“And you can do it but you’ll do it at the station and I’ll be in the interview room with the both of you. I arrived on the scene after she called me in distress. It’s obvious that even if the victim didn’t succeed, he attempted to rape her. This case will be opened and shut within forty-eight hours, and you and I both know it. So, cut the posturing, do your job and I’m sure that promotion you’ve been chompin’ at will come ’round sooner rather than later, now you’re gettin’ down to doin’ some actual work.”
I blinked at Danner and I wasn’t the only one. He’d always been quiet, even reserved to the point of fading into the background. It was what had made him such a good cop, everyone was always overlooking him, underestimating him. That man was gone and in his place was a leader, the cold, ruthless kind of man that set my pulse to racing.
I watched his three colleagues physically stand down and lower their heads the way betas might do in deference to the Alpha of a wolf pack. I felt the animal impulse to tilt my head and bare my neck to him as well.
“You’ve been in deep with the RCMP for three years, Danner. You think Van PD is gonna be hot on you interfering in a murder case?” Another cop said, this one short and slight with a wispy mustache.
“As a matter of fact, you better sweep this up good and fast so it doesn’t compromise my play with the RCMP. You wouldn’t want to be to blame for fuckin’ up a year’s long investigation, would you? And you think I’ve been in deep three years and I don’t have connections to pull in if I gotta? Harleigh Rose Garro is my responsibility, Sterling, so listen hard and hear me clearly when I say, she isn’t goin’ through this shit without me.”
A sob ripped through my chest, unzipping the tight lock on the emotions overstuffing my chest so that they spilled through me. I shook with the impact as my shock ruptured and pure horror and agony overtook me.
“Oh my god,” I choked out through the tears as I buried my face in my hands. “I don’t deserve this.”
And I didn’t mean Cricket and the attempted rape and the murder. I probably deserved all of that. Karma or some bitch like that for all the ways big and little that I’d been careless and disrespectful and just straight up wrong over the years.
But no, that wasn’t it.
There was no way in any world, in heaven or hell that I deserved to have a hero like Lionel Danner in my corner.
As if hearing my thoughts but probably responding to the horrific sound of my ugly sobs, he turned slightly to swing me under his arm in a tight hold even as he continued to issue orders. “Now, get someone to take her goddamn pictures and do an examination so we can get her out of these bloody clothes and into something clean. I’m takin’ her to the station myself and Sterling, you wanna show what a big boy cop you are, you stay here and get this mess sorted.”
Danner
I was speaking with the trauma counselor when the door to the North Van Police Station crashed against the wall as it opened and a hoarse voice called out, “What the motherfuckin’ fuck do you think you’re doin’ talkin’ to my fuckin’ girl without her fuckin’ lawyer and goddamn father present?”
I closed my eyes even as the station went wired around me. I thought about counting to ten but giving the President of The Fallen MC ten seconds of vulnerability was ten seconds too many. The six foot five behemoth currently stalking towards me like an enraged, feral jungle cat was not the kind of man you wanted to fuck around with.
I knew that.
It was a lesson one might argue that I’d learned the hard way, when I’d let his teenage wife get abducted by a rival MC.
Regardless, I knew not to fuck with him now.
Unfortunately, Zeus Garro didn’t know that he’d earned my reluctant respect, so I was braced and unsurprised when he stormed right up to me in a room full of wary cops, lifted me with a huge ass hand by my throat and slammed me against the wall two feet behind me.
Fuckin’ fuck. That hurt.
I let him do it though. The only way to stop a man like Zeus Garro was to shoot him in the head or lie down in the face of his fury and hope it passed you over. As I’d been in the fuckin’ outrageous position of giving a shit about his kid daughter for the last fifteen years, I chose not to shoot the fucker in his thick skull.