Like he was reading someone his or her Miranda rights or reciting a code from the police academy. Like what he was saying was an irrefutable, absolute fact.
In a way he was, if there had ever been a chance of me not loving Officer Lionel Danner, it was obliterated by that moment and those words. My heart was imprisoned by his, regardless of his lack of interest.
“I still gotta call it in,” he told me, stern but gentle, a contradiction he’d mastered. “If you thought I was gonna let this slide because you’re you to me, you were wrong. You didn’t call your daddy, you called me, and I’ll get it sorted just like he’d get it sorted for you but my way will be a fuckuva lot different and more legal than his, yeah?”
When I nodded, shadows passed over the grass green of his eyes like clouds overhead. His jaw ticked as he stared at me like that for a long minute before standing up and sticking out a hand to me. It was a deeply tanned hand attached to a strong wrist threaded with thick veins that ran up and over his corded forearms. A strong hand at the end of a strong arm on the body of the strongest man outside of the club that I’d ever known.
Reeling from everything, including the powerful resurgence of my childhood adoration, I mutely took his offered hand and let him peel me off the tacky blood spill. My core throbbed dully, painfully and my skin felt tender all over like the flesh of an overripe peach dropped to the floor. Still, I sat in one of my slightly wonky wooden chairs and watched him as he pulled out his phone and called in the accident.
I didn’t listen to the words he said as he talked to the operator at the station. Instead, I watched the way his firm, beautifully formed mouth worked over the words, watched his pink tongue click against his square, white teeth. It was a disturbing situation to find myself so physically drawn to another man when my old one was barely even cold on the ground, but I’d always been irrevocably drawn to Danner and observing him in his element, Good Cop In Action, centered me.
Again, it felt that I blinked and there were people there, flooding through the doors of my apartment with equipment and cameras, in blue uniforms with squawking walkie-talkies. I jumped when three of them tried to corner me while Danner was busy talking to two people studying the body. I couldn’t seem to hear their voices properly. The volume was there, but the words were fuzzy like the adults in Charlie Brown cartoons.
Wah wah wah, wah-wah.
“Back off, Sterling,” Danner ordered, suddenly pulling me half behind him so he could face my interrogators.
The huge black man named Sterling rolled his eyes. “Just doing my damn job, Danner. You clearly got personal ties to this one. I think it’s me who should be telling ya to back off, eh?”
Danner crossed his arms over his chest and stared down the man in response.
Sterling lasted all of thirty seconds before he awkwardly scratched the back of his head and muttered, “Damn, Danner, I’m just trying to do my job.”
“And you can do it but you’ll do it at the station and I’ll be in the interview room with the both of you. I arrived on the scene after she called me in distress. It’s obvious that even if the victim didn’t succeed, he attempted to rape her. This case will be opened and shut within forty-eight hours, and you and I both know it. So, cut the posturing, do your job and I’m sure that promotion you’ve been chompin’ at will come ’round sooner rather than later, now you’re gettin’ down to doin’ some actual work.”
I blinked at Danner and I wasn’t the only one. He’d always been quiet, even reserved to the point of fading into the background. It was what had made him such a good cop, everyone was always overlooking him, underestimating him. That man was gone and in his place was a leader, the cold, ruthless kind of man that set my pulse to racing.
I watched his three colleagues physically stand down and lower their heads the way betas might do in deference to the Alpha of a wolf pack. I felt the animal impulse to tilt my head and bare my neck to him as well.
“You’ve been in deep with the RCMP for three years, Danner. You think Van PD is gonna be hot on you interfering in a murder case?” Another cop said, this one short and slight with a wispy mustache.
“As a matter of fact, you better sweep this up good and fast so it doesn’t compromise my play with the RCMP. You wouldn’t want to be to blame for fuckin’ up a year’s long investigation, would you? And you think I’ve been in deep three years and I don’t have connections to pull in if I gotta? Harleigh Rose Garro is my responsibility, Sterling, so listen hard and hear me clearly when I say, she isn’t goin’ through this shit without me.”
A sob ripped through my chest, unzipping the tight lock on the emotions overstuffing my chest so that they spilled through me. I shook with the impact as my shock ruptured and pure horror and agony overtook me.
“Oh my god,” I choked out through the tears as I buried my face in my hands. “I don’t deserve this.”
And I didn’t mean Cricket and the attempted rape and the murder. I probably deserved all of that. Karma or some bitch like that for all the ways big and little that I’d been careless and disrespectful and just straight up wrong over the years.
But no, that wasn’t it.
There was no way in any world, in heaven or hell that I deserved to have a hero like Lionel Danner in my corner.
As if hearing my thoughts but probably responding to the horrific sound of my ugly sobs, he turned slightly to swing me under his arm in a tight hold even as he continued to issue orders. “Now, get someone to take her goddamn pictures and do an examination so we can get her out of these bloody clothes and into something clean. I’m takin’ her to the station myself and Sterling, you wanna show what a big boy cop you are, you stay here and get this mess sorted.”
Danner
I was speaking with the trauma counselor when the door to the North Van Police Station crashed against the wall as it opened and a hoarse voice called out, “What the motherfuckin’ fuck do you think you’re doin’ talkin’ to my fuckin’ girl without her fuckin’ lawyer and goddamn father present?”
I closed my eyes even as the station went wired around me. I thought about counting to ten but giving the President of The Fallen MC ten seconds of vulnerability was ten seconds too many. The six foot five behemoth currently stalking towards me like an enraged, feral jungle cat was not the kind of man you wanted to fuck around with.
I knew that.
It was a lesson one might argue that I’d learned the hard way, when I’d let his teenage wife get abducted by a rival MC.
Regardless, I knew not to fuck with him now.
Unfortunately, Zeus Garro didn’t know that he’d earned my reluctant respect, so I was braced and unsurprised when he stormed right up to me in a room full of wary cops, lifted me with a huge ass hand by my throat and slammed me against the wall two feet behind me.
Fuckin’ fuck. That hurt.
I let him do it though. The only way to stop a man like Zeus Garro was to shoot him in the head or lie down in the face of his fury and hope it passed you over. As I’d been in the fuckin’ outrageous position of giving a shit about his kid daughter for the last fifteen years, I chose not to shoot the fucker in his thick skull.
Still.
“Stand down, Garro,” I said calmly.