Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(18)
“Bax is my problem. He always has been and you probably don’t want to call him Shane to his face.”
She lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “I watched Dovie fall in love with Shane, not Bax. He seems less scary as Shane.”
I grunted because Shane and Bax were two parts that made up the entire man. Both were equally scary and equally dangerous but she didn’t need to know that, so I motioned to the dingy room and ordered, “Grab your stuff.”
She gave me a lopsided smile. “I don’t have any stuff.”
She had said that but I hadn’t really believed her. What kind of woman could run with literally just the clothes on her back? One that was built to survive no matter what. I answered my own question.
I sighed and walked over to the door. “All right, let’s get out of here. I need to get down to the docks.”
She nodded a little and went to move past me as I jerked the paper-thin door open. I stiffened automatically when she paused in front of me and titled her head back so that she could look me in the eyes.
“For what it’s worth, you are very convincing at pretending to like me, Titus. For a second there before your phone went off, I almost believed you.”
She slipped past me out the door, leaving her words lying like bricks at my feet.
IT TOOK A LITTLE bit to get her to the apartment and get her inside with the orders to lay low until she heard from me. Bax’s old studio would work for now but I needed to find someplace I could take her that was safe and still visible enough that Roark would know where she was at—where we were at, pretending to be infatuated with each other. My plan sort of fell apart after that, though. I knew I needed to get Roark to show himself, but after he did, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure how that would play out. I wanted to be confident enough in myself that I could simply arrest him and take him in without any bloodshed on either side, but the guy was violent and he was pissed, so I doubted that would be the case. Once I had Reeve somewhere safe and secure and the charade began, I would hammer out the rest of the details. The devil always hid in those little f*ckers.
The ride to the District was silent and tense. The look on her face when she took in the battered condition of Bax’s old bachelor pad was priceless. I assured her Dovie had scrubbed the place down since they stayed there occasionally when Bax worked late at the garage he owned. I promised she was far less likely to get an STD from the bathroom here than she was from the no-tell motel.
She didn’t reply and I didn’t bother to tell her good-bye, but I did tell her to keep her head down and try not to attract attention. The only way a girl that looked like her could do that was by not going outside, and by ordering pizza and Chinese food. It was a crappy plan but it would have to do. She gave me a hard look, which reminded me that she had taken off with hardly any money and no real identification. With a sigh I had handed over a few twenties that I could see she wanted to refuse. Reeve didn’t want to rely on me any more than I wanted to be the only one in a position to help her out.
By the time I got to the docks, I was turned inside out. I was running on fumes and no amount of coffee or fury could fuel me enough to get through the fact that some innocent girl who lost her life for zero reason. The scene was chaotic. There were a lot of cops crawling all over the place and the medical examiner’s office was hovering over the body. Well, they were surveying what was left of the body. The poor girl had been through hell and Roark had made her suffering obvious. There was no mistaking that this was a message.
He wasn’t just mad at Reeve for turning on him. She was now the enemy and she would be treated as such if he got his hands on her. This guy didn’t care who his victim was. Man, woman, or child, his brutality was growing more and more apparent and targeted. This guy took making his point to another level. He was all about the impact and carnage and it seemed like the targets he chose to leave as calling cards were getting younger and younger.
The woman had been sliced across her chest much in the way Dovie had been cut the night she was abducted. Only Dovie had survived and had the scars to prove how hard she fought to live. This girl just had the wounds. She also had burns across every surface of exposed skin, a bullet hole in her forehead, and none of that was as gruesome as the things Roark had done to the parts of her that should never be treated with anything but reverence and appreciation. There was rage and hatred acted out upon this girl like I had never seen before and it was eerie because she did bear a remarkable resemblance to Reeve, only much younger and much smaller.
“Is it okay if we take her now, Detective?”
I glanced up at the young tech and nodded. I hadn’t been aware that I had zoned out and was just staring at the body like she was going to wake up and give me Conner Roark’s name so I could go arrest him with zero hassle. Nothing ever worked that way.
“Yeah. Do we have an ID on her yet? She’s just a baby. Someone needs to notify the family.”
“Not yet. The only lead we have is that she may have been a dancer over at Spanky’s. She was found with a whole lot of cash in her purse and not much else.”
Oh, great. Nassir was already on the edge and close to going over because of what had happened to his club. When he found out that one of his girls was in the worst place at the worst time and the same guy who torched the club was responsible, he was definitely going to go over. There were some men that I could care less if they decided they wanted to do battle on my streets. I was tougher, I was faster, I was smarter, and when I had to be, I was more brutal. None of that was the case with Nassir Gates. I wasn’t a hundred percent sure what his background was but I knew training and cunning when I saw it. He might try and play himself off as a typical thug but I knew better. Nassir was the Devil, and if he dropped off that thin ledge of civility he was holding on to, the bloodbath that would ensue when he fell would drown us all.