Shield

by Anne Malcom

  I’d made the decision on a whim, like I did most of my decisions. But LA was always supposed to be where Lucy and I would go to live out our dreams. Ultimate bachelorettes with a great apartment and fabulous jobs and few worries.

  But like most dreams, it hadn’t quite turned out that way. Lucy got hers, the one she didn’t even know she wanted.

  Mine weren’t important.

  “Well, not here exactly, because hospitals creep me out, no matter how hot the nurses are. Grays’s Anatomy was serious false advertising. But yeah, watch out, City of Angels. The Devil has arrived.” I winked, speaking the truth but disguising it with humor.

  If only my best friend knew what I’d turned into. Even the men in the club would blanche. So I had to bury it all. Dig a grave and put this new version of myself in it. Try to resurrect the girl from before.

  “Okay, so you’re not leaving,” she repeated, like she almost didn’t believe me.

  I hated that too. Trust between girlfriends was almost as sacred as those naked photos you only showed them. I broke that.

  “Nope. Not too far, at least. I’ll be back, I promise. See you never,” I said, trying to stick to old Rosie’s script.

  Lucy’s face warmed to a smile I didn’t deserve. “Love you always.”

  I gave her a smile and Keltan a wink before turning and purposefully walking out the door, as if I didn’t have a care in the world.

  As if I wasn’t close to collapsing.

  I couldn’t.

  I still had a part to play to the entire crowd of people in the waiting room.

  I wanted to see them all, despite the bitter taste in my mouth at seeing the stranger I turned into when I dove back into my previous life.

  Running was the easy part. It was coming back that was the bitch. Nothing went away while you were hiding; everything stayed exactly preserved, like a fossilized demon of all your mistakes.

  I just had to stop being such a coward.

  It was a family reunion, not a firing squad.

  So why did it feel so much like the latter?

  Just before I made it to the waiting room, a hulking form rounded the corner and I froze.

  There he was. The fossil I had craved just as much as I’d dreaded uncovering.

  Luke.

  Chapter Seven

  It would be nice if life was like the movies. Not only would I always look fabulous, regardless of whatever dirty situation I’d come out of, but everything would turn out for the guy and the girl in the end. After a long and painful separation, they’d finally reunite, run into each other’s arms and forget all the differences, the suffering that kept them apart.

  But that shit only happened in the movies.

  Reunions like that weren’t glamorous, or passionate, or romantic. They were stiff, awkward and hurt more than a bullet through the chest.

  Which I would’ve taken my chances with, me being in a hospital and all that. They could work with physical wounds.

  Emotional ones were a shit show.

  His presence hit me. Physically. Took the air right out of my lungs. And not in a good way.

  “Rosie.” He didn’t say the word as much as breathed it. But not delicate and quiet. It was like he’d yanked it up from some visceral part of him, the five letters of my name cutting at his throat as they passed through it.

  I couldn’t even manage the four letters of his at that point. I couldn’t manage any four-letter words. I knew what I did would have consequences. With all the stupid shit I did, I knew.

  Mostly I didn’t care about the consequences. Or thought they were worth it.

  But these consequences, staring me in the face in the form of a broken man I used to know, almost brought me to my knees. Which was saying something since I’d just stood at the bedside of my best friend who nearly died and managed to keep my shit together.

  This man always knew how to get me undone, without even knowing he was doing it.

  “Luke,” I said, my voice scratchy and low.

  One glance at him and I knew he’d changed, but what he did the seconds after I spoke showed me just how much.

  He grabbed my shoulders roughly, so slim darts of pain shot up from where his hands pressed into my skin. I didn’t cry out, despite it hurting and being surprised. I had good practice at keeping quiet when in pain. Who knew that what I’d learned from Venezuelan human traffickers would come in handy with the gentle and kind cop I used to know?

  He slammed me roughly against the wall, boxing me in with his body.

  “Where. The. Fuck. Have. You. Been?” he clipped, each word as physical as his previous grip on my shoulders.

  I stared into his blue eyes. The ones that used to be liquid and soft, inviting like a calm ocean in July. These weren’t those. I was looking at hard granite, the stuff that could crush you, that was colder than the wildest ocean in the middle of December.

  There was a lot more different about him too. The way he got my attention physically, violently. Yeah, that was new. Even now, when he wasn’t even touching me, his hands resting on the wall beside my head, there was a pulse radiating around him. Similar to the one that hummed from Gage when I got close enough, which was rare.

  It was rare because most people didn’t radiate on a level beyond normal. It was the level of murderers, men who walked through the valley of the shadow of death without anything anyone to protect them from evil. They faced it alone. And part of them still resided there.

  I’d put Luke there. Me.

  He used to wear his dirty-blond hair longer, mussed, boyish almost. It was clipped close to his face now, making the angles of his face harsher, sharper. Stubble darkened his jaw and ran down the cords of his neck that were pulsing with his obvious fury.

  He wasn’t wearing a uniform, the absence of a shiny metal shield accusing me with its nonattendance. Instead, he was in all black, as if it was a poetic statement about his transition. Muscles that were subtly defined before now strained at his skin.

  I swallowed roughly. “Around.” I was going for flippant, but it turned juvenile, pathetic.

  “You’re fuckin’ shitting me,” he seethed. “You disappear, not a trace, not a fuckin’ word to anyone, no one knowing if you’re dead or fucking alive, and the best you can say is around?” He ended on a shout, his previous open palm turning into a fist before he slammed it against the wall above me.

  I flinched, not at the violence but at who it was coming from.

  “It’s not your business,” I said.

  His eyes glittered with a danger I didn’t recognize. Or maybe I did, but I didn’t want to see it residing in him. “Oh, it’s my business. You’re my fuckin’ business. We both know that.”

  He glanced around. He’d garnered a couple of concerned stares from nurses. A glimmer of something familiar flickered on his face, letting me exhale a little. Maybe he wasn’t truly gone.

  He stepped back, sighing and running his hand through the hair that used to be there. Another shadow of before. “This isn’t the place. But we’re going to talk. You’re going to talk,” he rectified.

  I stepped back from my spot in the corner. Nobody, not even the man I’d loved since I was five years old, put Rosie in the corner. I pasted on my most sarcastic ‘fuck you’ smile. “I can’t wait,” I shot back with all the courage I could muster.

  I was going to turn on my heel and let him watch me walk away, but he beat me to it, giving me one hard glare before turning on his boot and leaving without a backward glance.

  I gaped after him.

  Maybe I was wrong. Maybe he was truly gone and only shadows remained.

  I couldn’t chase shadows.

  But I would.

  Because I wouldn’t be Rosie if I wasn’t chasing the next big Fuck-Up.

  Luke

  He was sure that hospital, with its taunting smell of sterile death and unhurried pain, did something to her. He knew it. Because it did something to him, teased a memory from six years before upward, when he was wa
tching Rosie from the shadows of the hallway of the hospital, standing half in Laurie’s doorway, halfway between two worlds.

  One was her regular wild world that had horror and bloodshed peppered in, but somehow manageable, expected bloodshed. Something that came with the territory. Something that she never should’ve had to deal with, in a perfect world. But the world was far from perfect, and therefore she did deal. She did it fucking well. She decorated around the blood and death and violence and somehow made it glow, made it beautiful. To herself and surely as fuck to him.

  Not that he could ever let that opinion show.

  Especially not now.

  Not when another world opened up like a hole in the ground, not only exposing Hell but sucking everyone in. Everyone who didn’t deserve to be there.

  Laurie was the first. Rosie had been fighting the inevitable. She’d have to go in there, seeing Laurie, everything that had happened to that poor beautiful and innocent girl.

  Luke had dealt with gore in his line of work. Even a small-town cop had to, at some point, but his small town more so thanks to the resident motorcycle gang. Regardless of the fact that they hid the majority of their bodies in shallow graves. He’d still peeled men off the road after motorcycle accidents, seen what remained of a human head after a bullet tore through the skull, turning the brains inside out.

  He was as used to death and violence as a person could be.

  But seeing what had happened to Laurie, the sheer cold and needless brutality inflicted on her, had threatened to empty his stomach. If there had been anything more but coffee in it, maybe it might’ve stained his shoes. But he’d been up for almost twenty-four hours looking for her, hoping for the best, but knowing the worst was inevitable.

  He’d thought he’d been prepared. He’d thought he’d separated himself from the girl he’d grown up with, who’d taken in birds with broken wings and read to the people at the town hospice.

  He’d been sorely fucking mistaken.

  Cruelty was always hard to witness. To clean up after. It made it really fucking hard to keep faith in humanity when you could taste what humans did to each other.

  His faith was hanging on by a fucking thread after that shit. And that thread was standing upright, dry-eyed in a doorway, watching the life seep out of one of her best friends.

  So he’d had to leave, before she broke down. Because if she did, if he saw the strongest person he knew—including the men who considered themselves above everything—broke down, then he’d have no fucking faith left.

  It was cowardice, pure and simple. Leaving her there when he'd known that she’d had to face the Devil himself. But he’d had no fucking choice when the Devil was family.

  Six Years Earlier

  Delivering news of the death of a loved one to the surviving family was hands down the worst part of the job. Death was fucking hard too, but the person, the corpse he observed after the fact, was no longer a person. No longer in pain or suffering. They were at whatever passed for peace. Whether it be some kind of afterlife or total fucking darkness—which was what Luke suspected was the case—they didn’t have to worry about the ills of the world, but the world sure as shit worried about them.

  The people left behind had the death to cope with, to fight with. Not the one it happened to.

  Luke couldn’t decide if watching strangers suffer was worse than those he knew. Not that he delivered news to many strangers, not in a town this small. Being strangers with someone was a luxury small-town cops were rarely afforded.

  He found himself wishing he was telling strangers that their only child was brutally tortured, raped, and murdered instead of the two people who’d raised a beautiful, polite and kind daughter. They’d raised her that way because they were polite, kind, and all-around good people. Peter, her father, had come to Luke informally after Bull and Laurie had gotten together.

  Not for Luke to arrest Bull for taking up with his barely legal daughter.

  No, to tell Luke that it was okay.

  “Now I know you have a certain opinion on those Templar boys,” Peter had said after Luke had invited him in for a beer. Peter had visited him at home because he was that kind of guy. He was good friends with Luke’s own father and would always rather greet both Luke and his father as the pals he considered them to be rather than the law enforcement officers they were.

  “Men, sir,” he’d cut in quietly and respectfully. “They’re not teenagers playing rough and harmlessly with bikes. They’re men who get into trouble. Plenty of harmful trouble.” He didn’t want to sound like he was lecturing the man who’d ruffled his head at ten years old after he’d hit a home run at the baseball game his father hadn’t been at because of trouble with the Sons.

  Peter took a swig of his beer, regarding the bottle thoughtfully as he did so. “This is a good brew. Light, sweet,” he said instead of answering Luke immediately.

  Luke was impatient in the silence that followed but forced himself to wait until Peter said what he was going to say, to show him that respect.

  His eyes met Luke’s. “I know your opinion of these boys.” He paused. “These men. And I’m not here to challenge that or say it isn’t founded. I have many concerns of my own, don’t you worry about that. A father’s natural state is concern, especially when they have a daughter. Especially when they have one like Laurie. We’ve always known since the start that she was different. Special in a way, like she got one less layer of skin than everyone else, the one that protected people from the world but that also obscures them from seeing the true beauty of that world. Now, instead of trying to force her to grow that cynical skin, educate her on the ugliness of this place, my Christine and I have tried to preserve that view. Make sure nothing happens to obscure it. And it just so happens that Laurie seems to attract people who want the same for her.”

  Peter gave him a pointed look. “Know you’re one of those people, my friend. So I know it’ll be hard to hear this, and even harder to listen to what I ask, but I know you’ll respect me and Laurie enough to listen. Your first instinct is to go to that man, give him threats, ultimatums, anything to reconsider his gaze on my daughter. I will say that thought did cross my mind too. But then I focused on his gaze, the way he looked at her. Then I recognized it. He’s another one of those people. Maybe not like you—”

  “Nothing like me,” Luke interrupted, unable to help himself.

  Instead of looking angry at Luke’s words, Peter just nodded. “We don’t have to all be alike to see something that needs protecting and go about our job at protecting it. Way I see it, this is a different kind of protection than me or even you could offer. This is from the man who’s not only seen the true ugliness of the world but is willing to brave it to protect my daughter from it. You say and think what you will, but you know those men protect their kin, their women especially, with their lives. And as a father, knowing your daughter’s in the hands of someone who would do that, well it helps with the concern.” He drained his beer. “Never anything or anyone who’s gonna take it away, but it quells it some.”

  He stood, and Luke stood too, placing his own beer on the coffee table in front of him.

  Peter held out his hand. “I’m not asking you to agree here, just asking you to understand, let Laurie get another form of protection. Can’t hurt, can it?”

  Looking back, Luke wished he’d done fucking anything other than take Peter’s hand in his and say, “No, guess not.”

  But wishing didn’t do shit.

  So there he was, across from the same man, years later, telling him the news that not only had Bull been unable to protect her from the world’s true ugliness, but that he was the reason for her having to not only see it but have it eat her alive. They’d been hopeful when he’d first told them she was missing, because they were hopeful people.

  He’d never thought he’d be wishing to be peeling a wrecked corpse off the side of the road.

  He did now.

  Peter didn’t swear, yell, go for the gu
n that Luke knew he kept in a lockbox in his garage. Instead, he kissed his quietly sobbing wife on the head, pausing a moment to close his eyes and stay there, maybe dance with the notion that none of this was real. Then he let her go and focused his clear, dry gaze on Luke, who was having a hard time keeping his gaze anything but.

  “The boy, how is he?” he asked.

  Luke didn’t answer straightaway because he wasn’t quite sure if he was hearing him right. He couldn’t be hearing him right.

  “The boy?” he repeated, voice rougher than he’d like.

  Peter nodded. “Bull.”

  Luke clenched his fists where they were lying atop his knees. Peter, the man who’d just learned that he’d never walk his daughter down the aisle, never be a grandfather, never see her smile again, was asking if the man responsible for this was okay?

  At first, Luke didn’t trust himself to speak, so the silence between Peter’s words and his response was yawning and awkward. The only sound was Christine’s muffled sobs.

  When Luke trusted himself enough to meet the grieving man’s eyes and not show an ounce of his own fury, he did so. It was fucking difficult, but he did so. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice gratingly flat. “He has his men around him. His family.”

  It cost Luke a lot to say that. But the price of comforting a good man who’d just lost his daughter was never going to be too high for Luke.

  Peter nodded again, face entirely too lucid and yet too far away at the same time. He stood.

  So did Luke.

  He held out his hand.

  Luke took it.

  Peter looked him straight in the eye. “Thank you, son.”

  It cost Luke every fucking thing to look back at him and say, “You’re welcome, sir.”

  The man was thanking him. Him. Who’d failed in his most basic job of protecting the innocent, prosecuting the club before this could happen.

  Just as much blame rested on Luke’s shoulders as it did Bull’s.

  Luke barely remembered driving to the Sons of Templar compound. He vaguely recollected wondering about the sheer lack of bikes or signs of life as he pulled in. He hadn’t pondered on that for too long.