Chapter Text
Petra comes to with a start, gasping for air and all too aware of the throbbing between her legs and the swirling sensation of heat pooling low in her belly. She's so distracted by the dazed, buzzing sensation flitting across her skin as she recovers from her dream, and all the revelations it brought with it, that it takes her a moment to register the knocking which must've woken her in the first place.
She stands, straightens her shoulders, schools her expression, and shakes off the arousal, along with all of the questions that came with it, to be shelved and dealt with at a later point in time. While it’s fair to say that she’s trying to get a little better at ‘living her truth’, so to speak, and being in touch with her emotions, she’s also a firm believer in compartmentalizing, when the time is right.
When she reaches the door, she’s feeling as ready as ever to deal with whatever mess is about to be thrown her way, until it turns out Jane (lawyer Jane, not Jane, Jane) is the one on the other side of it. Petra takes a deep breath and does her best not to allow her mind to flood with images from moments ago, and does her best to put on a warm, convincing smile. She has a feeling it comes out as more of a grimace, but Jane seems a little too distracted to notice, anyways. In fact, she seems downright distressed. A niggling little voice in the back of Petra’s head tells her that Jane looks downright guilty, even.
Petra really, really doesn’t like the familiar feeling washing over her.
That feeling like she’s about to be betrayed.
“I need to talk to you.” Jane insists, point blank. Her tone is firm, but there’s a pleading look in her eyes. Petra sighs, and she hopes it sounds put upon, rather than sad.
“Alright,” She steps aside, waving the other woman into her suite. “Keep quiet, I don’t want the girls to hear whatever it is you’ve come to say.” She continues on, locking the door and leading the way into the living room. She’s somewhat surprised when Jane takes a seat next to her on the sofa, rather than on one of the armchairs to the side. It throws her off, but she tries not to let it show.
The moment they sit down, Jane starts talking.
“Luisa hired me to set you up.” It’s not that she didn’t see it coming at all, at this point, but Petra still can’t help the pang of bitter hurt that flares in her chest. “I swear, Petra. I only agreed because I thought you were guilty. She told me you and your ex-husband set her up, made her think she was crazy so that she’d commit herself and give up control of her shares. I’d never have agreed to this if I hadn’t believed her. I swear, I’m-” The desperate edge to her voice breaks, and she cuts herself off, holding something back.
“I’m not that type of person. I need you to believe me when I say that.” For a moment, Petra says nothing. She’s vacillating somewhere between hurt, rage, and an intensely compelling desire not only to forgive, just to preserve this one thing in her life that was starting to seem like it could be good, for once, but to be… better. As she’d promised herself she would be. The trouble was that the line between being better, and being gullible, was a fine one indeed. A needle she hadn’t always managed to thread quite as precisely as she wished.
“You say you’ve been working for Luisa. Are you still?”
“No.” Jane shook her head, her tone left no room for question. “It’s complicated, but as soon as I realized that there was no way you’re guilty, I told her I was out.” Petra’s first impulse was to ask what it was that changed her mind, but she pushed forward with what she knew was, really, the more important question.
“What do you mean by ‘it’s complicated’?” She demanded. Jane took a deep breath and reached into her purse, retrieving a flip phone, never a good sign, and pressing a few buttons before handing it over to Petra. There she found a series of cryptic and increasingly tense messages from an unknown number, the last one sent not even twenty minutes ago.
Unknown @ 9:30PM
Either Petra goes to jail or you do.
And while that’s plenty alarming, it’s not the first time that Petra’s faced this type of threat. She hasn’t ended up behind bars yet, and now that she has more than ever to fight for, her two beautiful, wonderful daughters, there’s no way she’s going down now. It’s also not the message that holds her attention. It’s the two immediately before it.
Jane Ramos @ 6:07PM
You said she was guilty. She clearly isn’t.
Jane Ramos @ 6:08PM
It’s over. I’m out.
Now, this isn’t enough to convince Petra she should throw caution to the wind and give into her desire to put her trust in JR (again), but it’s definitely something. Now feels like a good time to ask the question she’s been holding back.
“What changed your mind? About me being guilty.”
Jane bites her lip, as if mulling over her words, before speaking. “It wasn’t one thing, exactly. When I met you, you didn’t seem like someone with something to hide, and trust me, I know how to spot someone with a secret or two. But, you didn’t strike me as one of them, at least not in this particular case.” And the grin that spreads across Jane’s face when she says that does a frankly alarmingly good job of reigniting the butterflies in Petra’s gut, given the circumstances.
“Then, it was the little things. The way you care about your family, how seriously you take your job, not to mention how confident you are in your position here. It just didn’t seem like it would be worth the risk. Not to mention, you don’t strike me as the type to kill her sister, no matter how you felt about her.” Jane paused, and Petra could feel that she was staring slightly too intently, waiting with more anticipation than she cared to admit, but she couldn’t quite seem to stop herself.
“And it was the big things, too. What you did for my mother-” the wavering in her voice was clear, and it took all of Petra’s discipline not to reach out, take her hand, comfort her, anything. It wasn’t an impulse that had ever come particularly naturally to her, but she’d gotten better at it in the last few years, and it was nearly overwhelming, now. “What you did for my mother, Petra, there was no reason for you to do that. As your lawyer, we both know I didn’t need any extra reasons to try and win your case beyond doing my job, you just did it because you could, because it was kind. Because you’re kind.”
And damn, Petra could feel a slight burning in her eyes, she’d made it almost a lifetime without crying, and now here she was, twice in one day. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had called her kind and meant it. Meant it almost enough for her to believe it herself. “Plus,” Jane continued “There was today, in the stairwell. That was real. And that was the end of it.”
Petra took a deep breath, simply thankful it wasn’t stuttering. “Yes. Well,” She said quietly, caught between avoiding JR’s eyes to avoid any tears managing to spill, and not quite finding the will to look away from the other woman’s face. Trying to determine where to go from here, difficult to manage through the thick fog of fresh emotion and information clouding her mind.
“Thank you.” She managed, so sincere it almost hurt to say. “For believing me. Not many would.” The look Jane gave her was both relieved and questioning. “I may not be that person now, but I have been, in the past.” Jane nodded, understanding. She couldn’t, of course, not fully, but she was willing to accept both truths. That Petra had indeed been someone else, someone more sinister, in the past, and that she had grown beyond that.
She decided that, for the moment, she couldn’t deal with the emotional side of things, it was too much for the day already. So, instead, she opted to focus on the more pressing issue at hand.
“Alright.” She stood, voice firm. “Follow me.”
Petra led her to the small, personal office of her suite, closed the door, and rounded on a somewhat bewildered looking Jane. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do next, because I’m certainly not going to prison, and neither are you.” Jane’s face fell into a more familiar grin, with an almost devious edge to it, an expression all too familiar from the dream that seemed so far away, now. Petra suppressed the shiver that threatened to make its way down her spine at the thought. That was firmly in the category of thoughts and feelings sort out later on.