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She disappears from sight and flicks off the light, and I groan as I lock up behind me.
Kael. I’m gonna fucking kill him.
Reed
The look the officer gives me when I bowl through the front doors of the police station at close to midnight is almost laughable. I can tell he recognizes me, but he’s doing his best to maintain a professional image when he signs me in and then points me to a set of doors over to the left of the main reception area.
The doors are stainless steel, covered in smudgy finger marks, and I really don’t want to touch them.
But I have no choice.
I head through the doors and walk down a long corridor, the walls littered with tattered missing persons flyers and rewards for stolen property. There are a few people sitting on a long bench against the wall, but none of them are coherent enough to look up when I walk past them, so I’m not concerned that anyone is going to make a big deal of me being here.
There’s another window when I reach the end of the corridor, so I ring the bell, waiting for someone to come to the counter.
While I wait, I glance around the waiting area.
There’s a woman sitting near me with a baby in a stroller. The baby looks to be about two years old, but that’s a wild guess, because what do I know about babies? It’s a girl. She’s really cute. She slowly looks up at me, and I smile down at her, but she just stares at me with a blank expression that doesn’t seem quite right for a kid that age, and something pulls deep at my heart.
I have to look away.
Thankfully, a female police officer walks up to the counter and asks what she can help me with. I tell her who I’m here to bail out, and I swear she rolls her eyes at the mere mention of Kael’s name. Awesome. He must be making a real good impression back there.
Keep digging that hole, Kael. You’re nearly there, just keep digging.
I sign a shitload of paperwork, hand over my credit card, and then I’m told to take a seat and wait my turn.
Just as I’m about to take a seat with the others, Nick comes barreling through a door to the right of the counter, and when he sees me, he sighs a huge breath of relief, pulling me to one side so we can talk privately.
“Thank goodness you’re here.”
“Where is he?”
“They’re bringing him out of a holding cell in a few minutes. He’s a mess, man. His face is black and blue, and he’s still so drunk he’s slurring his words. I can hardly make out a thing he’s saying.”
“Jesus,” I grumble, rubbing a hand across my mouth.
“This is going to take some major damage control. I don’t know how we can hide this from the media. We have a show in two days. No amount of stage makeup is going to hide the aftermath of this fucking disaster.”
“Have you spoken to anyone from the label?”
“No, not yet,” he replies with a firm shake of his head. “That conversation can wait till morning.”
“It is morning.”
He grunts. “Come on, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?”
“I pulled a few strings and managed to find a cop with a heart. They’re taking him out through a back exit. There’s a parking lot on the east side of the building and a door that doesn’t get used a whole lot. I figured that might make life a little easier, not having to walk back through the chaos out front.”
“Good thinking.”
Thirty minutes later, Nick and I are freezing our asses off in an abandoned parking lot behind the cop-shop that I didn’t even know existed up until this point.
The cinder-block wall at the back of the lot is covered in colorful graffiti, but other than that there’s only a small chain link fence separating the parking lot and the dark side street, the police station sandwiched between tall office buildings.
“I thought you said they were bringing him straight out.” I rub my hands up and down my arms. I’m not exactly dressed to be outside in the middle of the night, and for the briefest moment, my thoughts wander back to Brinley and how cozy and warm it was in her apartment.
