“Give me twenty minutes, and I’ll be back.”
Jina sighed and slumped back down on the bench. “Okay.”
Without another word, Willow turned and hurried to the staircase. I followed closely behind. We got to her apartment to find the door frame splintered. Willow gasped when she stepped inside. If anything, Jina hadn’t done the damage justice.
Not a single thing had escaped the intruder's attention. The walls were all spray painted with crude insults, the couch was in shambles, and every pillow was ripped apart. There wasn’t a single shelf or table that stood upright, and anything that could be smashed or broken lay ruined on the floor. All the cabinets in the kitchen were open. Shattered crockery littered the floor and the stink of food from the fridge and pantry filled the space.
Gingerly stepping through the rubble, Willow moved deeper into the apartment. She was silent, but I could smell distress radiating off of her.
“I can replace or repair everything,” I said, hoping to ease her suffering.
“I’m sad I lost so many things,” she said, moving into Jina’s room. “But the fact that someone deliberately targeted me is the biggest problem. Who would want to hurt me like this?”
“Maybe they’re after Jina.”
She turned to look at me. “Do you really think that?”
I shook my head. I needed to be honest with Willow. “I can smell a hint of their rage. The people who did this were focused on you. I can feel it.”
I expected that to upset her, but she only looked resigned. “It had to be me. I have way more enemies than Jina does. For all her big talk and cussing, she’s got a mild personality. She hates it when people are upset and would much rather stay quiet than cause waves. I’ve never backed down from a fight.” She waved at the mess. “This had to be because of me.”
She made her way to Jina’s room. The quilt was in one piece, but it had been badly ripped in several places and there was spray paint on it. Willow gently gathered it and held it tightly in her arms, then turned to her room. She stopped in the doorway and gagged.
If I hadn’t scented the intentions of the intruders, the special attention they paid to destroying her room would’ve told me Willow was the target. Not only was it given the same destructive treatment as the rest of the apartment, but they’d gone a step further and pissed on everything. I could smell it from where I was standing behind her.
“Leave it,” I commanded. I refused to let her even walk into that defiled place. “I’ll replace everything, but don’t touch it. Don’t let them soil you also.”
Willow turned in place and pressed her head against my chest. I wrapped my arms around her and held tight. We stood like that for a little while before she pulled away.
“You don’t need to replace my stuff,” she murmured, looking up at me with tears swimming in her eyes. “But make the people who did this pay!”
“That will happen,” I promised.
Willow
Hours later, the police finally showed up. They took our statement, gave us a website we could check for a case number, and left. We weren’t under any illusion that the cops would catch the people who did all the damage. The only thing the police would do was create a record. Unless whoever did this to our place kept doing it to others or went after a home in a more affluent neighborhood, it was unlikely they’d ever be caught.
A manager from the company that ran the building showed up as the cops were finishing. He stood there, making impatient sounds waiting to talk to us. He was brusque, rude, and unsympathetic. If Jina wasn’t already struggling to keep from crying, I might’ve picked a fight with the manager.
At least he said he’d have the door fixed by the end of the day. Not that we were ever coming back, but for some reason, it helped to know that our space wasn’t going to be desecrated by randos wandering in through an open door.
When it was all finally done, I loaded Jina into the back seat of the car. She was dazed from the whole thing so she didn’t notice at first. She seemed to “wake up” after we hit the freeway and couldn’t stop talking about the vehicle.
“You bought her this car,” Jina said for the hundredth time as I drove us to Vie’s place. “But you guys have only been dating for, what, a week? And you bought her this?”
“Yes, he bought me this car,” I said. “Now drop it.”
Jina ignored me and kept talking to Vie. “You must be loaded. Are you like rich, rich-rich, or fucking rich?”
I snorted. “That made no sense.”
Jina finally turned her attention to me. “It does. Rich is like people with pools in their backyards. Rich-rich are people with a couple of houses that have pools in their backyards. Fucking rich is when you have vacation homes on islands.”
It felt good to have the old Jina back. “That’s all the levels of rich?”
“Nope,” she said. “There is also going-to-space-for-the-fun-of-it rich.”
As we got closer to the exit for Vie’s place, I had a thought. “Um, Vie, do you have another bed?”
