“I don’t know. They said there’s been an incident at the building, in my apartment, and I needed to get there right away.”
My jaw clenched,and all I wanted to do was fuck someone up. I had no idea who was messing with Chanel, but I wanted them to pay. The most frustrating part was not having a specific target. At least when Muffin fucked around, I knew exactly whose face to smash in. With Chanel, I had a faceless target. That fucked with my mind something terrible, which contributed to a bad attitude when we arrived at her building to find the police at her unit.
“Ms. Dubois, somehow, someone made it into the building and into your apartment.”
“The hell you mean ‘somehow’? The hell y’all been sitting here doing in the twenty minutes it took us to get here?” I demanded.
He looked at me, and I recognized the starstruck look in his eyes. It was the same look most fans had when they met me in person. I wasn’t about being personable at the moment though.
“Mr. Santoro, I assure you that we’re working on determining the answer to that right now. We are interviewing all the staff, looking at security footage, and a full-scale investigation in her apartment is ongoing. There has been some vandalization. I’m not sure if anything is missing or not, but we would like for you to do a walk-through with a couple of our officers to determine that,” an officer stated.
As he was explaining that, a short, petite officer walked up behind us. It was the same woman who arrived at Alex’s house when our fight broke out. I wasn’t happy to see her, but she wasn’t focusing on me, but the other officers and Chanel.
“What’s going on?” she demanded.
“Officer Goode, we were?—”
“Tommi!” Chanel exclaimed, as she turned toward the female officer and grabbed her. They hugged tightly as Chanel cried. I felt useless for the moment, but I wasn’t leaving her side. After she cried for several moments, and the woman comforted her, she stepped back and looked at me.
“Ashton, this is my cousin, Tommi.”
It clicked in my mind that Chanel had been at the station when I was released. That was how she knew that I was there.
“We’ve met,” I grumbled.
Tommi smiled at me and then turned back and started speaking to the officers. They explained again what occurred.
“I’m confused. I live in a secure facility. People cannot get in here that easily.”
“Which is why we’re thinking it’s an inside job and looking at all the staff who were on and off duty tonight, along with the security cameras,” the original officer explained.
“I’ll do a walk-through with her to determine if anything is missing,” Tommi declared. “Where are we with getting security footage?”
“Officer Pommel is getting that now,” the lead officer explained.
“Are you coming?” Tommi asked as she took Chanel’s hand and led her into the apartment.
Rage tightened every muscle in my body as I saw what they had done to her apartment. All I wanted was to grab her in my arms and press her face against my chest, to protect her from seeing the destruction. Someone had come through with the same red paint that they had used on her car and spray-painted her walls and furniture with the words Whore, Homewrecker, Slut, Thot, and You reap what you sow.
It was hard for her to see her apartment that way and keep herself together, but with both of us on either side of her, she made it through. It took almost an hour for us to finish the walk-through. Nothing had been taken, but things had been damaged. Something slimy had been thrown across her bed; food had been tossed out of the refrigerator onto the floors, counters, cabinets, and appliances.
Her couch and chair cushions had been ripped with a knife. The TVs had been smashed, and several picture frames were broken with some of the pictures still intact and others destroyed. She walked to her office and found her files destroyed and her computer smashed.
She broke down crying, especially when she noticed that her awards had been damaged as well.
“Do you have any of these files that were destroyed backed up?” Tommi asked.
Chanel nodded as she sobbed so hard that her body shook.
“What about your things on the computer? Are they backed up?”
She nodded again but couldn’t speak. That was all I could take. Against my better judgment, I pulled Chanel into my arms and held her.
“Chanel, honey—” Tommi began.
“Give her a minute. She can answer all the questions you want later.”
“We need to get it while it’s still fresh,” her cousin explained.
