She climbed to her feet and I saw the way her eyes shifted when I mentioned the dead girl. She was capable of regret and remorse. That was good to know and it made me feel a little less like shit for wanting to push her back up against the wall and continue where we had just left off.
“Where exactly do you want me to go, Detective?”
“When Bax got locked up he was staying at this crappy little studio just outside of the District. I didn’t know he bought a house before he got arrested. When he got out of jail and hooked up with Dovie, he left the place in the city and took her out to the burbs. Well, I paid the rent on the studio in advance for a few years so that he would have someplace guaranteed to go back to when he got out. It’s been empty for a while and it’s only about half a step up from this place, but it’ll do until I can figure out something more secure.” I cut her a hard look. “Besides, everyone knows how Bax feels about you, so no one would ever think you would be anywhere near his place.”
She couldn’t afford to forget that there were enemies around every corner and all of them would be happy if she suddenly stopped breathing.
“Titus . . .” Her voice was quiet and her eyes bored into mine when our gazes locked. “I came back to help you out. I don’t want to be the reason you and Shane end up back at odds. I know how hard it was for you to almost lose him. That’s not what any of this is about for me.”
Her eyes drifted up to the white spot in my hair that was a constant reminder of how far my little brother was willing to take things. Unlike me, Bax didn’t have a cage he kept his wild side locked away in. He did what he wanted, when he wanted, and that made him unbelievably dangerous. That’s why she needed me. Bax and I might not always be on the same page and there was still an ungodly amount of tension between us and how we viewed the right and wrong of things, but he respected me enough, cared about me enough that if I could sell the act that this woman mattered to me on some deeper level, he would back off. He wouldn’t like it. In fact he would absolutely hate it, but he would still do it.
“Bax is my problem. He always has been and you probably don’t want to call him Shane to his face.”
She lifted a shoulder and let it fall. “I watched Dovie fall in love with Shane, not Bax. He seems less scary as Shane.”
I grunted because Shane and Bax were two parts that made up the entire man. Both were equally scary and equally dangerous but she didn’t need to know that, so I motioned to the dingy room and ordered, “Grab your stuff.”
She gave me a lopsided smile. “I don’t have any stuff.”
She had said that but I hadn’t really believed her. What kind of woman could run with literally just the clothes on her back? One that was built to survive no matter what. I answered my own question.
I sighed and walked over to the door. “All right, let’s get out of here. I need to get down to the docks.”
She nodded a little and went to move past me as I jerked the paper-thin door open. I stiffened automatically when she paused in front of me and titled her head back so that she could look me in the eyes.
“For what it’s worth, you are very convincing at pretending to like me, Titus. For a second there before your phone went off, I almost believed you.”
She slipped past me out the door, leaving her words lying like bricks at my feet.
IT TOOK A LITTLE bit to get her to the apartment and get her inside with the orders to lay low until she heard from me. Bax’s old studio would work for now but I needed to find someplace I could take her that was safe and still visible enough that Roark would know where she was at—where we were at, pretending to be infatuated with each other. My plan sort of fell apart after that, though. I knew I needed to get Roark to show himself, but after he did, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure how that would play out. I wanted to be confident enough in myself that I could simply arrest him and take him in without any bloodshed on either side, but the guy was violent and he was pissed, so I doubted that would be the case. Once I had Reeve somewhere safe and secure and the charade began, I would hammer out the rest of the details. The devil always hid in those little fuckers.
The ride to the District was silent and tense. The look on her face when she took in the battered condition of Bax’s old bachelor pad was priceless. I assured her Dovie had scrubbed the place down since they stayed there occasionally when Bax worked late at the garage he owned. I promised she was far less likely to get an STD from the bathroom here than she was from the no-tell motel.
She didn’t reply and I didn’t bother to tell her good-bye, but I did tell her to keep her head down and try not to attract attention. The only way a girl that looked like her could do that was by not going outside, and by ordering pizza and Chinese food. It was a crappy plan but it would have to do. She gave me a hard look, which reminded me that she had taken off with hardly any money and no real identification. With a sigh I had handed over a few twenties that I could see she wanted to refuse. Reeve didn’t want to rely on me any more than I wanted to be the only one in a position to help her out.
By the time I got to the docks, I was turned inside out. I was running on fumes and no amount of coffee or fury could fuel me enough to get through the fact that some innocent girl who lost her life for zero reason. The scene was chaotic. There were a lot of cops crawling all over the place and the medical examiner’s office was hovering over the body. Well, they were surveying what was left of the body. The poor girl had been through hell and Roark had made her suffering obvious. There was no mistaking that this was a message.