“I touch you now while I’m still slightly hard, and we are fucking. Again. All over this fucking place.”
She grinned, turning around and leaning back against the bar. “Oh… promises, promises.”
Fuck.
AVERY
Life was quickly becoming something I didn’t recognize.
But God, did I love it.
Gage was growing, learning, and developing every day, but so was Shotgun. The two of them were teaching each other, and it was starting to seem like Adrian and I were there to watch or help along the way. And that was how it should be.
Between school, work, and being a surrogate mom to that precious baby boy, Shotgun was lucky if he got even a moment of my attention. He was now the second most important man in my life.
I shuffled into class like a zombie, wishing I’d opted to stay home today.
Adulting was hard.
Doing the right thing for my education, even harder.
“Okay, I’m going to send Harper and Jake up the rows with these buckets, and you are going to turn your phone off and place it inside one of those buckets—” The groans from the fifty or so people in the lecture theater were loud and annoying. “If you do not want to place your phone into the bucket, you may leave. Now!” Mr. Singer pointed to the door to emphasize his point, and to my surprise, at least six people got up and walked out, their precious phones clutched in their sweaty palms.
When the door was shut behind them, and the two buckets full of our only contact to the outside world, my foot began to tap nervously.
“Our guest today is someone who works deep within the criminology field and has brought along some evidence and real crime scene photos,” Mr. Singer explains, walking over to the door. “The reason you can’t have your phones is because these photos are a part of a real police investigation and cannot, under any circumstances, be seen by the public or anyone outside this room. Are we understood?”
A chorus of understanding and also excitement swept through the lecture theater, and Mr. Singer pushed the door open, allowing my worst nightmare to step inside.
My foot bounced as Garrett Drake walked across the front of the room. His suit was tidy, but I quickly noted the handful of wrinkles showing he hadn’t had it pressed for the occasion. The same with the sprinkle of dark hair that decorated his usually clean-cut and polished jawline.
The man wasn’t the same polished human he once had been.
Austin breathing down his neck, desperate for any kind of something that could put him away. Shotgun with men asking questions around town, trying to figure out just where the hell he could be hiding Emma’s sister, Thayleah.
The spotlight was on him.
He was on the back foot.
And you know how I knew why? Because instead of sitting back and letting them search, he’d let his ego win, and now he was here, in my class, determined to take a dig at me because that was how he was going to get at Shotgun.
He would see it as a win.
And men like him had to fucking win.
Though, just that thought made my stomach sink as I realized I was the target here.
Should I leave?
Not give him the opportunity?
Kid was sitting in the parking lot waiting for me.
Did I go get him?
He’d asked the teacher to remove anything I could have contacted someone with for a reason.
“Forensic Pathology,” he spoke loudly, his eyes scanning the room. Looking for something, and I knew just what. Me. When his eyes finally caught mine, his flat eyes lit up, and he flicked his computer open, the screen that took up almost the entire lecture room wall. “I recommend, if you have a weak stomach, you either look away or exit the room because this is not going to be pretty.”
Another four people scurried from the room, while a few others opted to simply face the rear of the class.
I should have done either.
I should have known that asshole had something up his fucking sleeve.
The picture lit up—the gasp that left my mouth came out like a sob.
Eyes turned to me, some sympathetic, thinking I was shocked by a picture of the dead body.
The skin pale.
The lips blue.
The damage to their skin.
The slice across the throat.
All things I’d seen before.
In person.
Oh, Micah.
“Let me tell you about this case…”
The icy sensation started in the pit of my belly, working its way outward. I almost welcomed it for a moment, this numbing feeling flooding through my body as he flicked through another picture, then another and another, each more gruesome than the last.
My sister’s body pulled apart on this table.
Cut open.
Her organs casually lying beside her.
All for what? So they could check her appendix and say, ‘Well, it wasn’t that. It was probably the way her boss gutted her like a fucking fish.’
Hadn’t she been through fucking enough?
Hadn’t she suffered enough already?
The tears that trickled down my cheeks were silent. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of more than that. Fuck no. Not even when my insides were twisting, my lips zipped tightly to keep the vomit from escaping as I watched a video of some bastard walking through my sister’s crime scene.
The police talking through what happened.
How she’d tried to leave.
How she’d run, but he’d caught her like a game of cat and mouse.
And just to slap me in the fucking face—one cop noting the way she was dressed and how maybe she had tempted and teased him too much.
I pressed my fist to my mouth, bile hitting my tongue before I could force it back down.
They didn’t fucking know.
And that bastard didn’t get to judge her because she simply trusted a man not to kill her.
Though none of that had anything to do with his job, in particular. I could tell my fellow students found it fascinating, their eyes wide and focused on every gory damn detail. Especially when Garrett moved on, explaining how she died, how he would have determined her death had the case been his, and also other evidence he could identify that could have aided the police with their investigation and helped them put the suspect away.
“The police don’t just want to know how someone died. They want to know whether there are other things that have happened which they can use to charge the offender with. For example, they would have wanted to know, was she beaten?” he explained.
Yes.
“Was she raped?”
Yes.
His eyes came to rest right with me. “Had she still been alive when he slit her throat and let her bleed out on the floor?”
Also fucking yes.
And the joy in his face told me he fucking knew that too.
I needed to get out, my heart racing and my clammy hands no longer able to hold my damn pencil, but as I began to throw my shit together haphazardly, his slideshow changed—a new image lighting up the screen.
This one I didn’t recognize.
Not at first.
The body lay face down, the image was much older and grainier. The carpet on the floor was dated and stained with a pool of blood. The décor around kind of bland and boring, desperately in need of a bit of color.
“This crime was one I’ve looked into, one I found interest in,” Garrett rambled, pacing around the front of the room. He paused at the computer, zooming in on the body, and as things began to focus in a little more, I noticed the Brothers by Blood MC logo on the back of the man’s club cut. “You see, this crime was deemed self-defense… yet a lot of the crime scene evidence pointed toward the opposite. This is where a forensic pathologist can be important. We can look for things like defensive wounds. Of which there were none found.”