like me.
Chronic students.
Forever changing their major, never actually graduating, instead ferreting away deep knowledge about a dozen or more subjects.
When they asked what I did for a living, I had to give them the technical truth.
I worked at an antique store owned by my grandfather.
They didn’t care that I’d majored in fine arts, English, history, and, finally, business.
I’d settled on business and likely would have finished that degree with the sole purpose of keeping my family business in the family. A job that was supposed to go to my ne’er-do-well older brother. Who, last time I’d checked in, was buried under some rich lady’s skirt in Colorado, enjoying that she was a partial owner of a ski lodge, so he got to spend his long, responsibility-free days on the slopes. For free.
I refused to let the family’s legacy, as crumbling as it might be, fall away. We had three generations in the antiques business. But my grandparents only had one child. And my mother only had two.
So this fell on me.
I couldn’t afford to be away from the store for a day, let alone the length of a murder trial.
But here I was.
Here we all were.
Just thanking our lucky stars that we hadn’t been sequestered.
I’d actually been surprised by that decision. I didn’t know a lot about the mafia, but I knew that during other high-profile mafia cases, there had been bribes and threats to the jury, prompting them to do a fully anonymous and sequestered jury.
That said, that was in the past. Back when the mafia was big news, big business. While I was sure the mafia was still alive and well, I didn’t believe that they were as powerful as they used to be.
Clearly, the judge agreed.
Or he simply knew that by locking all of us in a hotel together, unable to talk to anyone but each other, and eating from the same five restaurants in an infinite rotation, we were going to get antsy and angry, and rush through a verdict just to get back to our lives.
I mean, I wasn’t exactly planning on dragging out my decision even without being sequestered, but at least I could go home each day. I could check on my grandfather. I could visit the store to make sure things weren’t falling apart.
It would just be a couple months, I reminded myself.
The store had been failing for years. A few weeks wouldn’t be what brought it down. I’d already been working on fixing things. Those patches would hold it over. Then I could fully commit to it, never having to think about jury duty for a long while.
So I sat back in the ridiculously uncomfortable jury box chairs and watched the prosecution and defense team flounce around the courtroom voices raised, over-enunciating each word.
Unfortunately, for both sides, the news had hit and circulated too quickly for them to get a jury that hadn’t heard about what had happened before the trial. And because I was who I was, and because I’d been desperate for a break from the relentless cataloging of what was inside of the cramped, dusty, stuffy antique store, I’d been quick to hop on news and socials, looking into the case.
Murders were common in the city, regardless of how much the crime rate had dropped in the past few decades.