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“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I groaned, then sank down back into my chair. Taavi leaned into my legs and whined.
It was going to be another long fucking night.
* * *
I’d barely gottenmyself and Taavi in the door—thanks to Dan, who had generously driven us home because my beloved Charger no longer had a windshield, a driver’s side window, or taillights—when my phone rang, the screen showing me a picture of Tony the Tiger.
“Hart,” I answered it, tucking the phone alongside my jaw as I unhooked Taavi’s collar. He shook his head, one ear flopping over, and I ruffled it, unable to resist.
“The fuck, Hart?” Raj sounded pissed.
I sighed for what felt like the millionth time that night. “I don’t have the headspace for any more shit today, Raj,” I told the tiger shifter.
“Where are you?” he asked me.
“Home. Where are you?”
“How did you get there?”
“Dan Maza, not that it’s any of your goddamn business,” I snapped back.
“Do you trust him with your life, Hart?”
I stood up, holding the phone in my hand, and walked on autopilot into the kitchen, tired and hungry. I could hear the click of Taavi’s nails as he followed me. “Yeah, I do. The fuck is your problem, Raj?”
I heard him blow out a huff that sounded an awful lot like Taavi when he was annoyed. “You the fuck are my problem, Hart,” Raj growled back. “You and the fact that you just keep fucking ending up on the bad end of everything.”
“What the fuck do you want me to do about that, Raj? I can’t fucking help what I am.” Despite the bravado in my voice, my heartrate spiked at his words. First, it stung that Raj was somehow holding me accountable for the shit being slung at me from Precinct Four. Second, it made me nervous that Raj was worried about me, because if he was worried, then I should also be worried.
And now I was too distracted to try to focus on dinner, so I leaned back against the counter, wrapping my free arm around myself.
Raj was quiet for a moment, although I could hear him breathing over the phone.
“Quit,” he said, then.
“Ex-fucking-scuse me?” I couldn’t have possibly heard him correctly.
“Quit,” he repeated. “Leave the RPD. Hart, you could’ve been killed last week. It’s going to happen again, and you cannot—do you hear me?cannot—trust the uniforms or even the other detectives to have your back. At best, some of them will turn around and let you get beaten to death, and at worst—Fuck, Hart, youknowthere are guys out there who will literally fucking push you into a riot, hoping you’ll get killed.”
He was upset.
So was I.
“You think I don’t fucking know that, Raj? I’ve got the goddamn scars and bruises to prove it. But what the fuck else am I going to do? This is my goddamn city. These are my people—ourfucking people—getting killed out there, and if I don’t do this job, who the fuck do you think will?”
Raj was quiet.
“Fuck, Hart,” he hissed.
“Yeah. It’s a goddamn pile of maggot-infested, arsenic-laced pig shit,” I replied. “It stinks to high fucking heaven and it’ll probably kill you sooner or later if you get it on your hands. But I can’t just walk the fuck away and let the rat-fucking bastards win.”
Raj made an odd noise in the back of his throat. “I don’t like it, Hart.”
“And I’m throwing a goddamn party over here? I don’t have a fucking car anymore, Raj. And any fuckhead can look up my driver’s license and find where I live. But what the fuck else am I going to do?”
“Sleep somewhere else.”
“Where?”
