Better When He's Brave Page 4

  There was a security code on the phone that I couldn’t figure out, so I called one of the tech guys up and asked him if he could look at it. I was known as kind of a hard-ass around the station, but I also got the job done, so generally when I called in a favor it got bumped to the front of the line. It only took twenty minutes for the tech guy to show up and another five for him to get me into the phone. By the time he left to go back to his own part of the station, I had already been through ten messages that had my teeth clenching so hard I was lucky they didn’t crack.

  It was all there. Words upon words that told a tale of revenge and destruction. There were messages back and forth between Roark and someone that had a standing date with one of Nassir’s working girls arranging the setup so that the Irishman could get to Roxie, one of the Point’s most well-known hookers and a personal friend of Bax’s from back in the day.

  There were exchanges with someone simply called Zero setting up the entry of explosives through customs. The explosives that had to have been used to annihilate Nassir’s club. The fire was intended to punish not only Nassir and Race but also the people that flocked to the heart of the Point in search of bad things. The rage the dirty fed had toward the city was unreal and I couldn’t figure out what was behind it. It wasn’t like he lived here or had been a victim of the streets like the rest of us that called the Point home had been. His fury and the vengeance it wreaked felt so displaced. I knew there had to be more to it but the phone wasn’t giving me that much.

  There was another flurry of back-and-forth messages chronicling the plan to grab one of the kids that owed Race money on a football bet and dumping his body as a message to the new criminal elite. More bodies had followed and so had money into the hands of desperate men so they would do ugly things to make sure that everyone knew the Point was never going to be safe, no matter who was in charge. That it was never going to be anything but a forgotten place filled with forgotten people that no one would miss when it was gone.

  There was even a picture of Race’s classic Mustang as it burned to nothing but a twisted scrap heap of melted metal and rubber.

  The guy was vengeful and liked to witness the effects of his handiwork up close and personal. Unfortunately he knew how the good guys worked, so while there was plenty of evidence that he had been present for all these dirty deeds on his end, there was nothing on ours that showed him. Roark knew how to avoid cameras, knew how to blend into the background, and knew enough to keep from getting caught while he pulled strings in the background like a demented puppet master.

  I flipped through the hundreds of messages that he had exchanged with Reeve over the last few months. There was nothing unusual in the exchanges. They were flirty and fun. She seemed to really like the dirty fed. She told him she missed him when he had to go back into the city during the week. She thanked him profusely for not judging her by her past actions. She told him that he made her feel special and safe.

  He responded with flip answers and easy reassurances. He told her she was beautiful, that she was gorgeous, that she was a prize. While Reeve spoke to him like a woman in the first stages of falling in love, Roark replied like a man with a trophy he was eager to show off and flaunt. His title and his badge had done a lot to win her over, her looks had done everything to convince him to break protocol and take her to bed. I understood the temptation.

  It was the newer messages, the ones leading up to the fire at the club, that were the most interesting. Reeve had grown up in the Point and had lost a sister to the vicious and unforgiving ways of the streets. She was not only street-smart but also had keen instincts for danger. She started texting him about where he was going on the weekends and why he wouldn’t talk to her about what he was up to. She asked why he was in the Point for reasons that had nothing to do with work. She asked him why his phone was going off at weird times during the night. It wasn’t uncommon for a cop but she seemed to know something wasn’t tracking. She asked him who Zero was and why had he shown up at her place in the secure location looking for him. It was clear she knew something was off and that Roark wasn’t who he claimed to be.

  He tried to put her off. He texted that he was in the middle of a top-secret case, that it was high profile, and he smoothly apologized for all the secrecy and double talk. He promised to take her somewhere tropical and warm as soon as the trial for the rest of Novak’s crew was over, and when none of that seemed to pacify her he broke out the big guns and told her that he loved her. That shut her down for exactly one day. She told him she loved him back and then went silent.

  After the declaration there were no more messages between the two of them but there were several between Zero and Roark. He had his goons watching Brysen and Dovie. He also had eyes on Spanky’s, the strip club that was now the de facto operating headquarters for Nassir since the Pit was gone. Spanky’s was also where a stripper named Honor danced, and if anyone cared to watch closely enough, they would see that if Nassir had any kind of weakness, it was her. The texts indicated that whatever was driving Roark was amping up to bring the fight right to the heart of those willing to stand sentinel between him and his revenge, and all that could mean was that things were going to get uglier and bloodier before I could put a stop to it.

  The texts stopped because it was apparent that the next time Roark saw Reeve she snagged his phone and headed back to the city in order to hand it over to me. She saw his profession of love for what it was, a smoke screen, and had done what she had done since the first time I had met her. She was covering her own ass and I bet Roark was smart enough to know that his cover as a good guy, as a member of law enforcement, was blown as soon as the phone came up missing. I would wager my left nut that the fed had gone into hiding and that I wasn’t the only one that would be looking for him. I made a mental note to put a call in to the marshals to see just how much they knew about their dirty agent.

  “Well, fuck.” 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.

  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 h
eart 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.

  And now he needed me. Which meant he was going to have to look at me, and maybe, just maybe he could see past all the things I had done and all ways that he couldn’t tolerate me. It was wishful thinking on my part, but after being so close to him yesterday in the office, after breathing him in and watching those sky-blue eyes heat up and cool off with everything he was feeling, I couldn’t stop the longing from crawling all over me. It was so heavy and thick it had kept me up all night. How I had convinced myself Conner was an acceptable substitute for the force of nature that was Titus King was beyond me. One man was a legitimate wonder of this world; the other was a cheap plastic trinket that fell apart as soon as you got it home.

  So there I was in the dingy bathroom of the horrible motel room looking at myself in a mirror that was so cracked and so foggy with age that I could hardly see my own face, worrying about how I was going to look when Titus showed up at my door any minute. I knew it didn’t matter. He would never see me the same way I saw him even if there was an undeniable pull between the two of us. However, my vanity and my own need to be my best around him still had me fiddling with my hair and trying to fix my face with the meager supplies I had stashed in my purse. When I snatched Conner’s phone I hadn’t really planned too far ahead. All I had on me were the clothes on my back and what was in my purse, which wasn’t much, but it would have to do. I heard the cardboard-thin door rattle as a heavy fist thudded against it, and took a deep breath to steady myself.