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An enigmatic expression flickered over his face and then he walked back into the kitchen.
Taking another sip of the coffee, I continued to watch him as he placed a pan on the stovetop and turned on the gas. The coffee was good. So good. The bastard. Of course he would make the best coffee I’ve ever had.
“It was the cop who asked me to kill someone.”
My stomach rolled at his statement, uttered in an offhand way over his shoulder as he cracked an egg into the pan.
The sizzling pop and crackle of the egg frying filled the silence between us. I was glad for that. I had no fucking clue what to say. I’d grown up without hearing statements like that. The most horrific statement I’d ever heard in my formative years, those years responsible for how you deal with stressful situations, was, “Veronica, would you like to go to the Justin Bieber concert?”
When Lucas turned back to me, his eyes were angry. And haunted. “The cop—a piece of work called Officer Dewey—became obsessed with me after watching me on the underground MMA circuit. One night, he followed me after a fight. That was how he discovered I was a member of Trinity. He used it as a means to initiate a relationship with me.”
I didn’t like the way he said relationship. Not at all. My face must have shown it.
Lucas chuckled, the sound bleak and dry and without any humor at all. “Yeah, he wanted to fuck me. When I emphatically said no, he gave me two options—let him fuck me or be arrested.”
The wave of nauseous tension that had been churning in my stomach turned into a tidal wave of sickened disbelief. I knew cops weren’t all paragons of virtue, but blackmailing a teenager into sex? Jesus.
“Wh—” I stopped, my mouth dry. “What did you do?”
An image too horrific to describe filled my head. I wanted to wrap Lucas in my arms and hold him, protect him, take away the grief he must be living with.
He chuckled again. “I got arrested.”
I blinked.
“My parents don’t know that of course,” he said, an unreadable emotion in his eyes as he watched me gape at him. “There was nothing to stick and no crime to pin on me. As I was leaving the station, Dewey caught up with me and made me another offer. Turn C.I. for him.”
“C.I.?” Oh God, my tummy was a mess. “Criminal informant? That’s dangerous.”
“It is. But I agreed.”
“Why?”
Lucas drew a slow breath. “He threatened me with something far more important than my anal virginity.”
The way he regarded me told me I didn’t want to hear what that something was. And yet, I asked anyway. “What?”
“You. Dewey told me he’d make your life hell. And by hell, he’d make sure your address and your picture made it into the hands of the kind of people who would love to get closely acquainted with a young, innocent teenage girl who looked the way you looked back then.”
And there it was. I wanted to throw up.
“How did I look back then?” I asked, the words barely more than a scratchy rasp.
He looked at me, his gaze holding mine. “Like heaven. Like the sunshine after a nightmare storm. Like all that is perfect and right with the world.”
“But why would he threaten me?”
“He had me under surveillance, said he’d noticed how I looked at you.”
“Lucas…” I whispered.
“So I said yes,” he went on, reaching for his coffee and raising the mug to his lips.
I watched him take a sip, my mind whirling.
Oh God, he’d…he’d exposed himself to more danger than was imaginable because of me.
“When did this all happen?” I asked, trying to pinpoint the exact moment Lucas’s life had been plunged into hell because of me. Trying to align his behavior since his family had moved in next door to us with what he was telling me now.
