Better When He's Brave (Welcome to the Point #3)(24)
“No. I didn’t feel guilty about locking him up. He broke the law, he was always breaking the law, and he didn’t care enough not to get caught. I felt guilty that I was the reason he didn’t care. I felt bad that I was the reason he was a criminal in the first place. I left Bax to fend for himself with a drunk mother and a mobster father. He never had a chance and I knew it, but I left him anyway. I think failing the one person I was supposed to keep safe was one of the driving factors in me deciding to go into law enforcement. I built the GTO to show him that it mattered . . . the time we spent together before he hated me, before I let him down. Bax is an action guy. The words wouldn’t get through, but I thought maybe the car would.”
“That’s why you paid his rent while he was locked up? You wanted to show him that you cared?”
Titus grunted in agreement and turned his eyes back to the road. I settled back in the bucket seat and watched him as he concentrated on the road. He was driving way faster than the speed limit, and I wondered if he even realized he was breaking one of the laws he was adamant about following. Titus was a complex man and there was a lot more to him than I had initially thought. I knew his relationship with Bax was complicated and that the brothers were polar opposites, but I hadn’t known that Titus had demons from his past and from the way he had pulled himself out of the Point that clung to him. It made him seem less infallible, more human. It made me want him even more, which I didn’t think was possible.
“Where are we going exactly?” We hadn’t left the Point. In fact we were going deeper into it, past the District and all the way out to the docks. No one went to the docks unless they wanted to make a body disappear or they were trying to send something illegal out or ship something illegal in.
“Race has a place on the docks. He’s turned it into his own little command center. He has his own muscle and his own security system set up around it since his lady and her sister live there with him. It’s almost as good as protective custody, but it’s still in the city and visible enough that should Conner want to make a move he’ll know where to find us.”
I fidgeted nervously. “It’s also where he left that girl that looked like me.”
Titus sighed. “I know. But it’s the best option for what we’re trying to accomplish. You’ll be safe while I work, and that means I won’t have my attention divided between my job and your safety.”
A trickle of warmth tried to work its way into the heart I had been trying to freeze up toward him. “I wouldn’t think you would care if I was safe or not. After all, I’m the one that got myself into this mess.”
I rolled my head to the side so I could look at him and noticed that the tick he got when he was trying to hold whatever he was feeling inside had started to work at his jaw. His big hands tightened on the steering wheel and he bit out, “We can’t always control what or whom we care about. Didn’t you learn that lesson the hard way with Roark?”
I jerked my eyes back to the road and felt ice take up the spot where the heat had been sneaking in. “You’re right. I don’t need to learn any lesson more than once. So how did you get Hartman to agree to this setup? If he went to all the trouble of building a castle for his queen and princess, why would he let the wicked witch in the gates?”
He gave me another hard, sideways look. “Because he has his own agenda, and now I owe him. Race is neck-deep in stuff he shouldn’t be in, and being able to call in a major favor like this isn’t an opportunity a smart guy like him can pass up.”
A heavy ball of guilt and something uglier, something dirtier, lodged in my throat. “So you are compromising yourself for me, for this plan of yours? You would never give anyone a free pass otherwise.” I didn’t want Titus to go against his own code just to get me close to Conner. I didn’t want him to change at all. I loved the way he was . . . loved the way he came off as heroic and brave. Knew I could so easily love him with my entire heart if it didn’t seem so impossible.
He swore softly under his breath and then wheeled the noisy muscle car down a ramp that looked like it led to an underground garage. He turned to look at me, his eyes almost at bright as the headlights shining in the dark in front of us. He sounded resigned and tired when he told me, “I can’t tell the difference anymore between the bad guys and the good guys that are bad because they don’t have any other choice in the matter. I’m not compromising, I’m adapting. Isn’t that the first rule of survival?”
It was, but I didn’t want him to adapt. I wanted him to stay just the way he was, and I would die before being the reason he felt like he had to change.
Chapter 6
Titus
THIS WAS SOME SPECIAL kind of hell that I wasn’t sure I was going to survive.
It had been a week since I moved Reeve into the loft at Race’s compound. A week in which I killed myself at work trying to figure out why exactly Roark had declared war on the city. I called the marshals and got shut down because they didn’t want anyone else to know they had a viper in the nest, so I was working around them instead of with them. I was also going to the condo at night and pretending not to watch Reeve while she paraded around in clothes that were too tight and too short for my sanity or peace of mind. A week in which I tiptoed around her because the loft was just that: lofty. It was totally open, so there were too few walls and not enough places to hide. The bedroom was just a platform set above the open-plan kitchen, so there wasn’t even a door there to shut and hide behind. I heard her in the shower, I saw her kick off the covers in the middle of the night, I heard the sound of clothes rustling as she got dressed and undressed. The noise scraped across my skin, and all of it was making my insides itch and my temper quick to boil over. It was all a frustrating waste of time and I was almost at the end of my rope.