I flipped through the hundreds of messages that he had exchanged with Reeve over the last few months. There was nothing unusual in the exchanges. They were flirty and fun. She seemed to really like the dirty fed. She told him she missed him when he had to go back into the city during the week. She thanked him profusely for not judging her by her past actions. She told him that he made her feel special and safe.
He responded with flip answers and easy reassurances. He told her she was beautiful, that she was gorgeous, that she was a prize. While Reeve spoke to him like a woman in the first stages of falling in love, Roark replied like a man with a trophy he was eager to show off and flaunt. His title and his badge had done a lot to win her over, her looks had done everything to convince him to break protocol and take her to bed. I understood the temptation.
It was the newer messages, the ones leading up to the fire at the club, that were the most interesting. Reeve had grown up in the Point and had lost a sister to the vicious and unforgiving ways of the streets. She was not only street-smart but also had keen instincts for danger. She started texting him about where he was going on the weekends and why he wouldn’t talk to her about what he was up to. She asked why he was in the Point for reasons that had nothing to do with work. She asked him why his phone was going off at weird times during the night. It wasn’t uncommon for a cop but she seemed to know something wasn’t tracking. She asked him who Zero was and why had he shown up at her place in the secure location looking for him. It was clear she knew something was off and that Roark wasn’t who he claimed to be.
He tried to put her off. He texted that he was in the middle of a top-secret case, that it was high profile, and he smoothly apologized for all the secrecy and double talk. He promised to take her somewhere tropical and warm as soon as the trial for the rest of Novak’s crew was over, and when none of that seemed to pacify her he broke out the big guns and told her that he loved her. That shut her down for exactly one day. She told him she loved him back and then went silent.
After the declaration there were no more messages between the two of them but there were several between Zero and Roark. He had his goons watching Brysen and Dovie. He also had eyes on Spanky’s, the strip club that was now the de facto operating headquarters for Nassir since the Pit was gone. Spanky’s was also where a stripper named Honor danced, and if anyone cared to watch closely enough, they would see that if Nassir had any kind of weakness, it was her. The texts indicated that whatever was driving Roark was amping up to bring the fight right to the heart of those willing to stand sentinel between him and his revenge, and all that could mean was that things were going to get uglier and bloodier before I could put a stop to it.
The texts stopped because it was apparent that the next time Roark saw Reeve she snagged his phone and headed back to the city in order to hand it over to me. She saw his profession of love for what it was, a smoke screen, and had done what she had done since the first time I had met her. She was covering her own ass and I bet Roark was smart enough to know that his cover as a good guy, as a member of law enforcement, was blown as soon as the phone came up missing. I would wager my left nut that the fed had gone into hiding and that I wasn’t the only one that would be looking for him. I made a mental note to put a call in to the marshals to see just how much they knew about their dirty agent.
“Well, fuck.” I tossed the phone on the desk, curled my hands into fists, and shoved them into my eye sockets. I could feel a headache start to coil around the base of my neck and throb behind the back of my eyes. It felt like a sledgehammer pounding away inside my skull.
I pushed out of my ancient chair and it groaned with relief. The door to my office rattled in the jamb as I slammed it shut behind me and several of my fellow officers stopped to give me questioning looks as I stalked toward the front doors of the station.
Fresh air wasn’t something anyone was ever going to find in the Point, but I needed to be outside, needed the freedom to pace back and forth without feeling like a caged beast. I pulled my already loosened tie the rest of the way off my neck and pulled my own phone out of my back pocket. I was about to make a call that I never in a million years thought I was going to make.
It rang and rang on the other end. At first I thought she wasn’t going to answer and then I thought that if she didn’t I was going to get in my boring-as-hell police-issue sedan and drive every single road of the city until I found where she was holed up. When you looked like her there was nowhere that you could hide.
Finally, when I was at the end of my patience and was just getting ready to hang up and probably throw the phone across the parking lot, her smoky voice came tauntingly across the line.
“Well, that was fast, Detective.”
I bent my head down so that I was looking at the scuffed toes of my boots and wondered like I had a million times before why I just didn’t walk away from this life. I had the credentials. I had the skill level. I could be a cop in any city, anywhere in America—hell, I could probably go a step further and join the feds if I wanted to. What kept me here was undefinable and impossible to fight. When I was younger I’d tried my hand at a better life, at living on the other side of things up on the Hill. All that had taught me was that bad people and bad things were everywhere. The zip code didn’t really matter. I had innocent people to protect here and I was going to do that until I drew my last breath.
“You’re right. I do need you, Reeve.” And God help us all.
She gave a chuckle that had no humor in it. “You have no idea how long I’ve wanted you to say those words to me, Titus King.”