by Noir, Roxie
He paused for another moment, and he looked like he was about to say something, but didn’t. Instead, he nodded one more time, then stood and walked through the door to the station.
Grey looked around the little cell. She felt completely hopeless, her brain tired and fried. When she laid back on the bench and closed her eyes, the fluorescent lights in the little room felt like they were knifing right through her eyelids.
I have no idea what to do, she thought. Can I even get a lawyer yet? I don’t think I can afford one.
Bits and pieces of her seventh grade civics class started coming back to her, as she tried to figure out her predicament.
They have to give me one if I ask, right? She thought. And they can’t hold me for very long without charging me. Only twenty-four hours, I think, or at least that’s true on TV. And I get a phone call.
Or do I only get a phone call if they arrest me?
She wanted to cry again, but she felt like her eyes didn’t have any tears left to shed, so she laid on the bench, her back against the cold concrete, and tried to breathe deep.
Presently, the door opened again. By then, Grey had both her arms over her eyes, trying to block out the light and at least relax, even though she knew there was no way she could fall asleep.
“I want a lawyer,” she said, figuring that it was Dane again. “And a phone call.”
There was the sound of key jingling, but no answer for a long time.
Then, a familiar voice said, “Well, I don’t have either of those.”
Grey sat bolt upright on the bench, only to see Isaac standing right outside the bars of her holding cell, whirling a keyring around one finger.
She blinked.
This is a weird dream, she thought.
“Need company?” he asked.
She rubbed her eyes. They felt like sandpaper, she’d been crying so much.
“Why are you here with keys?” she asked. “Are you jailbreaking me?”
“Sorry, nope,” said Isaac. “I think Dane would kill me.”
Grey waited, patiently, for him to explain how he knew Dane.
“Dane’s my mate,” he said. “Mind if I come in?” he asked, rattling the keys again.
Grey shrugged. She was pretty sure that she was feeling every emotion at once, and couldn’t quite untangle them, but anticipation and nervousness were definitely in there, somewhere, along with excitement that the hot fighter had come to sort-of rescue her.
“Sure,” she said, frowning. “Are you allowed in here with those keys?”
Isaac shrugged, not answering the question.
“I don’t think you’re gonna get them from me,” he said. “I’ve got a couple of tricks up my sleeve.”
He unlocked the door and came in, sitting next to her on the bench.
“How are you holding up?” he asked, softly.
Grey just shook her head, feeling new tears form in her eyes.
Furtively, Isaac glanced toward the door beyond the bars, slipping the keys into his pocket.
“Don’t worry,” he murmured. “They don’t have anything. Ramirez — the guy who arrested you — wants to keep you here overnight, but he’s the better-safe-than-sorry type, and I think Dane is about this close to ripping his throat out and letting you go, no matter what the Chief says.”
“Who’s the witness?” she asked, rubbing her eyes again. “Not that they’re a witness, there was nothing to see, since I didn’t stab anybody...”
Isaac shook his head.
“I didn’t get a look,” he said. “Sounds like a man, but that’s all I got.”
Grey just nodded. Then she felt Isaac’s big, warm hand on her shoulder and before she knew it, she’d glued herself to his side, nestling into him, sobbing.
“Shhh, shh, shh,” he said. He put both his arms around her and stroked her hair.
I’m acting like a crazy person, Grey thought, but she couldn’t help herself.
Let him think she was crazy. She was in jail, for fuck’s sake, she was allowed to act a little crazy.
“I fucked up so bad,” she said, sniffling. “I never should have gone to that stupid game.”
“You were just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Isaac said, soothingly. “You could’ve been walking home from anywhere and seen poor Nicky.”
“Did you know him?”
“Not really,” Isaac said, half-shrugging. “We were in the same pack, but we weren’t friends. He was...” Isaac trailed off.
“A lot of people weren’t fans of Nicky,” he finally said.
“Wolf pack, right?” she asked.
Isaac chuckled.
“Right,” he said. “You just moved here?”
“From Reno, a couple of months ago,” she said. “I grew up there, but it’s not the best place for a compulsive gambler, so I finally got it together enough to move.”
Isaac nodded, his head against hers.
Grey felt a little weird basically snuggling with this guy whose last name she didn’t even know, but it also felt oddly right, despite the two of them being in a holding cell in what had to be the world’s brightest jail.
“I haven’t been in a jail for a while,” he said.
“How long?” Grey asked.
“Six years, I think,” he said.
“What were you in for?”
“Dogfighting.”
Grey gasped and sat up, her eyes nearly bugging out of her head, a disgusted look on her face.
“You were fighting dogs?” she asked, sounding horrified.
Isaac nearly laughed.
“More like wolf fighting,” he said. “Relax. I was the wolf.”
She blinked.
“Oh,” she said. “And you were fighting...”
“Other wolves,” he said, then clarified. “Other wolf shifters.”
Grey started laughing.
Oh shit, she thought. Now I’m actually losing my mind.
“Sorry,” she gasped between gales of laughter. “I’m sorry I thought you were fighting dogs, it’s just that I’ve kind of had a day.”
“Totally understandable,” he said, and patted the bench next to him.
Grey scooted back over. Even though she knew it was pretty weird to snuggle a stranger, she couldn’t help herself. Her day had been so shitty, and he was so nice and understanding, and made her feel better about her dumb predicament.
“Want to hear about the last time Dane and I got arrested?” he asked.
“Dane got arrested?”
“Yup.”
Isaac’s eyes sparkled with mischief.
“Tell me,” Grey said, and Isaac grinned.
“Once upon a time,” he began. “There were two young, stupid wolf shifters...”
Chapter Five
Dane
Ramirez crossed his arms over his belly, and Dane recognized the gesture. It meant, this argument is over.
“We’re keeping her until the tests are back on the blood on her knife,” he said to Dane.
Dane ground his teeth together, fighting the urge to shift and rampage through the police station.
“It’s a kitchen knife,” said Dane. “She probably cut a steak in half.”
Ramirez shrugged.
“The coroner says it’s likely that the killer used a blade that was only sharpened on one side and not particularly honed,” Ramirez went on. “A weapon of opportunity, like a kitchen knife.”
“That would only be a weapon of opportunity if he was killed in a kitchen,” said Dane, fighting not to roll his eyes. “He was murdered in an alley, so someone planned it and took their knife with them.”
“And we’ll see if that someone was her,” said Ramirez.
Dane gave up.
He stalked back through the police department, past Patty’s empty desk and to his own. He grabbed his jacket, then went to the holding cell.
Before he could even see into the cell, he heard Isaac’s voice.
How did he get in here? He wondered.
“So I won
, but I went easy on him,” his mate was saying. “And, just as we’re shifting back, getting human again, the doors bust down and it’s the Sacramento County police, and they arrested everyone in the joint.”
Dane made a face.
Don’t tell her the story of how we met, he thought, shutting the door behind him.
He walked to the small cell, holding out his jacket.
“I thought you might be cold,” he said to Grey. “I know it can get chilly back here.”
The girl was snuggled up against Isaac’s side, and the sight of the two of them sparked something deep inside Dane, a feeling of completeness, of protectiveness, that he didn’t think he’d ever felt before. He had the urge to grab the bars and pull, not that he thought he could bend the steel.
For them, he might try.
Quit it, he thought. You have the keys in your pocket. Act normal.
“I was just telling her the story of our first date,” Isaac said. “Come on in and sit down.”
Dane frowned.
“You know I’m not supposed to be entering the cell or even conversing with—” he almost said inmates, “—people in the holding cells,” he said.
“Who’s gonna find out?” asked Isaac. “It’s just Ramirez here, and he’s about as smart as a plate of spaghetti.”
Next to him, Grey snorted.
“He just wants to do it right,” Dane said. “We don’t get a lot of murders in Rustvale.”
“We don’t get any murders in Rustvale,” corrected Isaac. “Now come in here and keep us company.”
Dane stood perfectly still for a moment, looking at Grey and Isaac, snuggled up on the bench. There was nothing more that he wanted to do at that moment than go in there and be with the two of them, but it was very much against regulations.
He glanced back at the door that led to the rest of the police station. It was dark, Ramirez off somewhere else, and he knew that Ramirez wouldn’t come looking for him, he’d just radio.
Dane sighed, then reached into his pocket for the key ring.
Isaac grinned as Dane unlocked the door, swung it open, stepped inside and sat on the other side of Grey.
“What’s happening out there?” she asked, quietly.
Dane shook his head.
“They searched your apartment and found some knives,” he said.
She frowned and her eyes widened.
“There were knives in my apartment?”
“Kitchen knives,” he said.
Grey let out a quick bark of a laugh.
“Right,” she said. “Isn’t that pretty normal, though? Do most people not have kitchen knives?”
“They’re testing them for human blood,” he said.
“They’re not gonna find any.”
“I know,” Dane said softly. “But it’s not up to me, and that’s why I’m in here and Ramirez is out there. He’s not a bad guy, just... thickheaded, sometimes.”
Isaac snorted, but didn’t say anything.
Dane knew that he could be rigid and rule bound, but he was nothing like his boss. Ramirez didn’t believe in bending a single rule, and he also didn’t believe in suspicion and circumstance, like the fact that there was almost no way a five-foot-two woman could drive a blunt kitchen knife into a man’s ribcage that many times. When Dane had pointed that out to him, Ramirez had just said, “Maybe she works out.”
Grey moved against Isaac, bringing her left hip against Dane, and Dane bit his lip.
She’s a suspect, he told himself. You’re already breaking protocol in a major way. You can’t touch her.
“You were telling me about your first date,” Grey said. “I think you were trying to take my mind off of me being in jail.”
“Technically, you’re not in jail,” Dane offered. “This is just a holding cell, we haven’t processed you or anything.”
“Feels like jail,” Grey said, sounding a little sulky.
“Jail is much worse,” Dane assured her. “This is a cakewalk, compared to actual jail.”
Grey just looked at him, her eyes wide and a little nervous.
“I’m not helping, am I?” he asked.
She just shook her head, and Dane sighed.
“Okay,” he said. “So we were in Sacramento, and we’d just finished our first fight.”
It had been a strange fight, and it had taken place at a time when Dane already knew that his wolf-fighting days were coming to an end. He was good, but not great, and he was starting to feel the little effects of every fight.
Then, he’d stepped into the ring opposite a deep brown wolf with black eyes. Both of them had frozen at the same time and just stared at each other. Dane hadn’t been able to hear anything over his heartbeat, not the crowds, not the trainers yelling at both of them.
At last, the other wolf had shaken himself free 0f whatever was happening in his head, and he’d attacked Dane. The fight hadn’t been long, just a few rounds, some fur flying. Dane knew that it had disappointed the organizers by not being as vicious as they liked, but he hadn’t given a damn.
Afterwards, he and the other wolf trotted to the makeshift locker room together — an area behind some sheets that had been strung up. Both of them shifted, completely stark naked.
“Good fight,” the other wolf had said, stretching out his hand. “I’m Isaac.”
“Dane,” he’d said. He’d felt lit up like a Christmas tree, and was almost certain that Isaac could see the electricity humming through his body, lust and desire all wrapped up in the adrenaline of the fighting ring.
That’s when the doors had slammed open and the shouting had started. Seconds later, the Sacramento PD had burst through the sheets hanging around Isaac and Dane, guns out, and ordered them both to the floor, still naked. Dane had to talk the officers into letting them put on sweatpants and t-shirts before being hauled down to the station in handcuffs, where they’d waited in a holding cell that had looked a lot like the one they were in with Grey.
“You remember making out in the cell?” Isaac asked.
Dane looked at Grey, blushing a little.
“Of course I remember that,” he said. “We were the last two they took in for processing, so we were alone together in the cell, and I couldn’t help myself.”
“We still had handcuffs on,” Isaac said. “The cops had to beat on the bars to get us to pay attention to them.”
“When they took him away, he just shouted, ‘I’m in Rustvale!’” mused Dane. “So then I had to come looking for him.”
Isaac laughed.
“It worked, didn’t it?”
“I guess,” teased Dane.
“So you stopped fighting?” Grey said.
“That was my second-to-last fight,” Dane said. “The last one I lost in about thirty seconds, and they didn’t want me on the circuit anymore, so I left and joined the police academy.”
“They let you, even after getting arrested?”
“The charges ended up getting dropped,” Dane said.
Isaac nodded.
“The fight organizer has a lot of sway,” he said. “He knows a lot of lawyers, a lot of people who can make stuff go away.”
“Does he know how to make people go away?” Grey asked.
Dane looked down at her, a shiver of danger going through him.
“Not unless we have a whole lot of solid evidence to connect him to it,” he said.
“Pete’s smart,” said Isaac, shaking his head. “Smart and careful.”
“You said Nicky owed people money,” Grey said, softly.
“You don’t get money from a dead man,” said Isaac.
The talk made Dane start forming a to-do list in his head. Tonight he was dead tired, and he was already here, in a cell, with his — with Isaac and Grey, and he didn’t think that a herd of wild horses could drag him away.
But tomorrow, he had shit to do. He had to find whoever had been at that poker game with Grey. Whether Nicky had been there before her, and left. He needed to find out who Nicky o
wed money to, whose toes Nicky had stepped on, who just couldn’t stand Nicky’s face anymore.
“I’ll talk to him,” said Dane, glancing over at Isaac.
He could have sworn that he saw something flicker across Isaac’s face, but he let it go.
It’s been a long day, he thought. We’re all tired.
Then Grey’s hand was on his arm. He had the sleeves of his button-down shirt rolled up past his elbows, and she was distractedly poking at the veins in his forearm.
“Yes?” he asked, trying to mask the shivers running up and down his entire body.
“They must love it when you give blood,” she said. “Easy to find a vein.” She had both legs on the bench, crossed neatly beneath the skirt of her sundress. Over that, she’d draped Dane’s jacket, and she leaned against Isaac, her finger running up and down Dane’s arm.
For another brief moment, he and Isaac exchanged glances.
Does she have any idea of the effect she has on me? He wondered. More than anything, she looked bored and nervous — not at all like a woman who had two wolf shifters practically eating from the palm of her hand.
“Shifters can’t give blood,” Dane said.
Grey frowned.
“Really?”
He shook his head.
“Why not?”
Dane shrugged. “People are afraid it’ll make them sick,” he said. “Patients don’t want shifter blood, and the general population doesn’t want to think that if they ever need a transfusion, it might come from a dirty wolf.”
“Does it make humans sick?”
“No. It’s happened a couple of times that shifters gave blood without admitting to being shifters, and nothing’s happened.”
“So if you gave me a blood transfusion, I wouldn’t be able to turn into a wolf.”
Isaac laughed.
“We’re not vampires,” he said.
“I’m just asking!” Grey said, a little defensively. “I don’t know many shifters, but a couple of my students are, so I’m trying to learn.”
“Sorry,” Isaac said, still grinning.
“Anyway,” she said, still tracing one finger over Dane’s arm, “It’s stupid that you can’t give blood.”
“I agree,” said Dane.
“Is that why Ramirez is being kind of a dick about this?” she asked. “Because Nicky was a wolf?”