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“Yeah, let’s circle back to Czar,” I said, wincing inside at how sharp I’d said his name.
“Well, after spending the night at the motel,” she started.
“Why didn’t you come here?” I asked, cutting off what she was about to say.
“I just… I wasn’t ready yet,” she said, glancing away again. “Let me get to that part.”
“Okay. You went to the motel.”
“Yeah, after I dropped in on poor Dr. Price. I just didn’t feel safe at home,” she admitted. “And I didn’t really get much sleep, just stewed in what happened. Which got me good and pissed. Which gave me enough motivation to drive my ass up to the prison this morning to confront him, since I’d been sure he was behind it.”
“But he wasn’t,” I concluded.
“The look on his face when he saw all this,” she said, waving at her head, “really told me all I needed to know. It wasn’t him. He said he was behind the notes and flowers. But not for a while because the guy he had sending them to me got locked up too.”
“He doesn’t have any idea who could be doing it?”
“No. He said he is going to look into it, but he’s been away for a long time. I don’t know if they will even give him any sort of information now.”
It was a fucked situation.
I mean, if it had been Czar, it would have been an easy enough fix. At least you knew who the enemy was.
But if it wasn’t, and Nyx seemed pretty sure he had nothing to do with it, then we were completely in the dark.
“Why wouldn’t you come to me sooner?” I asked, hearing the hint of vulnerability in my tone, and finding that I actually didn’t give a fuck about her hearing it.
She had, after all, just been vulnerable with me.
To that, she let out a sigh.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” she said with a little smirk that said she was pretty sure everyone had. “But I can be really stubborn and have a bit of an ego?”
“Shit, really? Never fucking noticed that,” I drawled, getting a real smile out of her.
“It’s stupid, looking back, but I was really embarrassed.”
“About being dragged into the drug trade?” I asked, brows pinching.
“About being involved with a guy who was trying to control my life. Except, of course, as it all turned out, he wasn’t. But that was just… humiliating to me. I didn’t want anyone to think that I would let a guy control me.”
“If someone was controlling you with shit like threats to you or the guys you were with, babe, I don’t think there was a fuckuva lot of ‘letting’ it happen,” I reasoned.
“I know. It’s stupid. Looking back, it was irrational. But I just… I kind of project a very careful image. I didn’t want people seeing me differently.”
“I’m not saying you should put up a billboard for the entire fucking town to see, babe,” I told her. “I’m saying that you have people who care about you in your life, and you don’t have to put up any kind of image for them.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, nodding. “I’m starting to see that,” she added. “So… what happens now?” she asked. “I mean, you’re the lifelong criminal, right?” she added, shooting me a smile before taking another sip of her coffee.
I was.
But my world was usually more black-and-white. Aside from whoever shot up Riff and Raff on their way into town a while back, our enemies had never really been hidden.
“Now, we figure out who is slinging H around here,” I said. “Which means I’m gonna have to talk to Cillian and his brothers,” I warned her.
“I know. I mean… I was considering going to them too.”
I knew her well enough at this point to figure she meant that the choice had been between going to them or coming to me.
