Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(11)
“Well, f*ck.” I tossed the phone on the desk, curled my hands into fists, and shoved them into my eye sockets. I could feel a headache start to coil around the base of my neck and throb behind the back of my eyes. It felt like a sledgehammer pounding away inside my skull.
I pushed out of my ancient chair and it groaned with relief. The door to my office rattled in the jamb as I slammed it shut behind me and several of my fellow officers stopped to give me questioning looks as I stalked toward the front doors of the station.
Fresh air wasn’t something anyone was ever going to find in the Point, but I needed to be outside, needed the freedom to pace back and forth without feeling like a caged beast. I pulled my already loosened tie the rest of the way off my neck and pulled my own phone out of my back pocket. I was about to make a call that I never in a million years thought I was going to make.
It rang and rang on the other end. At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer and then I thought that if she didn’t I was going to get in my boring-as-hell police-issue sedan and drive every single road of the city until I found where she was holed up. When you looked like her there was nowhere that you could hide.
Finally, when I was at the end of my patience and was just getting ready to hang up and probably throw the phone across the parking lot, her smoky voice came tauntingly across the line.
“Well, that was fast, Detective.”
I bent my head down so that I was looking at the scuffed toes of my boots and wondered like I had a million times before why I just didn’t walk away from this life. I had the credentials. I had the skill level. I could be a cop in any city, anywhere in America—hell, I could probably go a step further and join the feds if I wanted to. What kept me here was undefinable and impossible to fight. When I was younger I’d tried my hand at a better life, at living on the other side of things up on the Hill. All that had taught me was that bad people and bad things were everywhere. The zip code didn’t really matter. I had innocent people to protect here and I was going to do that until I drew my last breath.
“You’re right. I do need you, Reeve.” And God help us all.
She gave a chuckle that had no humor in it. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted you to say those words to me, Titus King.”
I had no clue what she was talking about, but I had a bad feeling about what getting into bed with her meant for me . . . a professional bed or otherwise. In either case this girl was trouble.
Chapter 3
Reeve
I TOSSED AND TURNED all night long and it had nothing to do with the fact that Conner had to know I was gone by now and that he must know I was the one that had his phone. I had only had a few seconds left alone with the device before it locked, so I wasn’t sure how far down the slippery slope Conner had tumbled, but the few messages I did glimpse laid out clear as day that the man I thought was my savior was actually a murderer and no better than me. When Titus had called and growled that he needed me, his words not only had my panties spontaneously combusting and my heart tripping stupidly, but his words also told me that he had found more than enough on that phone to bury Conner. He wouldn’t have bothered with me otherwise.
Titus didn’t like me. How could he when he was intimately familiar with all the terrible things I had done in my past? I would never forget the way his pretty blue eyes lightened as I told him my sordid tale when I turned myself in after Dovie was abducted. Most men’s eyes darkened, got cloudy and hazy with emotion when they were angry or upset. Not Titus. No, those sharp, intensely blue eyes of his got so light they almost looked silver as I poured it all out. I told him about my baby sister, about how the wrong guy had ruined her. I told him about how the drugs had taken hold of her and how they had led her to prostitution. I told him how it was never enough, so Rissa’s boyfriend started to hurt her. I told him how it killed me because she shut me out, closed the door on me every time I reached out to her. I wanted to save her and I was desperate. As my story went on, his eyes appeared lighter and lighter and the frown on his face harsher and harsher.
I told him about the pregnancy and how Rissa’s boyfriend had freaked out when she told him. He was so upset that she wouldn’t be able to work anymore, that she wouldn’t be able to have sex with strangers to pay the bills. I broke down then, starting to sob when I told Titus about the cops showing up at my parents’ door in the middle of the night to tell us they had found my baby sister’s body naked in a back alley deep in the heart of the Point. I couldn’t breathe around the pain in my chest, and I remembered him getting up and coming around the desk so that he could roughly pat me on the back. He wasn’t a man prone to gentleness but he tried . . . for me . . . and all that did was make me break into even smaller pieces when I told him the rest.
I explained that I couldn’t feel anymore. That I was numb. I whispered that when they put my little sister in the ground they might as well have buried me right alongside her because nothing mattered to me anymore. All I could think about, all I could focus on, was getting back at Rissa’s murderous boyfriend. I was consumed by it, obsessed with it. Nothing else mattered to me. Vengeance was what nourished me. Revenge was what woke me up every single day, and eventually I couldn’t just think about it anymore. I had to act.
He stopped touching me then. He moved across from me and leaned against his desk, much like he had done yesterday while he watched me. By that time his eyes were glittering like diamonds in his craggy face and the metallic sheen in them felt like it could cut through my thin skin with no resistance.