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“I can take you to work like a civilized person,” I insisted. “Or back to your place to get clothes—”
“I brought some.”
Heat pooled in my chest at that, and I felt my lips twitch. “Oh.”
“If that’s okay?”
“Hell yes.” I stood, his fingers still in mine, then brought his hand to my lips to press a kiss to his knuckles. “It’s more than okay.”
Taavi smiled up at me, his eyes warm. “Take me to bed?”
Leaving the blanket behind, I led him down the hall to the bed we’d shared for two months. This time, he wasn’t going to be sleeping on top of the covers.
15
I droppedTaavi off at work as promised the next morning, wishing I could have lingered longer with his lips on mine as he kissed me quickly before sliding out of the Charger, his satchel—with yesterday’s clothes—over his uninjured shoulder. I waited for him to go through the glass front doors of the Arc-Arcanid Youth Center, and I was rewarded when he paused to look back with a half-smile.
I was so stupidly in love with this man.
And that worried me.
Taavi was selfless, clever, sweet, and had a sense of humor that—while admittedly a bit twisted, since he thought I was funny—made him both charming and calming at the same time. What worried me was that I was none of those things, and that Taavi would realize soon enough that I didn’t deserve him, and that he didn’t deserve an asshole like me, just… the other way around. He was an infinitely better person than me and shouldn’t have to put up with my shit.
I took a deep breath and reminded myself that I was supposed to be done with that crap. I was not going to try to save Taavi from myself because he was an adult who had the right to decide who he dated and slept with, even if I thought he was being completely stupid by dating and sleeping with me.
So even though I was worried that one day he’d finally see the proverbial light and dump my ass, I was going to hold onto him for as long as he’d let me.
Which brought me to my other worry. That this fucking case was going to end up getting him killed, which would be so very much worse than me getting my sorry ass dumped.
As I headed back to Beyond the Veil, my phone rang, and I took my eyes off the road long enough to tap the screen and bring up Dan on speaker.
“What’s up, Dan?”
“Bad news, Hart,” came his exhausted-sounding voice.
“Is there any other kind?” I asked, trying to lighten the mood.
“Not these days,” Dan replied, and I felt a stab of guilt for having left him in the lurch at the RPD, even though it probably had been the right decision. “But I didn’t call just to bitch at you,” he told me. “Although there’s that. The Oldham case has been restricted.”
I blinked, then frowned. “The fuck does that mean, Dan?”
“It means all the evidence is missing. Supposedly moved.”
“Moved the fuck where?” I wanted to know.
“If I had the answer to that, it wouldn’t be missing, now, would it?”
He had a point. “What do you know, Dan?” I asked.
“Not much,” came the response. “But it’s what I don’t know that’s most interesting.”
“Do tell.”
I heard him sigh. “What I don’t know is why they’re icing these supposed Ordo cases. I don’t know what’s happened to the evidence from them—any of them. It isn’t just Oldham, Whitehead, and Bazan. It’s also Greer and Nesbit and Mitchell. Even the fucking attempted file on Manning.”
Well, thatwasinteresting. It was one thing to freeze out closed files or cold cases. Greer, Nesbit, and Mitchell had all been shot by Victor Picton. We knew that—Picton himself was dead, and that meant those files were closed. But Doc’s case was different. Attempted murders often got flagged in the system just in case somebody tried again—but if that case was removed entirely…
Not good.
