She didn’t know if that was enough to pull him through this.
Warm arms came around her. The scent that was Adam surrounded her and she turned, pressed her face to him. It was amazing how easy it had become to lean against him.
A jangling sound filled the room, loud and shrill, and she jolted.
Lifting her head, she watched Sorenson pull the phone from his belt, silencing the old-fashioned ringtone. “I’ll have to take this,” he said, addressing the room at large.
“Don’t let us stop you from important cop work,” David said, a sardonic smile twisting his lips as he spoke to Sorenson’s back.
Sorenson didn’t bother to look back at them as he pushed through the door and headed into the other private waiting room across the hall. He wasn’t in there even a minute before he came out, spoke quietly to one of the officers and then headed down the hall.
Adam’s phone started buzzing and he pulled it out, sighing. “It’s Trinity again. I need to call her.” He rubbed Lana’s back. “I hope she hasn’t heard about Old Max. She doesn’t need this right now. Her and Noah have had enough. They ought to have their wedding in peace.”
“Excuse me.”
All three of them focused on the door.
The nurse there smiled and immediately her attention shot to Adam. Lana might have been a little bit put off, but then the nurse glanced down the hall and slipped inside. “You know I can’t really tell you anything. But … well. None of you are family.” She grimaced and then checked the hall one more time. “He’s a tough old bastard, though.” Then she winked.
After that, she was gone, moving down the hall, her long blond braid bouncing against her back.
“Hey!” Lana went to go after her, but Adam caught her arm.
“Celia can’t say anything else,” he said, shaking his head. “She can lose her job if she says anything to people that aren’t family. It’s risky enough that she even said what she did.”
“But—”
Adam dipped his head, pressed his lips to Lana’s. “He’s going to be fine. She wouldn’t have said what she did if he hadn’t pulled through.”
Then Adam squeezed her arms and stepped away. It was a force of will that kept her there.
That and David’s blue eyes, resting on hers as Adam and moved to the door to make his call.
* * *
Like a lot of the teenage boys, David Sutter had had something of a crush on Lana Rossi.
She’d been part angel, part demon, all whirlwind.
People had either adored her or just outright abhorred her. She’d been all about causes before having a cause was even understandable. She’d gotten a C in her Honors Biology class because she hadn’t wanted to do the dissection labs, but then she’d proven to the teacher that she understood more about the anatomy of a frog and any other animal he could think of.
When David had mentioned it to her during their tutoring classes, thinking to poke fun at her and just get her to leave him alone, she’d just shrugged it off: Hey, biology is easy. You want to see me freeze up, quiz me on chemistry.
He hadn’t quizzed her on anything. For the first three weeks of the tutoring—which had been set up by the principal and his parents had approved it—David had said as little as possible. Lana had been required to do it as part of the community service that had been set up after another one of her incidents. He couldn’t even remember what she’d done. She might have stolen all the frogs for a dissection class. It might have been when she left condoms and pamphlets in the girls’ and boys’ bathrooms, along with notes about safe sex—safe sex is more than just abstinence or pulling out, kids … be smart!
Since she was a smart kid, they tended to have her do tutoring or work with other kids as part of the community service, even though some parents protested that after the condom stunt.
David’s dad had said, You’d be a good influence on her.
Peter Sutter couldn’t have been more wrong.
The son of a bitch didn’t live long enough to wish he’d hadn’t okayed the tutoring. Within a week, Lana had realized there was something very wrong.
Within two weeks, she’d seen deeper than anybody else ever had.
Within a month, David had told himself he needed to pull back.
Not long after that, he’d started to believe Supergirl when she told him they could make a difference.
She told him how.
She told him what to do.
She got him the cameras, told him how to set them up.
It had hurt his gut to know that she might watch the video feed, but she promised him, from the beginning, she never would and he believed her. Supergirl was too honest to lie to him, and the way she looked when she talked about stopping everything … Yeah, he could believe it. Supergirl wanted to save the world.
Instead, they’d just ruined their own.
Looking at her through a filter of twenty years, Caine tried to align the woman he saw now to the girl she’d been.
He tried to align himself, the man he was, to the boy he’d been.
David had been just his side of scrawny, a gawky kid just on the verge of growing into the man he’d become. He was six four now, weighed two hundred even. His back was marred with scars and there were some on his soul that cut even deeper. Once, a brutal backhand from one of his “handlers” had knocked him into the wall and he hadn’t seen straight for three days.
Now he could pick that man up by the neck. Caine could probably snap the man’s neck, if he so chose. He’d imagined it. Had fantasized about it. Daydreamed about it.
Even now, with the cop standing out in the hall, talking in a low voice about what a fucking waste it was that somebody had hurt a helpless old man like Max, had killed a sick old woman like Mary, rage pulsed inside Caine.
He wasn’t in the club anymore.
Max wasn’t the only one who’d paid some nocturnal visits over the years. Yeah, Caine knew about that. He’d figured out what was happening almost right away and resentment had burned inside him as he sat by, waiting for his chance.
It had taken Caine years to get strong enough, fast enough. Then it had taken him a while to find the mean inside him. Years more to learn who else had been involved.
But he’d done it.
And that cop out there, sorrowfully hanging his head and commiserating with other cops, had been Caine’s first nighttime visit.
He’d bled red, just like the boy Caine had once been.
His dick was a mutilated stump. He’d seen specialists in Louisville, but Caine had been thorough—the damage, much like the damage done to Caine, was permanent.
Nobody had heard his screams, a fact that Caine had seen to—he’d wanted to hear those screams, but he wanted, even more, to know that man who’d raped him would live in fear, never knowing the name of the man who’d come at him in the night, never knowing if he’d return.
And he had.
Several times.
The stable base of the Cronus Club had faltered because Max had killed the older members and Caine had stalked the others. The only ones who remained were the younger, weaker idiots who hadn’t had the sense God gave a goat.
Caine had used the information his father had calmly given him over the years, during his indoctrination. That information had been used to destroy the stable group that had remained even after Pete’s death.
Our brothers are everything. Brotherhood is everything. We trust nobody but the brotherhood. You’ll be one of us and we have to be able to trust you, son. You have to trust us.
It had taken years for Caine to be able to think of that without feeling the bite of the whip.
He’d used those words on the nights he slid inside a house, into a trailer, the night he was waiting in the back of a truck’s cab. He’d whispered them in the ears of men and watched as they pissed themselves in fear and now, as he watched one of them, he wondered if he shouldn’t have just killed them all.
He didn’t believe in the cops. He did
n’t believe in justice. Not for him. Maybe it was going to work out for the kids now. Times had changed, some. And there were people working for the city now who were different—they didn’t have his father whispering in their ear and they didn’t have crooked cops guiding their steps, either.
Taking them out had been the crucial steps, Caine realized.
Although there were others. He hadn’t known it had continued like this.
The one in front of Caine had him curling his hand into a fist and he imagined getting up, crossing the floor, slamming that fist into the man’s face, gone doughy now, soft with age—
A hand touched Caine’s arm.
He fought the urge to react, and react with violence.
Caine had been forged in the fires of hell. Physical touch wasn’t welcome. There were only a very few he allowed to touch him.
As Lana sat down beside him, he had to force himself to relax.
She was one of the few.
“David—”
He closed his eyes.
A quiet sigh escaped her. “I guess you prefer Caine now.”
He gave a minute shake of his head. “I have no preference, really.” It was a lie, though and he knew it even as he said it. He’d killed the child he’d been, buried him the day he got his first taste of blood.
The man out in the hall had been Caine’s first, in more ways than one.
He’d been the first to rape David, while his father stood by and watched in silent approval.
And he’d been the one Caine had gone after first.
It had all started after he’d pulled Caine over for speeding, too. The memory flickered, burned bright in his mind.
“You have a look in your eye.”
He knew the look. It was a look that spoke of a need for blood, a need to hurt. Closing his eyes, he reached for that inner calm that Abraham had spent years trying to teach him. Caine had never learned it, but he’d learned to fake it. Once he had the mask in place, he looked over at Lana. “Sorry.”
She laughed softly and leaned forward, her elbows braced on her knees.
A raised voice from the hallway caught her attention and she frowned for a minute, studying Adam. Then she shrugged and glanced at Caine. “I’m not.… Sorry, I mean. You used to scare me. I was worried I’d find out you’d just jumped off the bridge or just hung yourself in your room. Now … well.” She shrugged. “You look like you want blood, but it’s not your own you’re after.”
He managed to keep from scowling, but just barely. She still saw just as deep as always. Before he could figure out what to say to that, though, Adam’s voice, clear and furious, echoed from the hallway: “Just what the fuck do you mean, Noah is in jail?”
The two of them were on their feet in a heartbeat.
* * *
So much for seeing how things were going.
Granted, she hadn’t really wanted to talk to Sorenson anyway.
The chief bothered her.
He looked at her like he saw right through her, and she hated that.
But they hadn’t even had ten minutes’ worth of time to talk before he’d up and told her they’d have to finish up later.
Later …
Shit.
Layla hadn’t even had a chance to ask him what she wanted to know.
So she’d go looking for it elsewhere.
If Noah had been taken to the station somebody would have seen it, and she knew all the right places to talk gossip in town. The best place was Shakers. The next best? The coffee shop. She’d sit down, get a cup of coffee and then loiter there, wait until Sorenson called her back.
Since she’d had such a rough night, she didn’t spend much time with her appearance that morning. She pulled her hair back, a simple, easy ponytail, then took the needed time to put on light makeup, frowning as she saw how deep the lines around her eyes were getting. It wasn’t a bad thing for what she had to do—she wasn’t supposed to look happy, for fuck’s sake, but she was thirty-six. She wasn’t supposed to look like she was already forty.
She took a few more minutes than she liked and then checked her clothes. A T-shirt, boring hair, barely any makeup. She still looked good, damn good. Flat belly, great boobs, and her ass was almost as tight as it had been in high school. So what if she had a few lines around her eyes?
She looked tired and stressed. Who wouldn’t be, considering what she’d been through, right?
She barely wasted a minute’s thought over what they’d do when they realized she was just jerking them around. There wasn’t any evidence against Noah and she knew that, but there wasn’t anything saying he hadn’t done it, either, she figured.
Otherwise … well.
She shrugged it off and hit the door, pulling a cigarette from her purse and lighting it up as she headed down the street. They didn’t have anybody, which meant they didn’t have any evidence. If they had jack shit, they would have arrested somebody and they wouldn’t have spent so much time asking her questions yesterday.
About Noah.
Again, for fuck’s sake.
The guy had turned into a fucking Boy Scout, but they thought he could have killed somebody?
What the hell ever.
Served his ass right, though, she thought. Giving her so much grief, looking down his nose at her.
Her gut twisted as she thought about the way he’d looked at her. Sad, kind of. Like he’d meant it when he told her to be happy. If he wanted her to be happy, he could take her to bed. That made her happy.
Pushing all of that out of her head, she shoved through the door to the coffee shop and paused, looking at all the people packed inside. It was elbow to elbow and all the voices were low, somber.
Making her way to the counter, she arched a brow at Cassie, one of the two college kids Louisa had hired to help out in the mornings. “Damn, who died?” Layla asked.
Cassie flicked a look at her, the diamond stud in her nose winking in the light. She shrugged. “Some old dude. You want the normal?”
Layla nodded and looked around, frowning. Man. Everybody was in here talking about Willie T.? She hadn’t thought that many people would care. Moving down to the end of the counter, she paid for her latte, using one of the twenties she’d swiped from Willie T.’s house to pay for it, as she looked back over the crowd, trying to catch a snippet of conversation. The closest group of people was a group of busybodies from the Methodist church, and when they caught her looking at them, the youngest just rolled her eyes and looked away, but Mona Grimes gave her a tentative smile. “I … I guess you heard the news.”
Layla just grabbed her coffee and headed for the door.
Heard the news? Her belly started to pitch around on her. She needed a smoke. No. She needed a hit. Something to settle her nerves would be better. She’d found him. How many times had she felt him on top of her? And he’d been one of those monsters.
“Screw this,” she muttered.
Whoever had killed him was a fucking hero.
She thought of Noah, wondered if maybe she should just let this all go.
She bummed a ride off Trick Thomas, cradling her latte in her hands and jamming her earbuds in so she didn’t have to listen to him yap. The trip up the hill didn’t take long, but it seemed to drag on endlessly. Sipping at her drink, she blocked out the scenes from yesterday and brooded.
Maybe if she ever found out who’d done this, she could sneak him in some cigarettes, but she didn’t need to drag this on.
Not really.
* * *
Trinity could handle mad.
She’d been mad before. She’d been furious before.
She’d had her world ripped out from under her and she’d gotten through it with a cool smile.
She’d watched the father of her child across a courtroom as she testified against him, and she’d managed to do it without shedding a tear.
But as she stood in the waiting room of the small police department in Madison she wondered if she’d ever been this angry.
The receptionist looked unhappy. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Ben—ah, Ms. Ewing. It’s still Ewing, right?”
“Yes. The wedding is tomorrow.” She tried not to grit her teeth. She was getting married in less than twenty-four hours. And her fiancé was sitting in a room somewhere in this police station and they wouldn’t let her talk to him. “Why can’t I talk to him?”
“He’s still being questioned.”
“For what?” she demanded.
A bell jangled behind her and a rush of hot air blasted against her.
She didn’t care if Santa Claus had come in. It could have been her ex for all she cared. None of it mattered, because until she saw Noah she wasn’t leaving. But then she saw the way the receptionist—her name tag read: Sally—looked past her shoulder. Sally’s face drained of color and she bit her lip, her precise white teeth catching her lower lip in a way that would have done many a romance heroine proud, Trinity thought. “Ah … Ms. Ewing, I’ll tell you what. You can wait in … um, well, maybe Chief Sorenson’s office. Okay? And I’ll, um, go see what I can find out?”
The sudden capitulation would have made Trinity ecstatic.
If it weren’t for the nerves that practically bled out of the woman.
If it weren’t for the way Trinity could feel her skin crawling.
Slowly, she turned.
When her eyes met Layla’s, Trinity couldn’t even say she was surprised.
Running her tongue across the inside of her teeth, she debated. She could do one of two things. She could do the wise thing. Go into the chief’s office, wait. See what happened.
Or she could call Layla out, because Trinity knew damn well that Layla was behind this.
It was there, written in those purple eyes—that purple was as fake as the mock concern that spread across Layla’s face.
“You.” Trinity balled one hand into a fist.
“Oh, honey.” Layla shook her head. “I am so sorry.”
“Whatever you did, you better undo it,” Trinity warned, taking one step forward. “Or you’re going to find yourself in more trouble than you can even begin to imagine.”
Something cool and calculating entered the other woman’s eyes. “Oh, really? What can you do, city girl?”
Sweeter Than Sin Page 27
