Know what? Fuck this.
I frowned and shook my head.Fuck this shit.I just left her and walked into the kitchen to join Aaron and Sean.
Thankfully, they looked like they were done. Lieutenant Rollings was already handcuffed and ready to go to the station.
We’d been there for less than an hour, but it felt like it’d been forever.
“We’re just going to take you to the station where we can question you properly,” Aaron told the lieutenant.
The poor man nodded and a tear ran down his cheek. I wouldn’t lie or pretend to not feel anything; I did feel sorry for him.
He stood up by himself, but Sean took hold of his left arm to usher him out.
“What will happen to her?” he asked Aaron. “I need someone to come around and clean the place up.”
My best buddy at least had the decency to give a professional answer and not say what I knew was on his mind.
The place had been shot up to hell and looked like a herd of wildebeest had run through it.
“We’ll sort something out,” Aaron told him before giving me a withered look.
“I can’t believe my own brother would do this to me. Fucking bastard,” Lieutenant Rollings snarled.
I didn’t bother to tell him his wife was an equal participant in the scenario, and based on my brief encounter with her, I thought it had most likely been her who initiated the whole affair.
We walked him out of the kitchen.
Mrs. Rollings was still sitting in the living room in that seductive pose, perched up on the sofa like one of those hairless cats I hated. She reminded me of one of those paintings of those god-awful things, sitting on a cushion. Her steely blue eyes only served to enhance the vision.
“Bye baby,” she called after the lieutenant.
I felt some sense of triumph when he turned his head away from her and looked ahead, not answering.
He did, however, break down once Sean got him seated in his patrol car.
The guy was actually crying tears of pain.
Women…they were beautiful creatures who could change everything in the blink of an eye, for good or for bad. Some were literal angels, while others were like Mrs. Rollings and used their looks to get what they wanted without caring about the consequences.
Then there were others who were so valuable and precious, there was no description for them.
I could only think of three women who fit that description for me.
The first was my mother, who’d put up with my crap daily for a solid eighteen years. The second was my baby girl, who I preferred not to consider a woman just yet because when I looked at her I saw the five-minute-old baby the doctors had handed to me when she was born.
And the third…well…
The third had to be Olivia, Aria’s mother, the one woman who’d successfully managed to steal my heart. She had also been the only woman to truly break me, to break everything inside me in a way that would never be fixed.
A part of me had died too the day she died.
Much as I hated it, I found myself thinking about her more than I wanted to lately. It was all this shit with Aria.
It was simple: the reason I didn’t know what to do was because I’d never been a sixteen-year-old girl. Eager to leave and initiate my plans for the evening, I rushed over to Aaron. If not for that damn incident, I would have been home an hour ago. I needed to get back by five. It was four now, and if I left right this minute, I could probably beat traffic.
“Hey, you good to finish up here?” I asked him.
He ran his hand over his beard and frowned, large brown eyes narrowing at me. The scar over his eyebrow looked more pronounced when he scowled.
