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“Now I know it’s morally questionable to get involved with a victim, and you know I have a deep respect for the rules,” Eric said. “But I also know that the situation with this particular woman is different. Exceptional. I don’t believe in girly shit like fate, and romance, I’m too much of a cynical old cop for that.”
Maddox snorted at the “old” part of that sentence. Eric was the same age as him, but in a way, he was right. The fucker was an old soul.
Eric didn’t acknowledge the snort. “I’m a cynic, but I’m not blind. Orion is more than a victim. Fuck, looking at her, that label doesn’t fit. She has no one, Maddox. No family, except you and April. The two of you . . . it’s dangerous. I’m gonna tell you to tread fucking lightly. Not just because of what she’s been through, that goes without saying. But because of your history. You’ve carried her with you all these years. That’s why you haven’t had a woman in your bed for longer than a night, no matter what you tell yourself.”
Maddox stared at his partner who was the brother he never had. He was his best friend. Eric knew about Orion. Maddox went to Thanksgiving at his house when he lied to his parents and said he had to work. But they did not have deep and meaningful “talk about your feelings” conversations like this one.
Eric came from a family of cops. His dad had just retired and was well respected in the force and the community. His grandfather had been one of the first black cops in St. Louis, speaking English as a second language. The Baptistes had emigrated from Haiti two generations ago, coming to the country with nothing but the clothes on their backs and generations of slavery and atrocity fresh in their minds. They promised to honor their people in this new land.
Eric was fluent in French because his father was determined for his son to hold on to his past, his heritage. As did all of his sisters, one of which was a beat cop.
His sisters doted on him, which made him sensitive and good with women. Too fucking sensitive, it seemed. They’d never gone this deep with their conversations before. It was an unspoken agreement between them, not to be honest about how deep a toll this job really took. You couldn’t get too introspective about that shit. It’d ruin you.
Maddox’s first instinct was to get mad. Defensive. His fists clenched in preparation for just that. Eric was probably half expecting it. But fuck, he was tired. Tired of pretending shit. Tired of hoping for a stroke of luck that only murderers and pedophiles seemed to get these days.
He sighed, running his hand through his hair, remembering the tentative, scared way that Orion had done the same thing to her long hair. He’d had to lock himself down, hold on to every single one of his natural born instincts to let her do that, let her stay in control. Go slow. Because as much as his mind told him he needed to go slow after what she’d been through, his dick and his heart didn’t get that same message. He could lie to himself and say he hadn’t been tempted that night two months ago, but he wouldn’t.
“Yeah,” Maddox said. “I became a cop because of her.” That much he’d told Eric before, without all the details. “Because I wanted to make a difference, make it so that shit didn’t happen again. I did carry her with me. That fourteen-year-old girl called Ri. She’s not that girl anymore.”
“No, she’s not,” Eric agreed. “Don’t work too hard.”
Then walked off.
He was tired. They both were. This was not the only murder they were working on. And this case was months old. Missouri was experiencing a crime wave. They were normally busy on an “ordinary day” but there had been a lot of missing persons lately. That was technically not in the homicide detective’s department, but Maddox had a theory about the disappearances, considering they had a lot in common. They were all men on the sex offender registry. All vanished without a trace. No signs of foul play in their houses.
Looking at their crimes, Maddox failed to feel any sympathy for the men he suspected of being murdered. But no matter whether he personally was sickened with these men or not—more so than ever with Orion back in his life—this was his job. He was not the morals police—he was the police, here to enforce the law. He didn’t agree with it a lot of the time, but it wasn’t about that. It was about a country free from anarchy. It was about the code he lived by, the vow he took. Plenty of police in this country abused their power, abused their badge, but it would never be him, even if he believed betraying the badge was the “right” thing to do.
