Despite themselves, Garro and his son smirked proudly at that.
Yeah, Harleigh Rose was trouble, born and fuckin’ raised.
“She’d just filed a police report,” I continued, and then watched their smiles get crushed under heavy frowns. “He’d started to stalk and threaten her. Filed a restraining order last week and got a friend from school to testify to the fact.”
“The fuck?” King asked. “Why wouldn’t she come to us with that?”
Cress leaned into him and spoke softly, “You think on that for a second, honey, and I think you’ll find your answer.”
“I’m not thinking on fuck all,” Zeus growled. “Why the fuck would she go to the pigs about that little shit?”
I thought about the sight that had greeted me when I entered H.R.’s small downtown apartment. It wasn’t just the blood lacquering her torn clothes and bared skin. The abuse and terror went deeper than that. There were hollows under her sharp cheekbones and deep, dark shadows under her flat blue eyes, signs of sleep deprivation and malnutrition. She was too skinny and too flat, even her honey hair had lost its luster and her eyes, eyes that normally flashed with sass and wonder, were dead.
Whatever that now-dead piece of shit had done to Harleigh Rose over the last three years had taken its toll and had been for a good long while. I knew H.R. well enough to know that by the time she realized she was in an abusive relationship with a scumbag, she would be too proud to ask for help. She’d stick it out thinking that she was the one who had gotten herself into the mess in the first place and so, she was the one who had to get herself out of it.
It was a good philosophy sometimes.
Completely disastrous in this case.
Not because the loss of Cricket (nee Taylor Marsden) was a travesty.
But because underneath Harleigh Rose’s crown of thorns and venom laced tongue, she was as tender as a fresh bloom and I hated that she would now carry the weight of taking a life.
I should have been there.
Though, it was pointless to chastise myself.
It was in the past, for one.
For another, I hadn’t whiled away the time. The last three years working for the RCMP in their Organized Crime Undercover Investigations unit was the highlight of my career and not only because I was out from under my corrupt father’s thumb in Entrance, BC.
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?”