Chapter 157 The Wrong Man

Chapter 157 The Wrong Man
Anya's POV

The courtroom doesn't look like the ones on TV. No dramatic gavel-slamming, no tearful confessions on the stand. Just fluorescent lights, tired lawyers, and a judge who reads the plea agreement in the same flat voice she'd probably use to read a grocery list.

I keep waiting for the moment to feel bigger than it does. For weeks I imagined this day as something climactic, Voss finally facing consequences, some visible reckoning that would match the terror of a rose on my porch or a blackout timed to a phone in my hand. Instead it's paperwork and procedure, a room full of people who've clearly done this a hundred times before, treating the worst month of my life as another case number on a docket.

Gregory Voss pleads guilty to stalking, unlawful surveillance, and breaking and entering. Eighteen months, most of it likely to be served as fourteen with good behavior, according to the prosecutor who explains it to us afterward in a hallway that smells like industrial cleaner and old coffee.

Fourteen months. That's what three weeks of terror costs, apparently, when the man behind the terror was never really the one in charge.

"What about Ashcroft," I ask, my voice tight. "Is anyone even looking for him?"

The prosecutor's expression flickers, careful. "We're pursuing it. But officially, on paper, Daniel Ashcroft has been deceased for eighteen months. Death certificate, closed estate, the whole record. Whoever's been directing Voss used that identity as cover, which means we're not just hunting a person, we're hunting a name that legally doesn't exist anymore. It complicates things."

"Complicates," I repeat. "He terrorized me for weeks. He's still out there. And the system's telling me that's complicated."

"I know that doesn't feel like justice," she says quietly. "I wish I had something better to give you."

She doesn't. Nobody does. Voss goes into a van outside the courthouse, and the man who actually orchestrated all of it walks around free, using a dead man's name like a mask he can put on and take off whenever it's convenient.

Levi finds me on a bench outside the courthouse twenty minutes later, having stepped away to make a call to his father, whose entire security team has apparently been reassigned to actively hunting down whoever's been using the Ashcroft identity. His father's business relationship with Whitfield Capital has unraveled completely in the fallout, their lawyers scrambling to distance the family from a scandal none of them saw coming.

"Hey." He sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch, not saying anything for a moment, just letting the quiet exist between us. "How are you feeling?"

"Cheated," I admit. "Relieved. Both, somehow, at the same time, which doesn't feel like it should be possible."

"It's possible." He takes my hand, threading his fingers through mine. "I felt exactly that after Voss's confession. Relieved it's partially over. Furious that the person actually responsible is still a ghost on paper, walking around somewhere."

"Fourteen months for Voss, and the real threat gets to disappear behind a dead man's name." My voice cracks. "How is that supposed to feel like anything close to safe?"

"It's not safe," Levi says quietly. "Not yet. I'm not going to sit here and pretend it is, because you deserve better than me lying to make this easier."

Something in me loosens slightly at that, not comfort exactly, but the relief of not being asked to pretend a hard thing is easier than it is.

"I keep waiting to feel like myself again," I say. "Like once Voss was sentenced, the fear would just turn off. It hasn't. I still check the porch every night. I still flinch when my phone buzzes with an unknown number. And now I know the actual danger was never him, it was someone patient enough to fake his own death and disappear behind another man's job title for eighteen months. That's so much worse."

"That's not going to disappear on a schedule," Levi says gently. "Fear doesn't care that one part of the case is closed."

"How long does it take?" I ask, hating how young and lost my voice sounds. "Before I stop looking over my shoulder every time I walk somewhere alone?"

"I don't know," he admits. "I wish I did. I wish I could hand you an answer that made this feel finished instead of half-finished." He squeezes my hand. "But I know you don't have to carry it alone while you figure that out. That part I can promise, and I'm not going anywhere until whoever's hiding behind Ashcroft's name is found."

I lean my head against his shoulder, watching people move up and down the courthouse steps, ordinary lives continuing around us like nothing enormous just happened inside those walls. Maybe that's the strange, unsatisfying truth of justice, it closes one file while leaving another wide open, and expects you to resume your life like the fear didn't rearrange something permanent inside you.

"I don't regret any of it," I say finally. "Not the article, not standing up to Voss in that garage, not any of the moments where I refused to just disappear quietly. I'd do all of it again, even knowing there's more coming."

"I know," Levi says. "That's part of why I love you. You don't run from hard things, even when they cost you."

We sit there a while longer, and for the first time in weeks, the silence between us doesn't feel like the held breath before another threat lands. It just feels like quiet. Fragile, incomplete quiet, but quiet all the same.

My phone buzzes as we're finally standing to leave, and my whole body goes rigid on instinct before I even look, an old reflex, hardwired now, that I don't know how to unlearn yet.

It's an email. From an address I don't recognize, no subject line, sent three minutes ago.

Congratulations on the conviction. Wrong man, though. I'm still very much alive.

I show Levi the screen without a word, and I watch the color drain slowly from his face as he reads it twice.

"Anya," he says quietly. "He knows we found out about him."