The second meeting ended, and the room emptied, and Harolin sat at the table and looked at his watch.
His father's message sat on the screen.
He read it once.
Immediately, he put his fist through the table surface angrily. It wasn't hard enough to break anything, but it was enough to make the officers filing out of the room stop and look back. Without anyone telling them anything, they made a collective decision to keep moving. One by one, they left. The sound of the door clicked, and the room went back to being quiet.
Harolin sat with the message and what it meant. He wasn't angry because of the message.
He was not surprised by it at all. His father had been building toward this for more than two years. The Crowe family name, the political connections, and the marriage that would consolidate both. Scarlett Carman was not a person to his father. She was a transaction. She had probably been selected from a list.
None of that was new.
What was pissing him off was his phone.
