Titus
WHERE I WAS FROM was something I never wanted to talk about with anyone, ever. It had nothing to do with Reeve or the fact that letting her into that deep dark hole was going to cement me even more solidly to her. I might be a man that had a purpose now, but before I was just like every other punk kid running the streets, and I hated those memories. I hadn’t been handed a way out; I made my own, and the way I went about it still left a dirty taste in my mouth all these years later. I had as much bad blood circulating in my veins as Bax did, maybe even more when it came right down to it. It was that part of me that I fought every waking minute of every day to keep buried under honor and duty. That tainted blood, that nasty past, followed me, haunted me, which was why I never had any room in my life for the gray. The fog of the past was full of monsters that feasted on my soul, so I kept them locked in the dark. Usually they wallowed there, starved and angry, but ever since Reeve blasted her way through my fortress of protection they were climbing to the surface and demanding attention.
So far they seemed content to feed on her attention and her luscious body. They drank in the acceptance and understanding in her navy gaze like it was ambrosia, but I knew eventually she wouldn’t be enough to keep those animals at bay. My carefully constructed life was liable to fall victim to the wreckage they would cause if they escaped. That’s why I crawled out of bed every single morning before dawn and went to work, leaving her sprawled on the other side of the bed, naked and marked up from my teeth and hands. Every night she let me have her without complaint and every day I woke thinking she deserved better than what I was giving her. Two weeks that felt like forever while I climbed all over her and let her sink deeper and deeper inside of me. Her pretty skin had angry red marks from my face rubbing all over her, and instead of wincing in regret that I had damaged something so beautiful, messed up such perfection, I wanted to beat my chest with pride and declare myself the winner of the world’s greatest prize. It was a dangerous way to think because she wasn’t a prize, a trophy, and I had done nothing to win her, so I left her there every single morning and went hunting.
I hit up every back alley I could find. I popped into every underground bar and rattled the owners in a hope I could make them talk. I waltzed into every drug den I had on my radar and demanded answers. Anyplace Novak was known to haunt back in the day . . . I showed my face there asking about his wayward son. I even stopped the girls that worked the street corners, the ones that didn’t want Nassir’s protection and preferred to tough it out in the wild on their own, and asked them about Roark. It was the same story from every lowlife I encountered. The elusive man with an accent had made his presence known. All the criminals and miscreants knew Roark was in town, hiding in the shadows, making those he deemed responsible for his father’s death pay. No one seemed to know where the Irishman was, but they all told the same tale. He was watching and they were afraid of him.
Honestly, so was I.
Seeing Bax broken like that, watching Nassir hover over Keelyn as blood pumped out of her chest . . . it all hit too close to home. I was used to having to juggle the law and people I cared about. I mean I had locked my brother up for five years, and I was just waiting for Race to do something stupid enough for it to be his turn to sit in a cell. But the kind of outright warfare Roark was launching at the people I loved was an entirely different ball game, and I hated knowing he had the upper hand. When the bad guy knew all the good guy’s tricks, it made trying to catch him twice as hard as it should be.
I was already feeling defeated and disgruntled after hours of hitting the streets when I got called to an armed robbery with a fatality. The liquor-store clerk was dead at the scene and two of the customers that had been waiting around to buy beer were also shot and en route to the hospital. It wasn’t an uncommon scenario in the Point, but for some reason, when I got to the scene and saw that the kid that was hooked up in cuffs and sitting in the back of the patrol car couldn’t be any older than twelve or thirteen, it almost made me turn around, get back in my boring sedan, and not stop driving until I got to the station to turn in my gun and my shield. All the violence and unnecessary waste of life just seemed like too much to keep wading through every single day.
I pulled up the knot on my tie and tried to smooth the wrinkles out of my slacks as I climbed out of the car. The uniformed officer that was talking to a group of people gathered on the outside of the crime-scene tape saw me and started over in my direction. The kid in the back of the patrol car looked up at me and I could see that he had tear tracks on his face. Shit. He should be playing football with his friends not out committing felonies.