Not giving me a moment to recover, Canon bounced slightly, making me squeak. “Good, I’ve got your attention. You walked in here with pink cheeks ten minutes ago looking like a girl who had it all. Now you’re withdrawing and thinking too hard.”
“Totally smelled burning over here,” Bond added from where he was sitting across the room. “Maybe it was Reid’s ass.”
“Nope, I used the poop powder in the bathroom, so I smell like roses, man,” Reid told him proudly.
Over Canon’s shoulder, I saw some of the men turn to look in the direction of the bathroom, their expressions intrigued.
“Anyway,” Canon huffed. “We know from the shit that went down with Katy that shit happens. It can happen in a big way, it can happen in a little way, but it always happens. To win, you need to hold your head high and fucking fight. If you curl up into a little ball or admit defeat before you’ve even fought, you’re doing yourself an injustice, and the Zuri Hadid I know wouldn’t do that.”
Chewing on my lip, I thought about what he was saying. He was right, I knew he was right, but a girl was entitled to a moment of self-pity, right? It’s not like I’d just found out that something I wanted to order was out of stock. This was a big fucking deal, and I was a normal human fucking being.
Lots of fuck’s in that, but fuck!
Moving to stand behind his brother, Jarrod crossed his arms in front of his chest. “You gonna fight it?”
Seeing as how his brother weighed significantly more than a feather and was still against my chest, I couldn’t get enough oxygen in to give them a full-sentence back, so all I did was nod.
“Give us the words, Zuri,” Canon sang, wrapping his arms around my head. “Repeat after me—I’m going to be a brave girl and kick the Albanian psycho’s ass.”
“Uh, Canon, man. I don’t think she could even say yo right now with your weight on her,” Carter pointed out.
Jumping off my lap, he backed away, looking slightly embarrassed. “Sorry, got carried away.”
Drawing in big lungful’s of oxygen, I nodded. “I’ll be brave and kick the psycho’s ass.” They all looked satisfied at my reply, so I pointed out, “But just to say, when you hit someone with news like that, you’ve got to give them a moment to feel sorry for themselves before you smother them like that.”
“It’s all of my muscles,” Canon smirked, holding his arm up.
Bond and Reid both snorted disbelievingly as they walked up beside him, but Jarrod just rolled his eyes and sighed as he joined them.
And that’s when I saw what Katy was saying—they were four versions of each other. Yes, they all had different colored eyes that set them apart, and they weren’t identical at all, but they had the same features mixed throughout the four of them. Two had the same nose, they all had the same shaped eyes and faces, three had the same chin… it was uncanny.
Taking a step back, Reid frowned down at me. “Why’s she looking at us like that?”
“I see it,” I cried, pointing between them. “Nose, eyes, ears, jaw, forehead… Holy shit, they got the same pieces and spread them across all of you.”
Rubbing the back of his neck, Canon looked slightly embarrassed. “Maybe I deprived her of oxygen for too long. She seems like she’s got issues.”
With Reid and Bond glaring at me, and Canon watching me like I was a new science experiment, I looked up at Jarrod and grinned when I saw him looking at me blankly. “Sorry about that, but your girlfriend’s right.”
Nodding slowly, he leaned into me, almost making me giggle like a teenager. “I’m the oldest, so I’m the original version. They’re just wannabes.”
It was so unexpected and also so funny that I burst out laughing and leaned into Raoul, who was sitting beside me, chuckling at what Jarrod had said too.
“Right,” DB said loudly, silencing us all immediately. “Now that we’ve got Zuri back online with us, we need to discuss something.”
Turning, he walked over to the door and opened it to reveal a pretty red-headed woman holding a little girl who was more tanned and had dark brown hair in her arms. Alex appeared behind her and whispered something to her that had her walking in to join us, the toddler watching all of us with wide eyes the whole time.
“As everyone a P.V.P.D. knows, this is Naomi Kelly. The little girl waiting to say hi—”
“Hi,” she squeaked in the most adorable voice I’d ever heard.
It seemed the men all felt the same way because there was a chorus of aww’s from them.
“Hey, cherub,” DB chuckled. “That’s her niece, Shanti, who she has custody of. Naomi moved here two weeks before Zuri did, which was why we had a plan in place for people needing the protection of the city. The plans and building of the safe room at the precinct were already underway by that point, but it was completed slightly more quickly than originally planned because of them.”
One of the new members of P.V.P.D., Carter, stepped forward, the expression on his face hard to read. “What do they need a safe room for?”
DB raised his eyebrows at Naomi, who rolled her eyes and came closer to us.
“Just after Shanti was born, my brother and his wife were in an accident. I was babysitting her when the officers came to tell me what’d happened. After that, I started to get people turning up at my door, pretending to be CPS officers doing spot checks on how I was looking after her. Because the IDs didn’t look genuine, I refused to let them in, called the number on the card I had from them, and found out they hadn’t sent anyone round. Weird stuff kept happening, but then my parents—who both have records and drug habits—started turning up to see her. They became more persistent until one day, I went to the store to get diapers for her. She was only about three months old then, so she was in her car seat in the shopping cart.”
As she spoke, Carter got closer to her until he was close enough for Shanti to touch—which she did, latching on him and reaching out for him to take her.
“Hi,” she squealed, beaming up at him.
“Hey, sweetie pie, I’m Carter.”
“Cah-tah,” she nodded, slapping him on the chest.
Looking slightly pale, Naomi continued, “I turned around to put the diapers in the cart, and my dad was there with a gun pointed at me while my mother lifted her out of it. If it hadn’t been for two off duty police officers, they would’ve gotten her. They got away, but after they did some digging, they found out that my parents were in deep with a dealer in Florida, so they’d arranged for a couple who couldn’t have kids to buy Shanti to pay him off.”
There was silence as we all stared at her, only a few of the men not looking surprised by the story.
“That there is some daytime car crash television show shit,” Reid whispered as he sat down heavily next to me. “What in the fuck?”
Clearing his throat, Carter rubbed Shanti’s back as she lay happy as anything with her head on his shoulder. “I know Naomi’s family because we’re from the same place, but I didn’t know any of this.”
Judging by the way her jaw tensed, there was also some bad history between them. Glancing at Reid, I saw that he’d noticed it too when he raised his eyebrows at me and looked back at them all.