"Why?"

  No one gave you shit for free.

  No one.

  To that, he shrugged. "Fuck if I know. I wouldn't say I'm a good guy, Tig. I just know desperation when I see it. Trust me, I see it a fuckuva lot in this line of work. Normally, there's not shit I can do. Or, maybe just as often, I create that when I take pics of private shit, and hand it over for money. I do dirty shit. Maybe this is my way of paying some penance for that. Something I think maybe you need to start doing too."

  From that day forward, I did.

  I contracted with Xander as I got out from underneath the gang I had been affiliated with since I was seventeen. This was not done blood-free, I might add. But it had to be done.

  One day, several years later, we had followed a lead for a missing girl the cops couldn't get a whiff of in their channels to some fucking place called Navesink Bank which was a cesspool of criminal activity. We found her holed up at Hailstorm on the hill, a paramilitary organization where they put her particular skills to work. Those skills were coding. She was a living, breathing computer. And she had run off when her parents cut her internet.

  Xander and I had shared a look, shrugging, both agreeing silently to leave her right the fuck where she was. Partly because we didn't want to piss off the leader of that camp, but also because we also understood.

  We stopped in town for a beer.

  And it was mother fucking fate, just like it was fate the day my hit was Xander's client. There in the bar was Sawyer Anderson. And he and Xander knew each other, so we got a table, drank, and talked.

  By the time Xander was ready to head back to the city, I had a job offer that I couldn't refuse.

  "Think you finally found it," Xander said, slapping a hand down on my shoulder, and leaving without another word.

  And I had.

  There was a part of me that maybe always knew I had to leave the city. I had to leave all those old ghosts behind. I needed never to see a face that knew me again. I needed to start over.

  Working for Sawyer, I slowly but surely manage that. And while he eventually got to know all the sordid details of my past, it was after he already knew and trusted and had respect for the man I became.

  The layers of filth and guilt and anger I had still been carrying even years after I started working for Rhodes slowly slipped away.

  I got a place, an old abandoned office building because I got it on a song and I fixed up the inside. Eventually, I let some construction worker take the basement and build a fucking fallout shelter in it. I made connections around the town, though I generally kept to myself.

  There wasn't a day, even more than a decade later, where I didn't think about Rainy, didn't wonder what she might have become, what we both might have become if circumstances were different.

  I think it was why Cassie and Kenzi's case was weighing on me more than they usually did. We handled a lot of shit at the office. But we didn't come across a lot of cases with women getting taken. In fact, I think there had only ever been one other even remotely similar case, and that was many years before. It brought back all the bad memories. I was disgustingly versed in the evil of some men, knowing what they had done to my own sister, knowing what could be happening to Cass, knowing the sick fuck still wanted to do those things to Kenz too.

  So even though all the leads went nowhere, there was no sign of her, I couldn't give up.

  I should have protected her.

  It should never have happened on my watch.

  Just like with my sister.

  "What was she like?"

  I felt my head jerk, not realizing how zoned out I was until I looked up at Kenz, fucking knockout she was, with sad eyes.

  "What?" I asked, confused.

  "Your sister."

  "Oh," I said, shrugging a little, and giving her the truth. "Honestly, she was a lot like Reese. Sweet, too sweet really considering what she grew up around. Skittish and a little naive maybe."

  Her hand released her fork, sliding across the table and closing over the top of my hand, turning slightly so she could squeeze. She didn't let go after. "I'm so sorry," she said, and there was a depth there that you really only ever heard from women, maybe being the only ones who could truly understand that horror.

  "Long time ago," I covered, feeling almost a little choked up which was completely foreign to me. But it had been a long time since I really sat and thought about my past. Sometimes facing it up did that to you.

  "I bet it doesn't feel that way, though."

  That was the damn truth.

  Seeing her pulled out on that slab in the morgue, busted, blue and purple all over, cuts and gashes all over her face and throat, looking nothing like the girl I had seen leave for school that very morning, yeah... that would always feel fresh.

  My hand turned under hers, fingers slipping between hers a little awkwardly given the angle, but giving her fingers a squeeze before releasing her, reaching for my scotch, needing to get the taste of my past out of my mouth.

  I didn't give women that story.

  Almost as a rule.

  I knew it for what it was- dark, ugly, terrifying. I also understood that not many women could even remotely understand that, reconcile the idea that the man who had done those things was the same one sitting across from them. I got that. So because things never got super serious with anyone to the point where we needed to share every awful detail of our lives, I just glossed it over. I gave them the condensed version about being involved with a gang and losing my family and moving on from there.

  Why I had invited Kenzi to ask me about it when I barely knew her, when she was not someone I was in a serious relationship with, was beyond me.

  Maybe a part of me thought, of all the women I had known, she would understand the best, judge the least. And not just because she had been a hellion, but because of the lives her brothers had led. By all accounts from what I knew of him, Paine was a good man, greatly respected in our community. And from what Rhodes said about Enzo since he took him in, still liking his desperate cases, the same could be said of him.

  But those good men had dealt heroin.

  They had pimped prostitutes.

  They had beat and likely killed people.

  Yet those pasts didn't define them entirely.

  Kenzi understood that.

  So that was likely a part of it.

  There was another part, though.

  It was irrational.

  It was too soon.

  But it was true nonetheless.

  While shit was still new, and the situation was less than ideal pretty much all the way around, I knew.

  I wouldn't be cheesy and say it was love at first sight or some shit like that. But she walked into that office, she threw that sass around, and I knew.

  Then every other interaction with her since then, even just the emails she sent back to me where she somehow managed to be smart-ass and snarky via text, to the conversation we shared earlier that day, to the make-out session on the couch, it all just reinforced what I knew from pretty much the moment I met her.

  Whatever was happening with us, it was heading somewhere serious.

  And when you were heading somewhere serious with a woman, you gave her all your dark and ugly right up front so she could decide right off if she could handle it, no springing it up on her six months down the road because you knew she was already in deep, taking the pussy route. No, you gave it to them straight and waited to see if they wanted to throw it back, if they could handle the burn.

  If they could, well, then you knew you had the right woman.

  It saved a lot of hell and headaches.

  I had a distinct feeling that Kenzi was the kind of woman who could not only throw it back, but then demand another round.

  That was the kind of woman she was- strong, fearless, up for a challenge, and maybe most of all... mature enough to know that no matter how sordid your past was, that it didn't mean you couldn't turn it around.

  Like her.

  While her history wasn't exactly dark, it was impressive how quickly she had made the switch from her old lifestyle. She went from a hellion to a dedicated workaholic in a blink. She went from being wild and uncontrollable to a professional whose life wasn't that much more interesting than her librarian sister's anymore.

  It said a lot about her as a person that she had managed that feat.

  I would be a lucky man if she decided that she could handle my dark.

  The next words out of her mouth, well, they gave me the answers I had been seeking.

  EIGHT

  Kenzi

  I knew what the appropriate response was supposed to be to his story. I knew I was supposed to recoil, blanch, feel sick to my stomach, run screaming from the restaurant. Truly, I was pretty sure any sane person would find any one of those reactions justified.

  There was no denying that his story was shocking and absolutely stomach-turning sad and violent.

  But the fact of the matter was, I understood. I truly got how things like that happened, how circumstances like bad areas and no money and bad schools and no strong parental figure could weigh on a person, veer them in the path of the less-than-legal land of opportunity. Paine went there. Enzo went there. When you could make thousands in a day instead of thousands a month, and you were young and feeling invincible and bone-deep sick of being poor, it even made total sense to go down that path.

  And Paine and Enzo had good, strong mothers. They had aunts and friends and people to try to keep them on the straight and narrow. But poverty was the surest way to weigh down a soul. And weighted souls did whatever they could to get some burden off.

  Tig didn't have what my brothers and I did. Tig had a junkie mom, a convict dad, and a little sister who needed to be taken care of. What was he supposed to do? Let her starve? Let her live on the streets? It was truly a testament to the good person he was, even when he was hardly more than a child, to take that onto his shoulders.

  Then to have her abused and murdered, holy freaking hell, I genuinely couldn't imagine that, even though someone I thought of like a sister was going through something at least somewhat similar.

  I didn't blame him for taking the path he did. If someone ever touched Reese, if someone touched me, Paine and Enzo would have fucking flayed them before giving them the sweet release of death. In my opinion, that was as it should be. There was murder, and there was justice. They weren't one in the same. Exceptions had to be made.

  What he did after, well, that was definitely more of a gray area.

  That was dark and cringe-worthy and, well, wrong.

  But he eventually gave that up.

  He moved on.

  He put some good back into the world as penance.

  That said a lot about him.

  So I wasn't completely horrified. I wasn't going to let his past change my opinion of the man who was sitting across from me.

  I was a prime example of the fact that people could change their ways, they could get their lives on track, they could take responsibility for the person they had been but still choose to move forward and become someone else entirely.

  Fuck anyone who said differently.

  "So how is the chicken parm?" I asked, watching as Tig, the huge wall of a man he was, actually jerked back like I had slapped him. I was pretty sure it was such a big movement that the front feet of his chair lifted up.

  "What?"

  I felt a twitch pull at my lips and forced them to settle. "I have always wanted to get it, but the portion is massive, and if I bring the leftovers home, Reese will eat them and then bitch about me being the reason her ass is getting big."

  To that, he relaxed back into his seat, shaking his head a little as if to clear it. "How about you tell Reese that a man likes a nice plump ass. Gives him something to sink his fingers into... or slap."

  Oh, hell.

  Really, there was no way that comment wasn't going to send wild visions flashing across my mind. One, a memory of his fingers doing just that- sinking into my ass. The other, the idea of him fucking me and slapping my ass as he did so.

  Let's just say there was a definite reason that I had to discreetly press my thighs together under the table.

  I cleared my throat slightly, reaching again for my wine, my lips tipping up. "Maybe you should tell her that."

  "Don't like that look in your eye, woman," he said, lifting a brow, instantly being able to tell I was up to something.

  "It's nothing. Reese just... likes a man who is good with his hands. You fixed the dishwasher..."

  "Please," he said, shaking his head. "I'm not the guy she needs. It was a knee-jerk reaction to seeing a man be a man. So many pansy ass men these days wouldn't know a Allen wrench from their own dick."

  My wine got stuck at the back of my throat as I snorted, the burn in my sinuses for a second making me genuinely worry that I might have a completely embarrassing wine-through-the-nose situation before I got it under control.

  And judging by the smirk on his lips, Tig knew exactly what I was dealing with. "You alright?"

  I waved a hand as I forced a swallow. "What type of man does she need then?"

  Honestly, I was genuinely curious. I could never peg down a type for her. Part of me thought she needed an opposite to balance her out. The other part thought maybe that type of man would scare or intimidate her and that she would be better with a quiet, bookish sort. Though, there was a part of me that believed that was the worst thing she could have because the quiet, bookish guys likely didn't know how to use their dicks, and every woman deserved to have epic sex with their partner.

  He shrugged at that. "Someone extroverted but not a jackass about it. Someone who can encourage her to come out of her shell a bit, but likes the shy thing enough not to want to change her either."

  "Wow, you know... I think you missed your calling as a matchmaker. Time for a career change, maybe?"

  "Watch it, smartass. You asked," he shot back, the smile on his face spreading wider. "Know who kinda fits the bill, though?"

  "No," I said immediately, knowing exactly who he was talking about. Brock. "Not a chance in hell. He's too old for her anyway."

  "He's my age, and she's only a couple years younger than you."

  "Yeah, but I led a life, y'know? She's been living in her books. She's not ready to take on a man with darkness like Brock has."

  "Just an idea."

  "Besides, I think she likes guys with beards. Weird, but true."

  After that, the conversation stayed on lighter topics, both of us already having purged all the old, ugly parts of ourselves and therefore able to move onto the smaller things: work, friends, family, the town, movie and music interests.

  By the time the check was discreetly placed at the edge, but center of the table, I was riding high on a good first date buzz.

  "Don't even fucking think about it, Kenz," he said oddly, making my gaze shoot up from the bill to his face. "I know you asked me out. I also know that you are a strong, independent woman who can pay for her own meals, but understand this about me- I take care of my woman. That means I make sure she is safe, that she is happy, that she is fucked however she wants to be fucked how ever often she wants to be fucked, and it also means I pay."

  There was absolutely no denying that that sent a primal surge of appreciation through my body. He was right; I had asked him out, and proper etiquette meant that it was my place to pay; it was something I was happy to do because, as he said, I was a strong independent woman who could pay for her own meal, I really, really liked that he didn't give a fuck about convention and wanted to cover the bill.

  "You gonna give me shit about this?" he asked, it obviously being a rhetorical question because he was already reaching for the black leather fold that held the bill which I knew would be hefty since it was Famiglia and I was pretty sure their tap water cost five dollars a glass.

  I sat back in my chair, cradling my glass of wine between both hands, getting ready to savor the last sip. "Not at all."

  "Halle-fucking-lujah," he said, but he was grinning as he slipped cash into the fold and pushed it to the end of the table, waving at the server and saying 'all yours' before moving to stand.

  And then he went ahead and did another thing to surprise me. He moved over toward me and actually pulled out my chair.

  I swear on all that was holy, my legs were a little wobbly as I forced them to hold my weight. Was there anything hotter than a guy who could break a man's neck with one hand but was still a gentleman?

  I was pretty sure there wasn't.

  We were walking to the SUV in the lot when my phone screamed, shocking me enough to reach for it though I had a strict no-cellphone rule for dates, especially first ones.

  Finding an email, my brows drew together as I clicked the link that brought up a webpage... and a video.

  My hand slammed hard into Tig's chest as the image came up on the screen, making him stop short and turn back, looking down at me as I watched Cassie's image clear.

  She was sitting on a chair in a dark room, she being the only thing illuminated like a spotlight was directed on her, bright enough to make her eyes squint. Well, one of her eyes. The other was swollen shut.

  My stomach clenched hard as I was vaguely aware of Tig lifting his own phone and video calling Barrett to live stream it with us.

  "Say hi, Cassie," a voice that was decidedly altered said, creepy even more so because I was so familiar with that robotic manipulation from all the messages I had gotten over time. "Say hi, Cassie!" the voice screamed when she didn't immediately follow orders.

  Her entire body jerked back violently, a loud whimper escaping her busted lips.

  I couldn't see below her chest, but it looked like she was bound. Her shoulders were squared back almost unnaturally, and she made no move to swipe a small amount of spit that escaped her lips when she cried out. Her hair was so greasy that it actually looked wet. Her makeup was still half-on, but messy around the eyes from crying.

 

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