I bit back the edge of my grin because I knew she didn’t like it when it looked like I was laughing at her. “That’s a play by Shakespeare called Romeo & Juliet. It’s incredibly stupid.”
“No duh,” she told me with a big eye roll. “But still, you’re Lion Danner of the Danners and I’m Harleigh Rose of The Fallen. Your people are cops and mine are bikers. Being friends doesn’t make much sense.”
God, but she was right.
As evidenced by my moral slip up today when I let her get away with shoplifting.
But I couldn’t leave her and King to Farrah’s devices, I just didn’t have it in me. I liked them too much.
“Sometimes, opposites attract,” I told her with a wink as I stood up and pulled her with me. “Now, come on. I’ve got a date tonight, and I want to talk to your mum when I take you home.”
“A date?” she asked me and there was something in her tone that had me turning to face her again. She was looking at the ground, carefully making sure her feet didn’t crunch any of the records on the floor. “Who would want to date you?”
“You’re too young to understand, but trust me, when you’re older you’ll get that it’s hard to find a nice, handsome guy who’s also tall enough you can wear heels around him,” I chuckled, because that was exactly what my date that night had told me when I’d asked her out last week.
Harleigh Rose stayed silent behind me.
After we picked up King from school and I’d taken them to Stella’s diner to grab a quick dinner, I drove them home so I could have a word with Farrah. If that didn’t work, as it hadn’t before, I’d get my dad to pull her down to the station and have a word with her there.
I was thinking this in the silence of the car, both kids tense as they hadn’t been all night knowing that I was taking them back to their mum. Harleigh Rose had tinkered with my iPod until “Sweet Child O’ Mine” by Guns N’ Roses came on, the lyrics filling the cab of my truck in a way that her voice couldn’t.
The song painted a picture of Harleigh Rose with her sky-blue eyes huddled in a corner while her stupid mother shot up, wondering where else in the world was safe for her, if not her home?
I could barely breathe through the weight on my chest as I pulled onto their street and noticed a lineup of cars all around their little bungalow. The second I cut the ignition, I heard the music.
“Stay here,” I told the kids as I unbuckled my seatbelt and opened the door.
I could smell the heady fragrance of marijuana in the air.
Fuck.
“You hear me?” I asked Harleigh Rose and King as they both looked at the house then back at me.
“Sure, Danny,” King said with a firm nod as he climbed over the middle console to sit in my vacated driver’s seat beside Harleigh Rose so he could take her hand in his.
The kid was twelve going on twenty.
I gave them a nod then made my way around the truck and up the gravel drive to the home. I could hear people partying in the back over the noise spilling out from the house and I was surprised the neighbors hadn’t called the police.
The door was open when I tried it so I pushed in.
There were people everywhere in varying degrees of nudity. Two women writhed on the floor fully naked as they exchanged tokes of pot and blew the smoke into each other’s mouths. Men were lining up to do lines of coke off some very young girl’s ass and a couple was fucking in full sight of everyone else on the couch.
My fucking Christ, was this what King and Harleigh Rose were subjected to regularly?
I moved through the rooms, bile metallic on my tongue, my fists clenched so tight my short nails cut half-moons into my palms. I wanted to rip Farrah in two and grind her into dust so the Devil could snort her in Hell.
She wasn’t anywhere.
I searched the house again, worrying about the kids in the car when there were people like these addicts, felons, and partiers so close by.
Still, I didn’t find her.
Instead, when I entered the kitchen for the second time, I found Harleigh Rose standing in the midst of the revelry, her eyes trained on the hall like she’d been waiting for me.
“Rosie, what the hell? I told you to stay in the car,” I growled as I pushed between another couple to get to her.
“I found her,” she said, her voice dead like the tone of a heartbeat flatlining.
She took my hand and led me through the crowd, back down the hallway and into the master bedroom I’d already checked then behind a cloth partition I’d thought was decorative into a walk-in closet.