All my brothers were watching her with intense looks. We were a pretty intimidating group of men, but she didn’t seem scared. I liked that. Liked that she didn’t seem to get shaken very easily. She’d approached me with only the slightest nerves, knowing she was going to ask me to help her get rid of a guy. This was my kind of woman.
I never knew I had a specific kind, but nerves of steel and a spine of iron seemed to be it. Not to mention hypnotic green eyes.
“The other night, I started following Teddy’s trail and he led me to Rhino.” She shook her head. “I don’t have proof of anything yet, but he has to be involved somehow.”
“Even if he isn’t involved with what happened to your brother, he’s trash,” I told her. “Good Samaritans don’t punch a woman in the face and then follow her back to where she works to finish the job.”
“He gave you that shiner?” Drifter asked.
“Yeah, when he caught me following him. I didn’t have my sedatives or gun on me, so I punched him in the throat-”
“Fuck yeah,” Code said with an appreciative chuckle. He coughed when everyone looked over at him. “Sorry. I just like a woman who fights back.”
“Don’t we all,” Hype said with a laugh.
“Go on,” I told Rue. Usually I was the one cracking jokes, but they wouldn’t come knowing that she’d been in danger.
“I managed to get away. I thought it was over, didn’t go back. I really don’t have a death wish,” she told me. “I thought I was just following a teenager. I didn’t think I’d actually find anything except maybe Ryan. I really didn’t think I’d run into someone likehim.” She pointed over her shoulder for emphasis.
“So he knows where you work now,” Relay said, giving me a pointed look.
“Yeah,” I answered his unasked question, which was ‘are we going to kill him’. “We’ll get whatever information we can out of him, then take care of it.”
“That’s going to make her investigation run dry,” Kilo pointed out. “Unless we can get some actionable intel.”
“I can get something out of him,” Relay said, tone dark.
“And even if we don’t, we’ll start looking into it,” I replied.
“Oh I can’t ask you to-”
I scowled at Rue until she broke off. “I’m not letting you wander the streets at night looking for one or more killers. Theseguys are kidnapping and offing kids. You think they’ll think twice about murdering a woman?”
She shook her head in answer to my question. “But it’s not your problem.”
“It is now,” I told her.
She searched my face, then nodded. “Thank you. I can’t seem to let this go. Maybe if… Maybe if kids weren’t continuing to die I wouldn’t need to search for the answer of why Ryan is refusing to come home, but I can’t just turn my head. Not when I’m the one bringing their bodies back to my hospital’s morgue. And…”
“And what?” I prompted her.
“Maybe it’s selfish. But I’m still hoping to somehow get to Ryan. To convince him to come home.”
“We’ll figure this out,” I told her, squeezing her hand. That wasn’t selfish. She felt obligated to protect her brother.
“There was another guy there that night too,” she said. “I could take you back to the building he came out of.”
“Good. Always helps to have more information,” I replied. “Now why don’t you wait up here with Hype, Code, and Merc? We’re going to talk to Rhino.”
“No,” she said, standing with me. “I’m going, too.”
“Rue-”
“He might have been the one to take my brother,” she insisted. “Or lure him away…I don’t know. I just want to hear what he says. Blood doesn’t bother me.”
There was no way she could work as a paramedic and have an issue with blood and gore. That wasn’t what worried me. It was the other things he might say, the things he might confess to. I was all too familiar with the structure of these types of operations. I wasn’t sure she was ready for what he might tell us. “You can leave and come back up here at any time.”
She nodded and followed me down our back hallway to the room we took anyone we needed to ‘talk’ to.
