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“Please don’t hurt—”
The gun smashed into my cheekbone. “I said, you got me, bitch?”
He screamed in my face until I nodded rapidly, my tears filling my eyes and spilling out from beneath my closed lids. “I got it. I understand.”
“Let’s go, Zane.”
Car doors slammed, while I hunched over, clutching my stomach, trying to ease the nausea threatening to erupt. I sucked in deep lungfuls of air as the crunch of tires on gravel faded into the distance.
Even then, I waited another five minutes to be doubly sure they weren’t tricking me into looking.
Finally, I allowed myself to collapse in a ball.
Until the crack of a gun unloading split the night air.
30
BOSTON
Searching for Eve with no information to go on was like searching for a needle in a haystack. The chief had called us back in twice now, and I wasn’t even officially a cop anymore, but Richards and I had both ignored the calls. I drove the streets aimlessly, desperately searching for anything out of place, while Richards combed through our databases, social media, and Google for any information we could find on Fawn’s ex-boyfriend.
None of the records he found were good.
“Arrested for assault at fifteen. Again at eighteen and twenty-two…” Richards scrolled down the side of his iPad, continuing a progressively worse list of violent crimes. The man had a rap sheet longer than my arm. The thought he might have Eve and Fawn had me gripping the steering wheel so tightly my knuckles turned white.
I wasn’t a cop anymore. The promises I’d made when Jayela and I joined the academy no longer applied.
I’d kill him if he’d laid a hand on Eve.
“Richards, Boston.” The chief’s voice crackled over the radio, followed by a heavy sigh, like he was thoroughly sick of our shit.
I didn’t care.
Richards hit the button to reply. “Yeah, boss?”
“Don’t know if you’ve actually been listening to your radio tonight, but everyone has been sent over to deal with the riot at the prison. Since the two of you refuse to obey commands, you’re the only ones still out on the beat. We’ve had a call about a body on a residential street near your location.”
My heart stopped. “Male or female?”
“Caller thought female, but she was too scared to go outside in the dark and check. Rather than pull someone from the prison, Richards, it’s on you. Since your partner quit, you’re in charge.”
I clenched my jaw. But it wasn’t enough for me to take back my resignation. I knew full well that as soon as I returned to the station, I’d be handing in my badge and gun for the last time.
And oddly, I was okay with that. The weight of everything that was wrong within this police department had lifted the moment I’d uttered those freeing words. I still wholeheartedly believed in protecting those who needed it. But what I’d been forced into doing and the way this department ran went wholly against my moral compass. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. Without Jayela, none of it felt right.
Maybe I could have changed precincts. Maybe things would have been different somewhere else, beneath a different leader. But my life was here.
Eve was here.
At least she would be when I got her back.
Over the radio, the chief rattled off an address just a few blocks away, and I turned on my blinker. With a rising sense of dread, I put my foot down on the accelerator, taking corners too fast until the street came into view.
“There.” Richards pointed to a lump on the side of the road, a few hundred feet away. It was too dark to make out features, but as I sped down the road, the cruiser’s headlights illuminated the woman’s body.
A dark-haired woman. In gray sweats that looked familiar because they were mine.
I slammed my foot on the brake and threw open the door without turning the engine off. “Eve!” My boots pounded over the road, and I slipped, nearly going down before righting myself. “Eve!”
