Not wanting to be stared at while I ate, I politely declined the pie and took my coffee back outside with me. It should only be a short walk over to the house Sonny-boy had been killed in, if I was thinking of the right area.
I made some calls while I walked over, setting up a death benefit for Sonny's wife and unborn baby. There wasn't anything I could do to bring him back from the dead, but I could at least provide a college fund for his kid.
It wasn't hard to figure out which house was the crime scene. It was all sealed up with SGPD tape in some lame attempt at stopping people from accessing the area. Either the idiots who closed the scene were new to this town or they were just ticking boxes, but a bit of tape wasn't keeping anyone out.
Certainly not me, anyway.
I simply ducked under the tape and went on inside like I had every right to be there. And I did. The Shadow Grove Reapers were firmly under my rule, so I didn't need permission to go anywhere in "their" territory, including this abandoned house, riddled with bullet holes and stained with Timberwolf blood.
The chances of there being any clues remaining after god only knew how many cops had trampled through the house were low. But I wasn't in a hurry to get anywhere, so I took my time looking around, sipping my coffee as I went.
"Find anything?" A low, rumbling question came from the front entrance about fifteen minutes after I'd arrived.
I shook my head, nudging an old, torn armchair with my toe. "Nope. Nothing. Except that my man was shot up by a firing squad in the middle of your territory and no one heard anything." I arched a brow at Cass. "Why is that?"
He shook his head, not rising to the bait. "Your guess is as good as mine, Hades. None of the local residents seem to have been paid off, either."
I narrowed my eyes at him, weighing whether he was bullshitting me or not, then nodded. "Silencers, maybe. Might have suppressed the sound enough that neighbors at a distance didn't notice it. The houses directly next door are vacant too, aren't they?"
Cass grunted a sound of confirmation. "They were bought up by Samuel Danvers during his rejuvenation project the other year. The ones opposite too."
I finished the last of my coffee, then shook my head in annoyance. I needed to access the written reports to get a better idea of what had gone down, but even then I couldn't trust the information—not if they wanted to claim my man was carrying angel dust. Even if we did sell PCP, Sonny-boy was a strip club security guard, not a drug dealer.
"You look different," Cass observed, taking a couple of steps into the dim room.
I scoffed a sharp laugh. "Seriously? Fucking hell, Cass. Now you're taking a second look? Maybe I should have fucked a stripper under your nose years ago."
"That's what you think?" He sounded genuinely confused as he closed a little more distance between us with those long strides of his. "I've taken a hell of a lot more than a second glance over the years, Red," he told me in a low voice that went straight to my pussy like a lightning bolt.
Red? Where the fuck had that come from?
"But in case you haven't noticed," Cass continued, getting all up in my personal space again, just like he'd done in the early hours of the morning while I was covered in blood. "I'm too fucking old for you, and we're rivals."
In stark contrast to his words, his tattoo-covered fingers came up to my face and stroked a loose tendril of my very red hair away. His touch was almost reverent, like he was scared I might break or explode, but it made me shiver nonetheless.
"Don't flatter yourself, Cass," I told him, tilting my head back to meet his eyes. This time, when my palm flattened on his chest, it wasn't to push him away from me. "We're not rivals. I could flatten your entire operation with a snap of my fingers." His lips twitched with the hint of a smile, and my fingers twisted in the front of his T-shirt.
But he'd rejected me before; I wasn't running that risk again. Sorry, but this bitch learned from her mistakes.
I released his shirt and moved to step out from under his looming presence, but Cass had other ideas. He caught my wrist and jerked me back to him before I’d made it more than one step.
My instinct was to lash out. In the blink of an eye, my free hand pulled the gun from my lower back and pressed it to his ribs. But Cass just ignored it. He kept my wrist captive in his grip as his other hand wrapped around my ponytail, tugging it back and tilting my face up.
"Cassiel," I growled, anger and outrage thundering through my veins... along with some other emotions.
His dark eyes met mine with a glimmer of challenge, and the corners of his lips kicked up. "You gonna shoot me, Red? Do it."
Fuck. Fuck.
He tugged harder on my hair, lowering his head until his lips hovered a breath away from mine, and my index finger stroked the trigger of my gun.
"Shoot me if you want," he rumbled, "but I'm going to kiss you anyway."
"I thought you didn't fuck children," I snapped back, my voice all bitter anger.
He huffed a sound awfully close to a laugh, his breath warming my lips. "I don't."
He didn't elaborate on that. He didn't need to. His lips met mine in a bruising kiss that temporarily short circuited my brain. Then I let out a small moan and kissed him back.
My gun was still against his side, my finger still on the trigger, but that seemed so very appropriate as we kissed like we were at war.
After a few moments, though, he released my wrist and shifted his hand to my waist. His fingers slipped beneath my loose sweatshirt, meeting bare skin and sending shudders rippling through me. I needed to put my damn gun down before I accidentally shot one of us.
It seemed the universe was against us hooking up, because a second after tucking my gun away, the heavy sound of footsteps came up the front steps to the porch and an unfamiliar voice called out, "Hey!"
"Motherfucker," Cass growled, echoing my own feelings.
"Hey, who the hell are you?" the stranger shouted. "You can't be in here! This is a closed crime scene!"
"Fuck’s sake," I huffed, pushing away from Cass's smoking hot body to glare in the direction of the voice. It was an SGPD cop, and a nervous-looking one at that, probably fresh out of training and tasked with keeping an eye on the crime scene. He'd been doing a shitty job of it too, considering how long I'd already been poking around.
"Y-you're going to have to come with me," the rookie told us in an uncertain voice.
Cass just arched a brow at me, silently asking if I wanted to handle it. I appreciated the sentiment but shrugged and waved my hand as if to say, All yours, Grumpy Cat.
He gave a short nod, then crossed the room to the baby cop in just a handful of long strides. The poor kid didn't stand a chance, barely managing to babble out a weak protest before Cass's fist met the side of his head and knocked him out cold.
The heavy thump of the cop's unconscious body hitting the floor seemed to echo, followed by the crackle of his radio.
"You okay in there, Simmons? Need back up?"
I rolled my eyes. "Great. He has a buddy."
Cass just shrugged. "I'm about fucking done with these bastards. They're reporting back to someone, and it's sure as fuck not the SGPD commissioner."