Axel stood with his back to the wall, arms folded, looking like he might tear the building down if anyone blinked wrong at me. Vin was a silhouette through the frosted glass of the hallway, pacing slow and steady, hands in the pockets of his jacket.
Carter herself looked like she’d just finished a double shift and was halfway through the next one. She tossed a folder onto the desk between us and flipped it open to a blank page.
“Your full name?” she asked, voice clipped and nasal.
“Darla May Maple.” My voice shook a little, but steadied out by the end.
Carter wrote it down. “Age?”
“Thirty.” I kept my eyes on her, even when she didn’t look up.
She reached for the coffee pot, poured some into a Styrofoam cup, and slid it across the table to me. “You want cream? Sugar?”
“I’ll take it straight.” I did, too, though it tasted like burned regret.
“Tell me what happened,” Carter said, and for the first time her eyes met mine. They were slate-gray and so tired I wanted to crawl inside them and sleep for a year.
I started from the beginning—the van, the men, the pills, the warehouse. I told her how Bart and Sarge worked for my father, how my father worked for the Lord, and how the Lord had a side hustle moving girls across state lines. I told her everything I’d heard in the van and through the vents in the house.
Carter didn’t blink. She just wrote, nodding at the right places, letting me drown myself in confession.
Axel never moved, but I felt his eyes on me the whole time. Like he was daring me to flinch.
When I got to the part about the gunfight, Carter leaned back. “You’re saying the Royal Bastards MC rescued you?”
“They’re not the villains here,” I said. “Not this time.”
“Funny,” Carter murmured, “I got two dead men on a rural highway and a dozen witnesses saw motorcycles leaving the scene. You want to tell me what’s really going on, or do I need to read you your rights?”
“They had me in the back of a van, Detective. If Axel hadn’t found me, I’d be another fucking Jane Doe in a drainage ditch.”
Carter drummed her pen on the table. “You understand your father’s a pillar of this community. You got any proof he’s running this operation?”
I pulled out the battered spiral notebook I’d swiped from my dad’s office—the one with all the names, all the codes, all the dates. I slid it across the desk. Carter took it with a look that was part disbelief, part hunger.
“Where did you get this?” she asked, voice finally cracking.
“The last time I was in the house alone, I took it from his desk and hid it in the bushes out front. We stopped and picked it up before coming here,” I said. “I’d overheard them talking about moving the ‘merchandise.’ The new location is on the last page.”
She flipped through, stopping at every other page, her lips moving as she read off the code words and dollar signs. Her hands were trembling by the time she closed it.
“You know what this means, Darla? He’s going away for a very long time, probably forever.”
I stared at the coffee until my eyes blurred. “I’m scared. He’s got everyone on his payroll—cops, judges, fucking city council. I thought if I came forward, I’d end up worse than before.” I took a shaky breath. “But then he sent Bart and Sarge to kill me. Or sell me. Or both. You ever see a man pray over a coffin he made himself, Detective?”
Axel put his hand on my shoulder. “Nobody’s touching you, unless they have a death wish.”
I put my hand on his.
Carter shook her head, and for a moment, I believed she actually cared.
“I didn’t want to be the next coffin,” I said. “So I called in the only people crazier than my father.”
Carter leaned forward. “Will you testify?”
“If I live long enough.”
Her mouth twitched. “We can keep you safe. We’ve got programs for this.”
