But all of that was really bullshit next to the real reason I hadn’t been there.
I’d had to leave for exactly the reason that I was now wishing I had stayed.
No self-respecting cop should fall in love with an MC Princess.
No moral gentleman should act upon his most deviant desires at all, let alone with a girl so much his junior.
No man could fall in love with a woman who would be his downfall but more, he hers without at least attempting to escape that fate.
And I had.
Only now, both H.R. and I were paying for that choice.
“Danner, clue in here please.” Loulou’s voice pulled me out of my thoughts.
“She didn’t call because she’s been abused, at least mentally and verbally, for years and by the time she noticed it, she didn’t want to shame herself by telling you all.” I lifted up a palm to them when they all started speaking over each other and then waited for them to fall into reluctant silence. “When was the last time you saw her?”
“Last fuckin’ week,” Garro snapped.
“She visit you or you come down here?” I shot back.
I read the answer in the tick of Garro’s furred jaw, in the way King ran agitated hands through his long hair and both women slid just that inch closer to their men in a silent act of comfort. She had visited them up in Entrance, in her haven, a place she could escape Cricket and the harmful, shameful way he claimed to love her.
Rage seared low in my gut like an unchecked burner. I knew if it wasn’t turned off soon, it would light my whole body on fire in a way I wouldn’t be able to control.
“Not like you to let a thing like this go unchecked,” I said quiet-like.
My lack of volume didn’t blunt the blow of the words the way I’d hoped.
“Watch your fuckin’ self. You don’t know shit all about my family,” Garro snapped and I could see in the way his body vibrated that he was a breath away from pounding my face in.
I leaned back against the wall and crossed my booted foot over the other. “How do you figure that, Garro? Those three years you went away, your kids were more at my place than yours with your strung out excuse of a wife. I was the one who first taught your son how to fire a gun. I was the one who bought your daughter her first ride, who made sure it had pink skull and crossbones on it just like she wanted, and then I was the one who taught her how to ride. So, tell me again how you figure I know fuck all about the Garro kids?”
It was a brutal speech, and one of the longer ones I’d ever made, but the lingering wrath that curdled my blood made it impossible to care about the flinch of pain that rocked Garro like the strike of a bullwhip. Loulou looked about ready to whip me herself, but it was King who seemed the most impacted. He stared at me with wide eyes that betrayed the fact that he was still fresh, a recruit of The Fallen instead of an initiated brother at arms. Only a man without blood on his hands could look at a cop like that; like a little boy who hero worshiped the cop next door.
I watched as he shook himself out of it and his jaw set to ticking, a bomb about to detonate. I wondered idly who he was angrier at. Me, for being right, or himself, for agreeing with me.
“You throw that in his face one more time, I don’t care if it’s tomorrow or in twenty years, I will personally cut off your balls, Danner.”
I looked down from Garro’s eyes to see Loulou leaning forward, little teeth bared, a biker built like a Barbie throwing threats at the feet of a cop. It should have been funny, that image, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t because I could see the ferocity in her eyes, read the restrained fury in her body and the pain at her lips that made them twist funny in the corners. I’d hit a nerve not only for her man but for her as well. After all, he’d gone to prison after killing the man who’d shot Loulou as a little girl right through her chest in a gang war that erupted outside a fucking church.
I hooked my thumbs in my pockets and raised an eyebrow at her. I couldn’t let her know, any of them know, how much I reluctantly admired them, their courage and conviction, the way they fused themselves together into one fucking beautiful family unit.
I tried not to spend too much time near the Garros because each time I did, my moral compass went haywire in the face of their magnetism.
“They aren’t done with her yet,” I told her blandly.
She blinked then put her little claws away and tipped her chin up like the snotty Princess she’d been raised to be. “Fine. We’ll just wait right over here until you’re done interrogating a victim.”
She tugged Garro away by the hand and with one last vicious glare directed my way he stalked after her, already tugging his phone out to update the brothers or call them to arms. It was lucky Cricket was already a dead man ’cause the damage Garro would’ve done to him once he found out the extent of his crimes… let’s just say that death by cleaver was a hell of a lot less painful.
King lingered a second, peering at me in that brooding way he’d mastered even as a kid. “What’re you still doin’ out here? Go make sure those fucks aren’t fuckin’ with her.”
I locked eyes with him as warmth loosened the dozen knots tied in my chest. Even after all the years and all the bad blood, it felt good to know the kid still believed in me, at least a little.
I gave him a curt nod then turned on my heel, shooting a quelling glance at the nervous rookie officer on duty behind the front desk as I stalked from the front bullpen, up the stairs and into the back where the interrogation rooms were.
They hadn’t been fucking with H.R. when I’d left. I’d spoken with the two interrogating officers, laid it out for them that this wasn’t about takin’ down an associate of The Fallen, but helping a long-time victim work through her shock and horror after taking a life.
They’d gotten me, mostly because I hadn’t given the option not to.
But as soon as I saw Timothy Guzman, I knew things had gone to shit in my absence.
He proved me right by immediately stating, “You gotta bring her in, son.”
Heat raced from the base of my spine up my neck and I had to physically bite back the fury to keep from throttling the man next to me.
I took three deep breaths before I faced the middle-aged piece of shit I had to call my superior.
“First off, not your son, Sergeant Guzman. Not going to tell you again,” I paused, waiting for him to acknowledge it with a terse nod. “Second, I told you once I told you fucking twenty times, no.”
“You can’t just say no,” he said through his teeth, slamming a fleshy hand down on the counter in front of the one-way mirror that looked into the interrogation room Harleigh Rose was currently sitting in. “This is official business and I’m your boss, Danner. This isn’t some suggestion box at a fucking coffee shop.”
I glared at the five-foot-three sack of shit that technically ran the Combined Forces Special Enforcement Unit for the province. He was a paper pusher, a schmuck that wouldn’t understand fieldwork if a bullet bit him in the ass.
“And I wasn’t suggesting shit. I was telling you that under no fucking conditions will I be involving a victim of abuse and gang violence in my investigation.”
“You don’t run this show, Danner. Your daddy may be Staff Sergeant up in bum fuck Entrance, but down here, in this city, I say what goes. And I say that Harleigh Rose, a far from innocent, born affiliate of The Fallen MC, is the perfect confidential informant to get us inside information from The Berserkers.”