Sweet Release (A Bad Boy Mafia Romance) Read Online Free Page A

okay.
     
    We sat down on either side of her overfilled desk, a mess of papers, folders, and sticky notes that made me wonder just how many cases she had besides mine. In this city, probably a lot. There was a little plastic up on my side, the kind you piss in for a drug test. I didn’t mind. Just the cost of doing business like this.
     
    “So you’re working with Jarome Tyson?” She asked. I’d filled out her papers in the waiting room.
     
    “Yeah. Good gig. Great guy. Took a chance on me.”
     
    She nodded slowly, and looked at the second page. She raised an eyebrow. “Living there, too?”
     
    “Room upstairs,” I said.
     
    “I understand you have the option to stay with family,” Annemarie said. She looked at me over the rim of her glasses.
     
    “I could,” I said. “Tony would take me; my brother. But, I don’t think I wanna get too close. Breaks my heart but… you know.”
     
    Annemarie sighed, and put the clipboard down. “I do know. I’m pleased to see you making progress and distancing yourself from a potentially bad element. How are you finding the outside world?”
     
    “It’s not bad,” I said. Probably sounded weird; like prison was any comparison. “I’m getting used to it.”
     
    “It takes time to adjust,” she said, “but it seems like you’re well on your way.” She gestured at the piss cup. “You know I have to ask. Just to the line, then screw the cap on. Don’t wash it, just wash your hands afterward and put it in the plastic bag and seal it. We won’t have to do this every time, but I do have to report the results.”
     
    “No problem,” I said. “I’d rather pee in a cup than a prison stall.”
     
    She let me do my business in the bathroom, and a few minutes later I came back with the little baggie sealed. She filled out a label and pressed it to it and set it aside; might as well have been leftovers from somebody’s lunch.
     
    “So,” she said after that bit was done with, “speaking of your family; have you had any contact from them?”
     
    “My brother’s called a couple times,” I told her. “I didn’t answer. I can’t put him off forever, you know. But… I gotta do me right now.”
     
    Her curls swayed as she nodded sagely. “Wise choice. And Officer Pembry?”
     
    The name made an angry spark flicker in my stomach. We both knew what was up. I’d made my case to Annemarie when we met. She’d taken it in stride. Fact was, though, whether Pembry set me up or not was, as she called it, an immutable element of the past that I wasn’t likely going to be able to change and that she wasn’t in any position to investigate or act on whether she believed me or not. The best thing was to move forward.
     
    “Nah,” I said. “Haven’t heard anything.”
     
    “Good,” she said. “If you do, you tell me about it. It’s not just my job to make sure you keep to the straight and narrow; I’m here to help you reintegrate into society. I want to see you succeed out there.” She said this like a warning. In the end, our relationship was clearly defined. She gave me the benefit of the doubt, but didn’t forget where I’d been for the past four years.
     
    “Yes Ma’am,” I said. “Believe me, I’m on that path and staying there.”
     
    “See that you do,” she said. She stood, and walked me to the door. “I’ll see you on Thursday. Marcus? Come on in.” Just like that, she was on to the next.
     
    I left the office relieved. It would get easier, I guessed; not that Annemarie was hard to deal with but she was one step removed from a cop and cops still made me nervous. Every time I saw a cop car on the street, or saw a uniform, my adrenaline pumped a little, and I had an instinct to walk the other way. Not every cop in the city was crooked, of course. But at least one of them was.
     
    Officer Jason Pembry had set me up. I knew it because he was the last cop to have his hands on me before his partner found twelve grams of weed and