Chapter 19

CHAPTER NINETEEN

"Heard good things about your woman." Cash wasted no time plucking my last nerve. "Heard about her, thought Jonas was exaggerating. Seems he wasn't."

I stared out the windshield wondering how I'd gotten myself into this situation. Not with Aria—I knew damn good and well how that had happened. I'd lost my motherfucking mind and got sucked into everything that was her. Now I was so far down the rabbit hole it was going to take time to dig myself out. The first part of extraditing my head from my ass was no more sex. No more touching, no more cuddling, no more teasing, kissing, and no more holding her hand like the lovesick idiot I was. And there was no denying I was sick, terminally fucking ill. Last night, curled into Aria, I took the last I was going to take from her. She'd seen it because I couldn't hide it. I'd gone and done the unforgivable and fallen in love with her. I'd felt her shiver when I silently told her. And I knew she knew how sorry I was I had to let her go.

The quicker the better.

She was already in deep with Kira, Jonas, and Ivy. This morning she'd met Layla, Cash, Theo, Easton, Kevin, and Nebraska. As she had with Jonas, she'd charmed the fuck out of the rest of the men on my team and it had taken less than ten minutes for the woman-bonding to start with Layla and Nebraska.

I had to do this right with surgical precision so those friendships could stay intact and Aria wouldn't hate me.

"You can ignore me but I know you heard me," Cash pushed.

"You probably don't wanna do this with me," I advised.

"Do what? Tell you I think your woman's the shit." He purposely misunderstood me as he swerved into the left lane, overtook two cars, then quickly veered back into the right lane, nearly kissing the bumper of the car in front of us.

"Christ," I cursed. "It's like you've forgotten how to drive."

"There's nothing wrong with my driving," he lied.

This was the situation I was wondering how I'd gotten myself into.

Cash behind the wheel of a company SUV.

"We're not on Route Irish, asshole, you don't need to drive like we're dodging IEDs."

"Unpucker your asshole, Smith, and enjoy the ride."

There was nothing enjoyable about Cash driving. He drove like he did everything else—with no regard for his safety. He played fast and loose with every aspect of his life. It was a damn miracle he was still breathing. Not that I had much to live for but it would seriously fucking blow to come home after a decade living overseas only to die in a car crash behind an outlet mall.

I drew in a slow, steady breath, then another. The effort was mostly in vain. My anger still simmered. Anger that had nothing to do with Cash's driving or his stupid-ass comeback. Cash was Cash. In more ways than one he was a lot like Zane; he said whatever he wanted to say, he buried his demons, and used humor to cover his pain. He was as honest as he was loyal, taking both of those to an extreme. Which meant he poked his nose in everyone's business and gave zero fucks if you wanted his counsel or not.

Therefore, I knew what was coming.

And I knew Cash had maneuvered to get me right where I was—alone in a car with him for an hour. The Escalade fit four men comfortably, seven uncomfortably. There was no reason to take two SUVs, yet Easton and Jonas were following us.

Cash didn't make me wait, which was unfortunate for him. He had more to hide than I did.

"Aria or Valerie?" Cash asked.

Anger morphed into bitterness. All consuming, barely restrained, overwhelming resentment shrouded in revulsion.

"Warned you, brother, you don't wanna do this."

"Valerie it is," he announced.

Fucking hell .

"Don't say her fucking name."

"That right there is why we're talking about her ."

My neck throbbed and my lip curled in disgust.

"You don't wanna go there, Cash," I warned.

"No, you don't wanna go there," he rightly returned as he switched lanes and sped up.

I changed my mind; it wouldn't suck dying in a fiery crash if it meant not talking about my ex.

"That's rich coming from you. King of avoidance. You bury your shit so deep, lock your past up so tight, it's a wonder you can function."

"Everything functions just fine," he joked.

"Except your balls. Those don't work."

I didn't need to look at my teammate to know he was smiling.

"Right, except those," he snickered.

"So maybe instead of getting up in my shit, you should worry about your own shit."

That was a low blow but he'd opened the door. Not only that, he'd barreled through it and threw down by having the audacity of saying her name.

"Oh, I know my damage. Unlike you, I own that shit. I got no problems talking about my bitch of a momma."

He was so full of shit. He might know his damage and own it but he sure as fuck didn't talk about it. Not about his mother, not his time in foster care, not why he ran away from the last home he was placed in, and certainly not about being a street kid—homeless and forging for food and shelter.

"You had no control over what happened?—"

I was so sick and fucking tired of the same bullshit platitude.

"How do you know? Were you there?"

"Nope. And I didn't need to be there to know you did everything you could to stop that woman from going back."

Just like Jonas, Cash was dead-ass wrong.

I gave up.

Quit.

When shit got real, I didn't do everything I could to keep Rie with me.

I'd had enough.

Years and fucking years of the same argument. The fight was always the same, too. Hours spent trying to talk her around, make her see reason. It would last a month, two, then her mom would call with the same sad song and dance, and beg her daughter to come home. Not because she loved and missed her. Hell no, the only thing that woman missed was her shield. If Rie wasn't there to be used as a punching bag, her mom caught the brunt of it. Until what she caught was her husband's boot to her back and a fall down the stairs. Her death was deemed an accident and it was deemed so because Rie's piece-of-shit brother reported he saw his mother trip and take a tumble down the stairs. The asshole also claimed his father wasn't home at the time of the accident, just him. And when the police and paramedics arrived, Rie's father had already made his way across town. But rest assured, after getting a call from the police, that motherfucker hightailed his asshole back to play the part of grieving husband.

So, no, I didn't try my best to stop her from going home. Her mother was dead. Her brother was putting the pressure on and she was out of her mind with grief. And in her grief, she broke down and told me all the ways her mother's death was my fault. The fuck of it was, she was right.

Then Rie bought it at the hand of her father and that was my fault, too.

My selfishness led to two women dying. One of them beaten down by life and an abusive husband. One sweet, beautiful, sensitive girl who didn't live long enough to put the abuse behind her and live the life she should've had.

"Your silence says I'm?—"

"My silence says nothing more than me sitting here doing my best to remember you're a man I respect and friend I value. Do not mistake it for more than that. This is bullshit, Cash, and you know it. You wanna conduct some fucked-up therapy session on the way to visit Rice, fine. Let's talk about you being twenty and shopping urologists to give you a vasectomy. None of them willing to give a twenty-year-old with no kids a surgery that would permanently kill his shot at a family. Let's talk about you at twenty years old, who was so fucking desperate he took unapproved leave and drove down to Goddamn Mexico to some quack doctor. You're lucky your dick still functions at all. Further from that, let's talk about why you were so desperate. No, wait, you don't talk about Debbie and the pregnancy scare. You keep that shit buried and I respect you enough not to bring it up to you or give you my opinion."

"I don't regret what I did or why I did it. I didn't want kids then and I sure as fuck don't want them now."

I had to hand it to Cash—he was far better at controlling his temper than I was. The way he rapped that shit out was almost convincing.

"Regret has nothing to do with your reasoning. You don't want kids, great, some people don't. But I was there, brother. You were in full-on crisis mode."

"Fuck yeah I was in crisis. We'd just earned our Tridents. I didn't want to be a dad, ever. I certainly didn't want a kid with some Frog Hog I'd picked up in a bar. But you bring up a good point. You were there, you saw how freaked out I was. Well, two years later I was there to witness the devastation that bitch Valerie wrought. I was there for the aftermath. She laid the heavy on you and you just took it. A few months later she was dead and so were you."

I kept my focus out the window. Nothing but trees and farm fields, a far cry from Detroit. Growing up, the closest thing I'd seen to a green space was the football field behind my shitty high school. Sometimes I wondered how different my life would've turned out if I hadn't met Rie—the pretty, sweet girl from the affluent Grosse Pointe Shores neighborhood with the graceful mansion on Lake Shore Drive with the bird's eye view of Lake St Clair. Then there was me, the kid from the Von Steuben neighborhood with our cracked streets and graffiti-covered buildings, crime, and the junk collector on the corner.

Nine miles separated our neighborhoods but it might as well have been nine-thousand.

I wasn't the boy from the wrong side of the tracks—I was the boy who was from a different universe. Our lives were opposite in every way. Yet I was drawn to her. At sixteen she was already broken. At seventeen I already had a God complex and thought I could fix what her father had broken.

I'd been wrong.

So very fucking wrong I often wondered where she'd be, what kind of life she'd be living if I hadn't had to drive my mom to St. John's Hospital and saw the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen sitting in the cafeteria eating alone. As soon as she told me she was there waiting for her father, a cardiologist, I should've walked away.

I didn't. And because I sat across from her waiting for my mother to be seen in the ER, I'd altered the course of her life.

"You need to start living," Cash declared, yanking me from my musings.

"We're done talking about her ."

"Agreed. Now, we're talking about Aria."

"No—"

"Heard all about her from Jonas," Cash talked over me. "Heard all about how funny the woman is, how gorgeous, how perfect she is for you, how her dad's Navy so she gets shit civvies don't, how she shovels shit at you and how you eat that shit up and beg for more. Heard about it. Thought Jonas was being Jonas, all optimist and shit. Then I saw it with my own eyes and I have to tell you, it took me less than a minute to see. That woman doesn't have you begging for it, she's got you gagging for it. Time to buck up, brother, put all that shit Valerie put you though in your rearview, and hold on to what you got in Aria."

I didn't have anything with Aria beyond a good time. I'd made sure of that and set boundaries, ones she'd assured me she wanted. After last night and this morning, I'd taken away the one thing we did have. She hadn't questioned it or fought it. And the one thing I knew about Aria that was ironclad—she spoke her mind. If she'd had an issue with me pulling away she would've said so.

Instead, she'd let me disengage.

I did what I should've done from the second Cash started down this path. I ignored him.

"Tell me about George."

"You're a stubborn fuck," Cash complained.

There was nothing to say to that so I said nothing and waited him out.

"My gut says the guy has nothing to do with what's going on and that was before the latest break-in happened while I was face to face with the guy. He didn't hide he loved his dad, is still messed up he's passed, but had no sentimental feelings on the house. He grew up in that house but for him, it's the people who lived in that house who were important to him, not the structure. I think part of the falling out he had with Billy has something to do with his sister, Brittney."

"There were pictures of Brittney in the attic. Presumably Billy took those pictures without her knowledge."

"Which confirms my theory. He didn't outright say it but he skirted the issue. Billy had the hots for Brittney and George wasn't happy about it. Let's just say, Billy wants us to find him before George finds out Billy took creepy-ass polaroids of his sister."

Cash was wrong. George finding Billy and beating the shit out of him would be better than me wringing the asshole's neck for fucking with Aria.

"With the cops involved, that's out of our hands."

"Then we all better brace, because if the cops inform Brittney about the pictures and ask her about them, she'll call her brother. My take is as soon as he disconnects that call he'll be on his way north to pay his old pal Billy a visit."

That could be a problem.

"Is Kira monitoring his moments?"

"My guess is yes. Layla called Zane after we left George's yesterday."

We were running out of time.

"If George comes up here, he's gonna blow this for us. Billy will know he's a suspect."

"Agreed. So we have today to scout the lay of the land and we come back tonight and take him in."

Not ideal. But it would have to do.

Thankfully the last thirty minutes of the drive was spent shooting the shit about nothing. Such was Cash's way—smack you with whatever truth he felt you needed to hear then switch gears like it never happened. And since I was in serious denial about Aria, that worked for me.

"Red Tesla," I muttered as we pulled down Billy's street.

Across the street, two doors down from Billy's house in the driveaway of a white house with black shutters, in a neighborhood that was tidy but very firmly middle class sat a red fucking Tesla. The car stood out like a beacon among the pickup trucks and older sedans that fit with the mid-income houses. That Tesla was likely out of the price range of ninety percent of the people who lived on that street.

"And the last piece of the puzzle clicks into place," Cash returned.

My cellphone vibrated with an incoming call.

Jonas.

"I see it," I said by way of greeting.

"We'll circle the block before hitting up that storage facility on fifty. Easton wants to see if there's anyone in there we can talk to."

To make the left turn into the residential area off route fifty, we'd passed a U-Haul self-storage center. We knew from checking the map before coming that the storage center's back parking lot butted up to Billy's backyard. All he'd have to do was walk across his lawn and he could access that center and store whatever he wanted if he was so inclined.

My stomach churned at the thought of what he might want to keep safe in a storage unit.

"We're stopping to talk to the neighbor," I told Jonas.

"Copy. Out."

Twenty minutes later, that final piece of the puzzle that Cash had mentioned clicking into place snapped tight.

"He said he needed to go to Philly for one of his clients," Mike Barnes, the owner of the Tesla, reiterated.

"No need to explain, man." Cash flashed one of his easygoing, we're all friends here smiles. "It's not illegal to loan your car to a friend."

Mike's mouth twisted.

"I wouldn't call Billy a friend. Last year I had a tree fall in my backyard, he let me use his chainsaw and his truck to haul the scrap to the dump. I was repaying a favor. He said his truck was in the shop so I let him use my car. I telecommute most days so I don't drive much. Besides, it was Sunday and I didn't have anywhere to go."

"Just Sunday?" I asked. "Not the whole weekend?"

"No. He picked it up around eight in the morning and was back by about four. I was annoyed because he didn't go straight to Philly and back. Asshole took the longest route possible back. Damn near drained the battery."

I glanced at Cash who still had his lazy, good ole boy friendly mask firmly in place.

"Sucks man, you do someone a favor and they take advantage. At least with that Tesla you can track your car, know how your friend's treating your car."

"Tell me about it," Mike agreed.

"Crazy what cars these days can do. It's been awhile but does that Tesla store the data?" Cash good-naturedly asked.

"The car doesn't track driving routes. But I have this after-market app. I use it to track my time for work. I get paid for drive time."

Mike pulled his phone out of his pocket. I wished we were doing this in his house and not standing on the street even if Jonas and Easton had peeked into Billy's back windows and reported the house empty. The guy could come home at any time.

It took a minute longer than I would've liked for Mike to find what he was looking for on his phone and tilt it toward Cash.

"The trips tab here shows thirty days of driving," Mike said, then tapped his phone. "This is the Sunday drive Billy took."

Cash studied the phone for a moment then inquired, "You cool with me taking a picture of this?"

"Sure, when you explain to me why you're really here. I know you're not following up on a hit and run report. There's no damage to my car."

Fuck .

"Caught us." Cash smiled. "We have a client who reported a red Tesla was following her. Our investigation led to your car."

Goddammit .

The less this Mike guy knew the better.

"Why doesn't that surprise me," Mike mumbled.

"Why doesn't it surprise you?" I entered the conversation.

Mike's gaze cut to Billy's house.

"You ever get the feeling someone's just not right?"

Christ. Dead end . We needed evidence, not a feeling.

"Sure," Cash answered.

"That's Billy. He seems nice enough. Lets the neighbors borrow his tools if needed, clears old man Jenkins' walkway when it snows. But there's something about him that's not right. One night I was coming home and I saw him sitting in his truck idling at the curb in front of the house three doors down from him. The lights were on in the house, the curtains were open, and he was staring into the house. Didn't even look in my direction when I drove past."

"Do you know what he was looking at?"

Mike looked back at me with his brows pulled together and a harassed expression on his face.

"Sammy the daughter had some friends over. Don't know exactly how many because I'm not a creep who likes checking out barely legal girls but I saw at least three in the front room. Looked like maybe they were dancing or jumping around. Whatever they were doing had Billy's full attention."

Now that wasn't nothing.

Sick fuck .

"Ever know him to have a girlfriend?"

"Nope. Never seen a woman over there."

My phone vibrated in my pocket. I pulled it out to see a text from Zane.

It was time to wrap this up.

"We'd appreciate it if you kept this conversation to yourself," I told him.

"No problem. If you give me your email I'll send you the data from Sunday."

Cash prattled off a generic Gmail address. After an excruciating long time, Mike had sent all the info to Cash.

We exchanged quick goodbyes, with another promise from Billy's neighbor he wouldn't tell anyone we'd been there to speak to him.

I waited until we were back in the SUV before I called Zane back.

"You're a fucking dumbass," was his intro. "I hope you know your carcass has been picked over for the last two hours. Whatever you did this morning freaked Aria out. I'm only giving you this heads up so you don't walk back into the office and have a domestic in my conference room. I don't pay you to fight with your girlfriend on company time. So get your ass back here, pick her up, and take her home and fix this shit."

Zane disconnected before I'd had a chance to say a damn word.

Home.

Jesus fuck, why did that word burn a hole in my chest?