His eyes flashed like knifepoints and his grip on my neck tightened.
There was no doubt in my mind that this man had killed men with that very hand or that he had killed them for a lot less than wrapping their daughter up in a murder case.
Fear germinated in my belly then bloomed into something better, something bold and beautiful like a poppy cropped up over dead bodies. I was the rare kind of man that fed off fear, that relished the challenge of conquering the beast and making it submit to me in the end.
I smiled languidly in the face of the beast before me and leaned into his grip, a silent dare that had Zeus Garro snarling. “I said, stand down, Garro. You’re going to kill a cop in a room full of cops? You won’t live a breath past the second my spine snaps.”
“I’ll throttle you myself, if you don’t tell us where Harleigh Rose is,” a sweet voice, sweeter than spun sugar and melted chocolate, called to me over his shoulder.
I ground my teeth when I realized Loulou Garro, formerly Lafayette, had followed her husband into the station.
I was a feminist.
But fuck if I hated when women got involved in men’s business because I’d never found a way to say no to them.
“Louise,” I acknowledged her easily as if her monster of a husband wasn’t strangling me toward a slow death. “Call him off and I’ll get you to Harleigh Rose.”
A golden hand appeared on the top of Zeus’s shoulder and like magic, the tension dissolved in his muscles a second before he dropped me from his painful clutch and stepped back with a low growl.
Loulou stepped forward just as he reached back for her. It was a small thing, but that little symphony of synchronicity hit me in the gut. Sure, Louise had been seventeen years old when they got together and Zeus nineteen years her senior but that move right there, that was the reason I didn’t find it disgusting in the least. If anything, my gut clenched with something startlingly close to jealousy. Not for her, never for her. Louise was almost too gorgeous to be made of flesh and blood, yet she was one of the most human people I’d ever met. In another life, one where she’d stayed good and I’d finally conquered my constant battle to be the same, we could have ended up thrust together.
But as I looked at her now, heavily swollen with Garro’s babies under her virgin white dress with shit kickers on her feet, I was glad for her that life hadn’t turned out that way. She leaned into Garro instinctively and her huge blue eyes sparked like a lightning streaked sky as she glared me down.
“The fuck you get my sister into?” King Kyle Garro yelled across the station as he stepped through the doors, holding them open for the slight woman trailing in behind him.
At least Cressida Irons, his better half, had the grace to look mildly embarrassed by the spectacle.
“We don’t know it was his fault,” she whispered, tugging on King’s hand to keep him from storming at me exactly like his father had done. “He’s gotten H.R. out of more situations than anyone else. Hear the man out.”
King redirected his glare from me to his woman, but his face softened into an affectionate grin as he looked down at her.
Man, those Garro men were whipped.
Again, there was a pang in my chest that had nothing to do with my high blood pressure.
“Haven’t seen this motherfucker in three years, H.R. hasn’t been in trouble with the fuckin’ pigs in three years and suddenly here he is and my girl is in trouble again?” Garro ground out. “Start explainin’.”
“She called me,” I said.
I could have said more but I was a man of few words and I knew they’d get me. Harleigh Rose had called me, a man she hadn’t seen in years, to help her out of a woman’s worst nightmare. She’d called me. Not her father, her brother or a member of the club she’d been born princess of.
She’d called me.
I rubbed at that sore spot in my chest as it warmed and pulsed.
“She called you?” both Garro men growled.
Loulou and Cress shared a knowing but troubled look.
I shrugged and crossed my arms over my chest, signaling with a slight head nod to the four or five lingering cops warily watching the family that it was cool to go back to their work.
“She did. Cricket showed up at her place high on a cocktail of illegal substances, which, apparently, wasn’t unusual,” I paused preemptively, knowing Garro enough to know he’d curse like a sailor at that. “This time, he was angry for a number of reasons. One, being that he was high on a potent combination of crack, marijuana and cocaine and that shit would turn a toddler into the Hulk. Two, that he’d recently been passed up for a promotion with the Berserkers MC, somethin’ he’s been working on for the last two years. And third, Harleigh Rose had just issued the last in a line of attempts to get rid of him, this one done by dragging an old trashcan in front of his apartment door, filled to the brim with stuff he’d left at her house, and this she set on fuckin’ fire.”
Despite themselves, Garro and his son smirked proudly at that.
Yeah, Harleigh Rose was trouble, born and fuckin’ raised.
“She’d just filed a police report,” I continued, and then watched their smiles get crushed under heavy frowns. “He’d started to stalk and threaten her. Filed a restraining order last week and got a friend from school to testify to the fact.”
“The fuck?” King asked. “Why wouldn’t she come to us with that?”
Cress leaned into him and spoke softly, “You think on that for a second, honey, and I think you’ll find your answer.”
“I’m not thinking on fuck all,” Zeus growled. “Why the fuck would she go to the pigs about that little shit?”
I thought about the sight that had greeted me when I entered H.R.’s small downtown apartment. It wasn’t just the blood lacquering her torn clothes and bared skin. The abuse and terror went deeper than that. There were hollows under her sharp cheekbones and deep, dark shadows under her flat blue eyes, signs of sleep deprivation and malnutrition. She was too skinny and too flat, even her honey hair had lost its luster and her eyes, eyes that normally flashed with sass and wonder, were dead.
Whatever that now-dead piece of shit had done to Harleigh Rose over the last three years had taken its toll and had been for a good long while. I knew H.R. well enough to know that by the time she realized she was in an abusive relationship with a scumbag, she would be too proud to ask for help. She’d stick it out thinking that she was the one who had gotten herself into the mess in the first place and so, she was the one who had to get herself out of it.
It was a good philosophy sometimes.
Completely disastrous in this case.
Not because the loss of Cricket (nee Taylor Marsden) was a travesty.
But because underneath Harleigh Rose’s crown of thorns and venom laced tongue, she was as tender as a fresh bloom and I hated that she would now carry the weight of taking a life.
I should have been there.
Though, it was pointless to chastise myself.
It was in the past, for one.
For another, I hadn’t whiled away the time. The last three years working for the RCMP in their Organized Crime Undercover Investigations unit was the highlight of my career and not only because I was out from under my corrupt father’s thumb in Entrance, BC.