Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(12)

The next set of words trembled off my lips because I knew I was admitting to a crime that could land me in jail at best and on death row at worst. I told him how it didn’t take very long to find someone to point me in Novak’s direction. Of course, the way I looked meant his goons were more than eager to bring me to the now deceased crime boss’s door. All men liked having a pretty girl owe them a favor and what I was asking meant Novak could own me body and soul for the rest of my life.

I didn’t care. Whatever price he asked I was willing to pay. If he wanted me to pay back the debt on my back, I would have. If he wanted me to grind on a pole at Spanky’s, I would have learned to dance. If he wanted me to mule his guns and his drugs, I would have taken any and all of those risks just as long as he guaranteed that Rissa’s murderer got exactly what he had coming to him. I wanted it to be violent. I wanted it to be bloody. I wanted him to suffer in every single way my sister had suffered, and Novak had given me a smile and promised me the bitter satisfaction I so desperately craved.

It had only taken a couple of weeks and then the cops were back at my parents’ door asking if we knew anything about the death of Rissa’s boyfriend. My mom and dad were baffled, and all I could do was sit there frozen in shock. It was supposed to make me feel better. It was supposed to make me feel gratification when he was gone. It didn’t. I was still angry. I was still hollow and missing my sister, and now all those gaping wounds were filling up with guilt and disbelief that I was responsible for another human being’s untimely demise.

Titus growled at me like an animal, and when I braved a look up at him, disgust was stamped all across his handsome face as he got up and put as much space between the two of us as he could. I felt the shame that I made him look like that, felt it all the way to my bones. He inclined his head so that I would keep talking and it took everything inside of me to keep going. I had never claimed to be a good person or woman without faults, but the way Titus was looking at me made me feel like I belonged in a filthy back-alley grave right next to where my sister’s final resting place had been.

I explained that Novak hadn’t approached me for anything for a long, long time. So long that I thought maybe he had forgotten about me and the favor I had asked. I moved out of my parents’ house because I knew I was corrupt, knew I had crossed a line there was no going back from, and went to work in a salon just outside of the District. Strippers paid a lot of money to make sure their hair looked good, and they were awesome tippers since their living was based on the generosity of overly amorous strangers. It was a nice gig and I spent a lot of time convincing myself my actions had been justified, that I had done what any loving, protective sister would do. I wore a mask of normalcy and I kept it on so tightly I almost convinced myself that everything that had happened had been a dream. Then one afternoon Novak’s right-hand man showed up and the mask was ripped away, leaving the vicious, hateful girl I really was exposed to the world once again.

Novak was calling in his favor. I was going to volunteer at a group home for kids and befriend a quiet redhead named Dovie Pryce. I was supposed to learn about her, keep tabs on her, and when the time came, if they needed me to, I was supposed to bring her to Novak with no questions asked.

I thought I could do it. I mean how hard could befriending one shy girl be? Really hard when that girl grew up on the streets and had the same kind of instincts about people as I did. Dovie never let me all the way in, and when Bax entered the picture and I tried to warn her about him, about how bad things were going to get if she didn’t walk away, she shut me out completely. Then came the call I was dreading. Novak wanted her and he didn’t care how he got her. I debated telling Dovie and just forcing her to leave town. I thought about running myself but knew Novak would just come after us both. At the end of the day I took the coward’s way out and called Benny, Novak’s right hand, and let him know Dovie was on her own, taking a bus back to some garage where she had been staying. I knew Novak’s guys would grab her; what I didn’t know was that they were going to use her to hurt Bax, or that they were going to raid the garage and beat her brother half to death and put the garage owner in the ground.

I sweated over my choices until I couldn’t handle it anymore and then I went to find Dovie. I had to tell her why I had done what I did. I knew she couldn’t forgive me—ever—but I needed her to know my reasons were more complicated than they seemed. I told her I was going to turn myself in and she warned me not to go to Titus. Of course, that meant he was the one I had to seek out. I was ready for the full punishment, and if that included pouring my heart out to Bax’s brother for him to do what he wanted with me, then so be it. I deserved whatever the law deemed appropriate, and when I was done speaking with Titus, I could see he agreed. To him I was nothing more than another criminal doing what criminals did in the Point.

I was prepared to serve hard time, prepared to watch my life drift by while I stared out through iron bars, but then Titus did some something that shocked us both. He called the district attorney, who promptly turned me over to the state’s attorney general. He begrudgingly explained what kind of info I had on Novak’s operation to the higher-ups, and the next thing I knew I was in a fancy office getting offered a deal if I agreed to testify in the case against the remaining members of Novak’s gang in the federal case. They offered me Witness Protection, offered me a way out, and I couldn’t jump on it fast enough. Titus might hate me and it was obvious what I had done repulsed him, but regardless, he saved me, and I pretty much knew I was going to love him forever for that. I hadn’t seen much good in my life and yet there was a whole big heap of it wrapped up in a towering package of dark masculinity and brooding gorgeousness that couldn’t even look me in the eye anymore.