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I just had to stick this out.
And silently vote for his challenger when the time came.
I clicked on my keypad, lowering the light on the computer in the hopes that I could just power through and get these new social media posts and newsletters drafted before I finally caught some sleep.
I willed the medicine to work faster, to bring me some peace amidst the turmoil.
Outside, the rain showed no signs of letting up.
A crash of thunder had me shooting up out of my chair, my nerves frazzled as I took myself into the bathroom in my office, leaving the light off as I wet some paper towels to press to the back of my neck, the pain making me sweaty and overheated.
I was still standing there when I heard the elevator ping, a sound I probably shouldn’t have been able to hear from so far away, but the migraine was making my hearing almost as sensitive as my sight and sense of smell that had me tossing out my dinner and throwing the bag down the chute before I even got to eat any.
It wasn’t uncommon for many of us to work late. But this was too late even for the most ambitious members of the team.
I heard the sound of footsteps, the stride awkward in the way only the senator’s was.
Michael Westmoore was a relatively short man. I actually had to stop wearing heels because it bruised his ego when a woman towered over him. To overcompensate for being vertically challenged, he had shoes with lifts specially made. The problem was, he wanted to be a lot taller than the standard lift would make him, which meant he added a slight heel to the shoes as well, making it so he ended up walking a bit like someone in high heels, only with flat loafers on.
I slunk back into the shadow behind the door, not wanting to engage with him. Not when my head was still screaming.
A loud ring had me fighting back a gasp before the senator’s voice flooded the hallway.
“Dimitri,” he said, making my brows pinch.
I knew the senator well. Well enough to know the names of every one of his family members—including the illegitimate son he’d never publicly acknowledged but who fleeced his father for money every month that he always sucked up his nose within weeks—but that name meant nothing to me.
“Are you alone?” A deep, heavily accented, man’s voice filled the hallway with the senator.
Michael Westmoore was completely useless with all forms of technology. He had this awful habit of always answering his phone on speaker without even realizing it, leaving one of us on his team to quickly turn the speaker off before he or someone he was talking to said something that would ruin his chances of reelection.
“Ah,” the senator said, and I could hear him turning into my office, likely having seen the computer still powered on. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, coming toward the bathroom, and glancing in, but not seeing me stashed behind the door.
“We need to talk,” Dimitri said, and I placed the accent as Russian as the senator walked back out into my office.
“About what?”
“You were supposed to get that case dropped,” Dimitri said.
In my hiding place, I winced.
I mean, it was an ugly truth of politics that most, if not all, politicians got corrupted eventually. Even the idealistic ones, the ones who swore they would never take corporate money or bribes, the lure money corrupted them all eventually.
I wasn’t surprised my boss was corrupt.
I was a little surprised that it sounded like he was involved in something actually criminal.
Michael Westmoore hated feeling like he answered to anyone. And when you involved yourself with criminals, you were never truly in charge.
“This kind of thing takes time,” the senator insisted. “It’s not like I can just go to the DA and tell him to drop the case against a man caught trafficking women into Brooklyn.”
Trafficking?
My heartbeat was punching against my ribcage, loud enough that I could swear it could be heard even from a room away with rainfall still hammering against all the windows in the building.
It was one thing to look the other way when someone was dealing cocaine to half of the politicians in the game. It was a complete other to try to get a man off of trafficking charges.
Trafficking.
