Raw (Revenge Book 6)

by Trevion Burns

  Gage shook his head softly as he watched her. “My entire life, Mother, you’ve been lying to me—”

  “Protecting you!” The glimmering tears that hugged her mascara-laden lashes raced down her heated cheeks, staining them black. Her voice went from a scream to a trembling whisper in an instant, every bone in her body taut as she spoke through clenched teeth. “You can’t begin to imagine the things I’ve seen. His complete disregard for human life—including yours. I’d sooner die. I’d sooner die than see any of it befall you!”

  Gage stepped away, moving towards the doors while speaking over his shoulder. “I’m going to find out what the hell is going on at the bottom of that ship, and I’m doing it with or without you, mother.”

  “You’ll do no such thing.” She was barely able to whisper the words as she raced after him. Even running at top speed, Gage still outpaced her using a rapid stride, making it across the long hallway, down the stairs, and through the foyer before she finally caught up with him, moments after he’d grabbed the handle of the front door.

  Celeste took his arm seconds before he opened the door, her voice rising to a roar, yanking him with all her might, black tears staining both her cheeks as she dug her bare feet into the marble floors. “I forbid you—I forbid you!”

  With one quick move, Gage snatched his arm from her grasp, opened the front door, and blazed out into the driveway, toward the Phantom. From the passenger’s seat, Scarlett watched them with big eyes. At the sight of Celeste’s frantic state, Scarlett’s blue eyes grew even wider, making her look like a cartoon.

  “Darling, please, he’ll kill you!” Celeste begged, hands still clutched around Gage’s arm, no match for his massive height and weight, but still fighting as he moved toward the driver’s side of his car, dragging her stumbling behind him as he did.

  Celeste screamed when Gage threw open the driver’s side door, snatching at every piece of his clothing she could get her clawed hands on the entire away.

  Gage ignored her pleas for him to stay and talk, shrugging away from her grabby hands before plopping into the driver’s seat and slamming the driver’s side door closed, narrowly missing her fingers as he did.

  Even as he closed and locked the doors—his heart shattered—Celeste banged on the windows from outside. He started the car, and she still didn’t give up, grabbing hold of the rearview mirror and moving with the car as he pulled out of the driveway, running alongside it as he sped away, and only releasing the mirror when her bare feet could no longer keep up with the tires screeching against the asphalt of the street.

  In the rearview, Celeste stumbled after the car in the middle of the street, sobbing, until the sight of her body slowly disappeared from sight, swallowed whole by the dark night sky painting the horizon pitch black behind her.

  28

  Across town at Shadow Rock precinct, Linc leaned forward on his desk, staring blankly ahead, unwilling or unable to respond to the pats on the back and reassuring words from co-workers as they passed. Hours after watching his wife die in his arms, less than a day after laying eyes on her for the first time in five years, the tears had swollen his eyes, reddened his face, and deadened his eyes. To such an enormous degree he was nearly unrecognizable. A low bun was in shambles at the nape of his neck, and as he wrung his hands on top of his desk, his bones were taut enough to snap like a rubber band. Moisture tried to roll down his flared, swollen nostrils, but he gave a good sniffle to keep them at bay.

  More co-workers approached to offer condolences, but he didn’t respond to anyone, unable to turn his head or come back down to Earth long enough to join everyone else in the moment.

  After Lisa had been pronounced dead at the scene, the press hadn’t wasted a moment swarming in with their cameras and incessant questions. If Lisa hadn’t disappeared, she would’ve been one of those reporters. The first one in line to close in on the hot story like a vulture. But that fact hadn’t stopped Linc from clocking the first reporter who’d approached him, square in the jaw.

  Lieutenant Chavez and a few other members of the team had been there to pull Linc away before he killed the bastard. They even managed to talk the reporter out of pressing charges. Chavez had demanded Linc leave the scene immediately before he lost his job.

  He chuckled.

  As if he gave a fuck about his job.

  As if he gave a fuck about anything anymore.

  Anything but her.

  If your name wasn’t Emma Hill, you no longer computed. Not in a way that was angry—or even sad—but simply the God’s honest truth.

  Nothing else mattered.

  Nothing else that is, but the rookie officer who’d just entered the main doors of the precinct. The redheaded rookie who’d barely had his badge pinned a month ago, but already had blood on his hands. The rookie who caught sight of Linc across the precinct and stopped dead in his tracks.

  Linc held the rookie’s eyes, his biceps pulsing on top of his desk, eyes calm under the dark shadow of his brow bone. He clenched his hands on top of the desk, cracking each knuckle.

  Chavez entered a moment after the wide-eyed rookie, giving him a confused look when he appeared to be frozen in the doorway. Her eyes flew across the precinct, and when she caught sight of Linc, her eyes grew knowing. Rubbing a soothing hand on the rookie’s back, she whispered something to him that Linc couldn’t hear.

  But Linc didn’t need to hear. He knew what Chavez was saying to the kid who’d just murdered his wife. She was reassuring him that Linc wouldn’t hurt him because it would mean his job. She was urging him to follow her up to her office so they could discuss the next steps. Reminding him that prepping for the internal affairs investigation that would follow Lisa’s murder was of the utmost importance.

  Apparently moved by Chavez’s whispered words, the rookie swallowed the lump in his throat, and with a deep breath, continued inside the precinct on a careful foot, never taking his eyes off Linc.

  Linc waited until the rookie’s cautious stride became more strong and sure. Until he was just a few feet away from his desk. Until he looked away completely.

  Linc waited until that moment to stand from his chair—so quickly it caused it to roll back—circle his desk, and block the rookie’s path.

  The rookie nearly tripped over his feet in his haste to step back as Linc moved into his path, bumping into Chavez, who’d been walking behind him, and forcing her to take his arms to help him find his footing.

  “Detective Hill,” Chavez warned, clutching the rookie’s arms before coming up beside him and giving Linc a look.

  Face still tight from the river of tears he’d shed earlier that afternoon, Linc couldn’t even manage to cringe down at the kid who was nearly a foot shorter than him.

  Wide blue eyes ripe with fear, the rookie’s face was nowhere near as red and swollen as Linc’s, not appearing particularly moved after shooting someone that afternoon.

  “Aye, Linc,” the rookie splutter. “Yo, I’m really, really sorry about this, man—”

  Linc reared back and caught the rest of his apology in a savage right hook that took the rookie off his feet, sending him flying back so violently that even Chavez wasn’t fast enough to stop him from falling to the floor.

  The precinct’s response was immediate, his fellow officers exploding into shouts, shocked expletives, and guttural bellows as they dropped everything they were doing to close in on Linc and the rookie.

  “Detective Hill!” Chavez took only a moment to look at Linc in disbelief before she fell to her knees next to the rookie, who still lay on the floor, cradling his eye with one hand. “Have you lost your mind?”

  “She set us up, man,” the rookie wailed, his voice full of the kind of shock that could only befall a man who’d taken an unexpected blow to the eye. “She killed Sam—she killed your partner!”

  After watching Lisa breathe her last breath, Linc had been convinced that he’d never feel anything again. Until that moment. Until the white hot, blinding rage that bl
azed across his body drove him to fly for the rookie again, hungry for a second hit. One of his fellow officer’s, however, who’d been watching from afar, seized the back of Linc’s arms, stopping him before he could clock the rookie again.

  “She was my wife!” Linc’s pained roars filled a room that had gone deathly quiet, the way it only did when the department had endured a terrible day like that one.

  “She shot an officer at point blank range,” Chavez cried, her own voice filled with emotion as she attempted to defuse Linc. “She pointed a gun straight at him. What the hell was he supposed to do?”

  Linc struggled against the officer still holding his arms from behind.

  “She was gone too long, bro,” the rookie said, his voice calming. “Only loyal to her pimp.” He pulled his hand away from his eye, looked at the palm, and nodded. “And I’m bleeding. Awesome.”

  “He’s right, Linc.” Chavez gave a soft shake of her head, regret staining her eyes. “Whoever Lisa was before she went missing, that woman had since moved to the dark side, and Officer Lavigne acted accordingly.” After a beat, she pointed a trembling finger to the second level of the precinct as more officers leaned down next to the rookie, whose name Linc now knew as Officer Lavigne, to check to see if he was okay. “You need to go and wait for me in my office,” Chavez said to Linc. “Now.”

  Linc nearly overpowered the officer holding his arms, so another pair of hands joined in, leaving both of his arms locked tight in the fierce grip of two different men.

  His gasping lungs easing, Linc turned his head but didn’t lock eyes with the two men behind him.

  “Get off me,” he spat, his deep voice prompting a strong silence. The first guy who’d grabbed him freed him, but when Linc found his other arm still clutched under the fierce grip of the second guy, his fiery green orbs flew toward him. “Get the fuck off me.” He snatched at his arm again, and the officer let go, holding his arms up to show Linc he didn’t want any trouble.

  Hand still on Officer Lavigne’s shoulder, chest heaving, Chavez bared her teeth up at Linc. “Detective Hill, if you’re not in my office in the next thirty seconds, that’s your job.”

  Another long, still silence, even as every chest in the room heaved.

  Thirty seconds elapsed, and then some.

  Linc didn’t move.

  It caused something to snap in Chavez, and even as her eyes filled with tears, tears for everything they’d all lost that day, she spoke. “That’s your job.”

  Scattered groans and soft hisses rose into the air all around, but none of Linc’s fellow officers objected. While it was hard to see one of their most dedicated men falling completely apart before their eyes, they couldn’t deny that Linc was beyond help.

  That he had been for five years.

  “Get the hell out of my precinct,” Chavez said. In the decades she’d been climbing the ranks at Shadow Rock PD, Linc had never seen her cry. None of them had. He knew that day would be no exception. Even as her eyes filled, she wouldn’t dare let the tears bubbling on the edges of her eyelashes fall. But it was the closest he’d ever seen her come to allowing it.

  The sight tied his stomach in a knot, and without another word, Linc followed his commanding officer’s order for the first time that evening. He moved forward, eyes empty, sidestepping everyone who’d huddled around them to witness the exchange, and without another word, he left Shadow Rock Precinct.

  Never to return.

  ——

  During the drive home from the precinct, Linc waited to care. He waited to care about punching that rookie dead in the eye. He waited to care that it had cost him his job. He waited to care how he was going to eat or keep a roof over his head.

  He waited to care about any of it.

  But nothing came. Nothing but the memory of Sam’s eyes earlier that day, wide open, like an empty vat, staring blankly at the ceiling with a bullet wound oozing in her neck. Nothing but the sight of Lisa’s eyes as they’d fluttered slowly shut. Nothing but the regret of not telling her that seeing her in that hotel room had been the happiest moment of his life too. Nothing but the nearly debilitating need to fulfill her dying wish.

  He didn’t care about anything but Emma.

  Finding her.

  Saving her.

  As he brought his truck to a stop at a red light, unable to even recall driving as far as he had, his cell phone rang from the cup holder. When he lifted the phone and saw who was calling, it hit him.

  If it wasn’t Emma, he didn’t care.

  Unless it was her.

  He answered Martin’s call because he knew it would be about the only other woman in the world, besides Emma, who could bring him back down to Earth in an instant, even when he’d been well on his way to floating away forever.

  “Yeah?” his voice was nasal as he answered Martin’s call, pulling ahead when the light turned green.

  “Hey, man,” Martin said, his voice laced with a regret that made it clear news of Linc’s termination had traveled fast. “I heard what happened. I’m really sorry—”

  “You got the results?”

  Martin stumbled at being cut off, but his tone remained understanding—apologetic—even as he got straight to the point. “The DNA on the watermelon Blow Pop was a perfect match. Whoever you swiped it from… the nails from the cliff were definitely hers.”

  Without another word, Linc hung up the phone, took a deep breath, and violently yanked the steering wheel, making a U-turn so sharp his tires screamed against the asphalt, kicking up white smoke as he hurdled down the street in the opposite direction.

  29

  As Gage pulled his Phantom into the empty parking lot at Blackwater Port, he couldn’t get the photos of his mother out of his mind. For years he’d believed it was his parents’ sham of a marriage that had broken her and left her a shell of herself. But no, as her profile photos slowly burned themselves into his brain, he could no longer deny that his mother had been in pain for much longer than he’d realized.

  He pushed the thoughts from his head as best he could—his stomach turning as he put the car in park, killed the engine and moved his eyes to Scarlett.

  From the passenger’s seat, Scarlett’s eyes were just as alarmed as they’d been earlier that night, watching Celeste chase after them, barefoot, in the middle of the street.

  “You sure Kevin Brady wants you badly enough for this to work?” Gage asked.

  Scarlett tilted her head, accepting his unspoken challenge by snatching her cell phone out of her purse. Her fingers danced across the screen, whispering the words as she typed. “Look, Kevin. I have needs. You have needs. I want you inside me…” She paused, cutting a look at Gage, voice lowering. “Now.”

  “That’s never going to work. Jesus. He’ll see right through it.”

  “You’re substantially overestimating a man’s ability to turn down free sex.”

  “He put a gun to my neck to protect whatever’s down there. This is serious. Some uninspired text message isn’t going to—” Her phone chirped, cutting off the rest of Gage’s rant.

  She raised her eyebrow at him before looking down at the screen. “‘I’m at work.’” She read what Gage assumed was Kevin’s response text. “‘After?’”

  “You see? He’s saying no.”

  Scarlett was already typing her response. “I always wanted to have sex on a boat.” She continued whispering the words out loud as she typed them.

  Gage groaned from the deepest pit of his stomach, his forehead falling onto the steering wheel.

  Her phone beeped again, and she read Kevin’s response. “‘How quickly can you get here?’”

  Gage’s eyes flew to her.

  Scarlett gave him a knowing look. “You thought I was playing when I said this fool has wanted to eat this booty like groceries since middle school. He would move heaven and Earth for it.”

  “Why do you talk like you’re from the hill? Because I think we both know that you a’int ‘bout that life,” Gage attem
pted his own piss poor hill accent.

  Her blue eyes rolled. “Look, I did my part. Now all I have to do is show up at the bottom of that ship and clear the door—which I will. The rest will be up to you. That’s the part of this plan you should really be worried about. God forbid you actually have to fight someone.”

  “You weren’t built to roll around in the dirt getting battered and bloody.”

  Gage clenched his teeth as Scarlett’s words sent him flashing back to the prom, where Veda had made the exact same insinuation.

  “I can fight.” He frowned.

  Scarlett chortled, not even dignifying that with a response.

  Fury encased him as he threw open the driver’s side door. Before the night was out, he would prove to Scarlett and Veda that just because he’d been born rich didn’t mean he couldn’t fight. Stand up for what’s right. Stand up for his future wife. For his future children.

  “Wait!” Scarlett cried.

  Already out of the car, Gage bent down and met her eyes through the open door.

  “We have to let some time pass,” Scarlett said. “Kevin needs to believe I came down here spur of the moment, and my house is ten minutes away.”

  A flash of impatience caught fire in Gage’s eyes, but he knew Scarlett was right. So he plopped back down in the driver’s seat with a huff.

  After closing the door, he looked at Scarlett for a long moment. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “How many times do I have to say it? There is nothing—nothing—I won’t do to get out of this engagement.”

  He exhaled. “Me either.”

  “Tonight, it’s go hard or go home. For both of us…” With a determined pucker of her lips, Scarlett offered Gage her pinky. “Deal?”