“I thought you said I wasn’t under arrest.”
“I’m hereby placing you under arrest. You have the right to remain silent. Now go back to bed.”
Instead of listening I climb into the cot beside him. “This is exactly my problem, every time. You’re just like every other guy. You ask me on a date and then you just… you just arrest me.”
His lips quirked. “Happens to you often, does it?”
All the time. All the time I’m left with the dark shame of being not good enough, of being the girl with a man banging on her apartment door, drunk and angry, instead of a man who loved her. I swallow hard, turning away so he can’t see my tears.
“Hey.” This time when he catches my wrist, it’s light, tentative, barely a touch. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole, really. If it’s any consolation, I know I am.”
“Why would that console me?”
“We don’t need to talk about me. Let’s talk about you. You can tell me why you were driving like a bat out of hell out of Tanglewood. It’ll be better than not sleeping on these damn cots, especially when the night is so…”
The night was so very something, I know exactly what he means, and lying on a hard cot in a lonely jail cell by myself is too depressing. Sitting on a hard cot beside a self-confessed ass is marginally better. Even if he is a cop.
She settled in, connected to him only by the felt blanket they shared.
“He’s a cop,” I say, though that short sentence can’t possibly express everything.
He seems to understand anyway, his body stiffening beside me. “Jesus.”
“A dirty cop. I’m sure you’re shocked about that. I’m sure you thought a man scared me bad enough to fly out of the city like a bat out of hell is just a nice upstanding law enforcement officer.” I meant to sound relaxed, but my voice got high pitched at the end—then broke.
“That’s terrible,” he says, his voice low.
“We were together. I lived with him. It wasn’t exactly…” Consensual. “But I just couldn’t see a way out. And then I missed my period. Another one.”
I glance at him, but he already knows where it’s going. The proof of that is five feet away, sleeping soundly. Deep breath. “Stefano didn’t want anything to do with a baby. I thought he would do something drastic. Beat me until I lost the baby. Maybe drug me and take me to a clinic. In the end he threw me out. It was such… God, it was such a relief.”
Fury flashes in those brown eyes, so different from the soft way he looked at me a few minutes ago, different even from the careful casualness on the road. “What did you do?”
“I didn’t have any money, but I had a few friends leftover from school. People who understood why I couldn’t keep in contact, why I had to drop out—”
“Wait. How old were you when this Stefano fucker took you?”
The word fucker startles me, but not as much as the word took. There are other ways he could have said it, ways other people would have said it. How old was I when we started dating? How old was I when I moved in with him?
Finn seems to understand the subtext, but then he did recognize the tattoo.
That’s exactly what happened. I was gifted by my father. Taken by Stefano.
“Fourteen.”
Finn sucks in a breath. “Jessica, how old are you now?”
“I’m eighteen now, okay? So don’t worry.”
“Don’t worry. You want me not to worry about you, when you’re admitting that you were essentially trafficked as a girl, that you were abused and battered and—”
“Stop please,” I say, wincing at those words. They land like stones on my skin. “I’m not excusing what happened. I’m not saying it was okay, only that I survived.”
“Yes,” he says, the admission coming gravely. “You did.”
“And I want to stay that way.”
“I’m going to help you, Jessica.”
“You don’t understand. Stefano, the people he knows, they’re dangerous.”
He makes a small sound. “Do you know what I did before you became a cop?”
“You were a boy scout?”
“I told drugs. Occasionally I helped run guns.”
My insides turn cold. I scoot away from him on the thin mattress. “You’re a dirty cop.”
“No, beautiful. That was before. Before the accident.”
By degrees I feel myself relax. “What happened?”
“I was driving on this road, right here. Running guns for this asshole who paid a lot of money not to ask questions. I had a woman in the car with me. It was only…” He looks almost ashamed. “Only sex between us. Only money. I picked her up in a bar in Tanglewood, determined to have a good time.”
My stomach clenches. Stefano’s work is incredibly dangerous, so much so that it became my dream. That he would one day wind up dead. That he would never come home.
“Did someone take the guns?”
A humorless laugh. “No. That would have made sense, at least. Instead it was a drunk driver. He hit us from the side. Of course I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, so I flew through the windshield, landed on pavement.”
“Oh my God.”
“That ended up saving my life. The woman was trapped inside. Unconscious, I can only hope. Because all those guns—they caught fire. Exploded. Right there in the street.”
The pain in his voice draws grooves inside me, a kind of shared memory I won’t ever forget. Not his fear or his injuries in that moment, but for the woman.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” he says sharply. “I don’t deserve a damn thing.”
“You didn’t mean for her to be hurt.”
“I didn’t even know her name.”
There’s a hollow in my chest, whether from what I hoped this man would be or from his own shame. “I’m still sorry,” I say softly.
“Yeah,” he says, his voice rough. “I’m sorry too.”
“And then you became a cop?”
“Took a while. Woke up in a hospital outside the city, the cops asking a lot of questions. There was a time it looked like I wouldn’t walk again, definitely not run far and run fast enough to pass the physical. But I had to do something with my life, something useful, or I couldn’t see any point to living it.”
The difference struck me, then. How Stefano had become a cop to have power, so that he could live above the law. And how Finn had become a cop for the opposite reasons.
“Is that why you’re alone?” I ask.
I don’t just mean whether he’s in a relationship. There’s an air of loneliness around him. I recognize it because it’s the same one I carry with me.
He makes a rough sound. “I like people just fine. I just don’t want to get too close.”
“I don’t know how to be close,” I admit.
He’s quiet a moment, looking pensive. “We make quite a pair, you and I.”
“But we’re okay. We’re going to be okay.” Optimism, she reminded herself. She would dredge up enough for both of them. “We don’t need to get close to enjoy each other’s company.”