Bend, Don't Break

by Skye Callahan

  Richards approached the table reaching for the trash Rose had left after finishing the chips and coffee.

  “I can take care of that,” I said, thinking there might be residue of whatever she’d been given still in the cup, but Richards snatched it up anyway.

  “Nonsense. It’s quite obvious you have your hands full.”

  I brushed my chin against her warm forehead, and she stirred.

  “Stay with me, Rose.”

  She lifted her head, her nose brushing against my neck. “Always.”

  Within a few minutes, Trent led the paramedics into the room where we waited. I squeezed her even tighter, realizing I’d have to relinquish her—if even for a few moments.

  The paramedic set his bag on the table, looking at me as much as he looked at Rose. “I’m just going to take her vitals. Then, we’ll get her loaded up.”

  “I’m going with her,” I said.

  He gave me a tense smile and nodded. “I figured.”

  Trent came around behind me and slapped a hand to my shoulder. “You might want to tame the glower that says you’re going to kill everyone.”

  He dropped back and sat on the table. “I promise he’s not as bad as he looks.”

  “Mmm,” Rose snorted, then she pressed a kiss to my jaw. “Yeah, he is.”

  “Her vitals are stable,” the paramedic said, repacking his equipment. “You want to bring her out?”

  I expected more questions, but then I suspected that Trent might have covered that on the phone. I shifted her so that I could stand and followed the paramedics toward the door.

  “I’ll meet you there,” Trent called after us.

  Rose slept all the way to the hospital, while I fielded the paramedic’s questions.

  Age. Symptoms. Medical history.

  What the heck could I tell them about her medical history? Most of it, I didn’t want to think about, so I stuck with the basics—including the shooting.

  The hustle of the hospital was actually a relief since I wasn’t the sole focus of their inquisition. They pulled her into a private room and checked her vitals again. Rose didn’t stir until the phlebotomist came in to draw blood. It took two attempts to rouse her, but she remained on the edge of semi-consciousness until the needle pressed into her skin.

  “Easy, Sugar.” I tried to hold her still until the procedure was complete, but just as quickly as she’d woken and tensed, sleep reclaimed her.

  I dragged my fingers through her hair, gently tugging free the small tangles around her face. Since we weren’t entirely sure what she’d been given, they couldn’t give her anything to counteract it yet.

  Fortunately, she wasn’t experiencing any severe side effects aside from extreme fatigue.

  Trent snuck quietly into the room, taking up his position on the opposite side of her bed. “I may have pilfered the cup from the trash can after everyone left.”

  “You sneaky bastard,” I whispered. “Glad you’re on my side.”

  “Now we just have to figure out who isn’t.” He leaned his arms against the railings and stretched out his neck. “I also got a sample of coffee from the coffee pot. I dropped them both off with a lab tech, who I’m fairly confident isn’t the mole.”

  He twisted his mouth and shook his head, keeping his eyes on Rose as if he expected the answers to come from her unconscious body.

  But, it felt like answers were slipping farther and farther away. It was one thing being in the Retreat and having to watch my back. I knew I was out for myself, but now things were supposed to be different. We were supposed to be a team, working in tandem to save girls, not druging them and aiding the criminals.

  What the hell were we coming to?

  “Any theories?” he asked.

  I stared down at the cotton blanket—all of the tiny threads intersecting, strengthening each other, creating the larger structure. “Who’s in the best position to get away with it all? To keep track of everything we know, and play the pieces just right to make it look like we’re digging as deep as we possibly can without actually finding anything to go on?”

  Trent’s mouth hung wide open for a moment. “If you’re implying what I think, you either just signed your own death warrant or resignation.”

  “Did you report that we were going to the bar the night that Elizabeth OD’ed?”

  “Of course.... And our guy didn’t show up, then we got called out of there damn quick.” He rubbed his chin and stepped away from the bed, shaking his head as he paced slowly around the room. “I can’t even believe I’m considering this. We’re going to need damn good evidence. He’d have to seriously fuck up—”

  I nodded to Rose. “I think he already did.”

  A knock sounded at the door, and a doctor stepped in with Rose’s chart in hand. “We rushed through the tox screen on her blood. There’s no GHB or any related substance in her system—”

  “Then—” I gestured toward her. She certainly wasn’t having a typical reaction to drinking coffee—not even the coffee at the station house was that dangerous.

  The doctor put up a hand to quiet me. “I wasn’t done. She had high levels of muscle relaxers in her system. Not dangerously high, so she’ll probably sleep it off.”

  “She said she was on muscle relaxers for tension headaches.”

  He nodded. “I saw that in her chart—it’s actually one of the reasons we tested for it. She takes a fast-acting, but short-lived muscle relaxer, metaxalone. A more extensive test would be able to confirm whether that was the culprit, but if so, she took triple the prescribed dose.”

  I clenched the bed railing, debating over how much to tell him—if I said foul play was involved, it wouldn’t be long before word of it got back to the station.

  “If that’s the case,” the doctor said, “I’ll have to recommend we keep her for psychiatric evaluation.”

  “That won’t be necessary.” If I couldn’t leave her for more than twenty minutes in the station, I wasn’t leaving her in the hospital.

  “We’ll keep an eye on her,” Trent said, maintaining a slight smile until the doctor disappeared. Then, he leaned over the bed toward me. “What’s the plan?”

  “Know of any nifty ways to find out who in our department is on muscle relaxers?”

  Horrible start to the plan because it’d never work, but I needed a few more minutes to think.

  Trent’s phone beeped, and he glanced down at the messages. He raised one eyebrow as he read and I had to steel myself to the bed to keep from jumping over and reading it myself.

  “It’s not really news,” he said. “There was nothing in the coffee sample, but there was residue on Rose’s cup. Tizanadine,” he grimaced at the word. “Brand name is Zanaflex—clearly not what Rose was taking. But here’s the brilliant bit, it’s available in a capsule.”

  “Easier to spike your drink with.” I tried to focus on coming up with a solution, but as I stared down at her, the only thing I could think of was how much she’d been through.

  Waking up from a drug-induced sleep surrounded by Gabe’s men, and thrust into life at the Retreat. I had to force her to put her trust in me—a man she didn’t know. All she knew was that she’d become my new sex slave—just a new toy, like all the others.

  But she’d never been like them. She fought for everything. In the end, she fought to save herself—and me.

  Choose to die or fight to live, I’d told her, after threatening to drown her in the bathtub. It is what it is.

  I trailed my fingers down her arm and took her hand. The rest of her body remained perfectly still, except for her slow breaths, and her fingers squeezing mine.

  It’s what we make of it, I decided. Whatever fate or anyone else wanted or expected us to be was irrelevant. We’d made our own way—so far off the original plan. It all shouldn’t have come together, but it did.

  She may have been a stubborn thorn in my side who threatened both our lives in the beginning, but she became exactly what she needed to be to survive. I’d
told Trent not to underestimate her, but I’d done just that myself. She was smart, intuitive, stubborn, and a damn sight brave. Hell, she could probably have done my job as well as me.

  Trent cleared his throat. “You’re smiling, and if we’re honest, it’s kind of creeping me out.”

  I snorted and straightened my back. It was starting to kink up from staying hunched over the bed so long. “Just thinking.”

  “About whatever it was—that I shouldn’t mention—that you two were doing before I showed up at the safe house earlier?”

  My smile widened. “I am now.”

  “Plan?” he reminded me.

  I scratched the back of my head and stared toward the dark window. “Hell if I know. Richards already knows about everything we got off Elijah, so—if he is the mole—he’s probably already informed the others to cover their tracks. So, any plan to intercept Elijah’s friend tomorrow will be shot. We’re right back at square one. How do you play a cunning game when there’s someone standing over you who can see your cards and your opponent’s cards? He’d know every possible move before we could even consider acting on it.”

  “If we force his hand we’re likely to get shot in the back—or fired. In this situation, I’m considering ‘fired’ a best case scenario. And we still have no proof it’s him.”

  I silently sorted through the possibilities. Maybe we weren’t supposed to have discovered Rose after she’d been drugged—he’d fucked up there, but it wasn’t enough to get him. We could prove there had been foul play in the station, but we’d probably end up spinning in circles again.

  Chapter 20

  Tenuous Ground

  After a couple of hours in the hospital, the effects of the muscle relaxers were fading from Rose’s system, but she was still groggy and nestled on the couch with her legs across my lap. “I’m never going to sleep tonight.”

  “You can keep us company, then,” I said, squeezing her thigh.

  Going back to the safe house was useless if we had someone on the inside ratting our every move, but it provided a quiet place to think. Trent joined us for the quietest brainstorming session I’d ever been a part of.

  Rose sat up and adjusted until she was curled at my side with her head on my shoulder. “Right. Nearly forgot that you hardly ever need sleep. What’d I miss?”

  Trent scoffed and flicked a stack of papers across the coffee table. “Absolutely nothing.”

  I blew out a long breath that hissed through my clenched teeth. “In theory, we could try to trace the drugs back to whoever decided to slip them in your drink, but that’d require us opening an official investigation which would tip off whoever we’re looking for.”

  She pressed her lips together and looked up at me. “You mean your captain?”

  “Why would you say that?” Trent asked, looking down at his phone and acting disinterested.

  “I don’t know. How else—Elijah said that the people he’s working for would know. Maybe we were wrong to think he was paranoid just because there weren’t any transmitting devices in the apartment.”

  “But how do we prove it?” I asked. “We need more than intuition and guesswork.”

  “Is Raini still around?” Rose asked quietly.

  Trent and I both dropped what we were looking at to turn our full attention to her.

  Raini wasn’t ever the social type, she just did as she was told—her own version of survival instinct. “Did you ever talk to Raini?”

  Rose shook her head. “But Alley....” She trailed off, fussing with a string on the blanket that pooled around her lap.

  All we needed was one little string to pull. Then we could let everything fall apart.

  “Alley was friends with nearly all of the girls,” I finished her statement. “So, Raini might be willing to help find out what happened to her.”

  Trent stood and popped his back. “I can try to track her down tomorrow. We have her address, but I can’t guarantee she’s still there. I spoke to her briefly after Elizabeth’s death, and she seemed okay.”

  “Raini suspects that I was the traitor,” I said. “She wasn’t there that night, but I’d assume the girls who were didn’t keep quiet about it.” And knowing that Rose was with me, Raini might be suspicious of her as well.

  “I can handle it,” Rose said. “She can’t be much harder than Elijah, right?”

  I nodded. At least I didn’t have to worry too much about Raini attacking her. I just had to worry about who Raini knew and who she might report to. “Except this time we’re doing it off the record. No backup.”

  “I can rig up a wire, though,” Trent said. “We can stick close by and listen in case you hit trouble. I’ll make the calls and set everything up, but it’s getting late and we’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”

  Which meant we’d also have to balance keeping Richards and the rest of the department off our asses.

  Trent finagled a call to keep us out of the station, leaving Winsor and Hudson to work the official case. Then, he called up Ryan Corell and asked him to meet us near the café where Rose and Raini were meeting.

  If all we had to go on was instinct, I assumed that we all couldn’t be wrong. He showed up—even though it was his day off—as requested, in plain clothes. Since he wasn’t expected at the office anyway, it all happened to work out in our favor.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. “Is Rose okay?”

  “She’s fine,” I looked at Trent and then took a running leap off the cliff. It was time to spill and let everything land where it may. “She was drugged, by someone in the station.”

  Corell’s face went pale as the clouds in the sky. “A cop?”

  He stepped away, taking a moment to breathe and let it all sink in. “That’d explain why y’all aren’t getting any traction, but why’d you call me?”

  “We’re banking on you not being the one who did it.”

  He scoffed and rubbed the back of his head. “Well, um, thanks. I guess.”

  “Rose is inside,” I nodded to the café on the corner. “She’s waiting for one of the girls from the Retreat. The girl was with Elizabeth Watkins when she disappeared, so we’re hoping she might be an in.”

  “She’s the girl who came in the night you were hiding out in the interview room?” He waited for my confirmation, then nodded. “Your girlfriend’s a brave girl—getting wrapped up in all of this. She knows what she’s getting into?”

  I glanced back to Trent again, unless he was a damn good actor, Corell definitely wasn’t the mole, since he apparently hadn’t followed our case closely.

  “Something amusing?” Corell asked.

  Forcing away my smirk, I shook my head. Where the hell do I start on the abridged version? “I met Rose while I was undercover. She was brought into the Retreat, she definitely knows what she’s getting into.”

  “Hell,” Trent said. “Give the girl her credit, since this was her idea. We’re bringing them down, along with whoever’s leaking information from the department, but that means we can’t launch an official investigation yet. We’d be tipping our hand too soon. It’s important that you also know what you’re going into.”

  This time we were taking it upon ourselves to fly under the radar.

  Corell took a moment, and I thought he’d tell us to shove it, but he pressed his lips together and nodded. “What do you want me to do?”

  Trent handed him a cell that would let him take video without anyone noticing. “Go inside and order a cup of coffee. Don’t make eye contact with Rose, but get set up somewhere you can see her.”

  “We’ll be in the car across the street.” I pointed to Trent’s car. We were parked almost a block from the Café, but this time we’d have eyes and ears on Rose. “Her danger word is ‘five’.”

  We got settled in the car and turned on the receiver so we could hear Rose in the café. After she picked up her order, the only thing we could hear was the clinking of glass and the distant mumble of people around her. Trent cued up the video on his
phone, but it was still dark.

  Raini’s smooth, quiet voice came through the speakers. “You had Trent call me?”

  “Yeah, I wanted to check in with you,” Rose said.

  “Me?” Raini made a noise and mumbled something I couldn’t make out.

  A picture popped up on Trent’s screen. Corell was sitting several booths away, but we got a clear image of both girls.

  Rose leaned toward her. “I wasn’t sure how to talk to anyone, but after Alley died,” her voice crackled and she paused. “I heard about your friend and—”

  “She wasn’t my friend,” Raini snorted. “You really think people like us come back out here and make friends? How many do you have?”

  Raini had hardened even more over the last few months.

  “I had one from before, but I’ve met a few new people I like.”

  “Oh, right. But you don’t see how different it was for you. You were there, what? A month?”

  Rose nodded.

  Come on, Sugar, I urged. She’d gone quiet as if uncertain about how to keep pressing.

  “It was long enough,” she said, her voice wavering again. “I have nightmares almost every night, and no one to call when I don’t even want to leave my house.”

  Raini’s shoulders sagged. “Don’t get me wrong—it’s just been a long week—I’m glad to be out. Every day’s a struggle, but I don’t have any assholes forcing their... you know,” she shrugged and left the rest of the statement to the imagination.

  “Yeah, I know,” Rose whispered.

  We’d never stop reliving it, but at least if we turned the damn memories into a strength we got something positive out of the whole situation.

  “Have you talked to Kirk since then?”

  Rose straightened, her gaze flickered to Corell for a split second.

  “I saw him at the police station,” Raini continued, “no idea why he was there. The detective seemed a little ticked with him, but I assumed that’s how you knew.”

  “Yeah, he told me.”

  “Well, tell him thanks. If he wants to hear that from me. It probably doesn’t—” She started to slide out of the booth, but Rose caught her arm.