“So that’s it? Dima’s just… lost. Forever? Stuck in that shitty situation?”
King sighed and glanced at me. “This means a lot to you?” He looked good; the silver in his honey-brown hair was manly, and his sharp cheeks and nose were made particularly attractive in the golden light of the sinking sun. My heart squeezed a little—not because I wanted him, but because I’d had him before and we were friends, and this was a serious situation. I was glad that if I had to be in this shit with someone besides Jayce and Madden, it was him.
“Dima seemed really fucking stuck. And he was nice when someone else probably wouldn’t have been. He wasn’t happy with what they were doing to me, King, and he was scared too.”
“Dima, huh?” He rested his head back against the seat.
“Yeah.”
He nodded and looked out the passenger window. “I don’t want this particular hydra to grow another head in our city. Tell you what, don’t worry about it, okay? Your cop boyfriend might be all high-and-mighty justice, but I know of a couple of boys who do a certain kind of work. I’ll put them on finding Dima, and maybe they’ll find the rest of these fucks, too.”
I glanced at him and then put my attention back on the road fast. “Really?”
“Yeah.”
“They won’t be cheap, will they?” Madden asked. He was never fazed by money, but that made me suck in a breath. If Madden funded anything it could be bad for him, and that he would even offer….
King laughed. “No, they won’t.”
“Halfsies?”
I glanced in the rearview mirror. “This isn’t fucking dinner, Madden.”
“No, but they hurt you. You’re a good guy, River. You may not realize it, but without you I don’t think I would still be a lawyer, and this is my, like,ikigai. My reason to wake up. I would have gotten bored before my career became interesting and wandered off to something new. I likeyou, and I like working withyou. You’re my friend and they hurt you.” His eyebrows dipped down, and I glimpsed the bulldog who sometimes showed up at a courtroom when we were sure we were in the right. He glared at me in the mirror.
“Well said.” King clapped a hand to my shoulder.
“Would you be putting this much energy into this if I hadn’t gotten caught up in it?” I asked King, point blank.
“No.”
My heart swelled. I knew I should have wanted him to say “yes,” that it would have still bothered him just as much, that the sex trafficking was dangerous and dehumanizing and all that other shit, but the fact that he fucked up my hair by ruffling it while I was taking a sharp turn onto the two-lane road and couldn’t fight him off made me smile and sniff and blink too much.
“Thanks.”
“Don’t fucking mention it. Really. To anyone,” he said, but he was smiling when he turned to look out the passenger window.
21
Jayce
Detective O’Neill was a pain in the arse, so I shouldn’t have been surprised that he gave me and Slater hell when we brought Jason—or whatever he’d decided to call himself today—in with the proof needed to throw him behind bars. The guy even confessed, but still, O’Neill chewed our arses out for “taking matters into our own hands.” As if those lazy bastards had plans to do anything about anything. They didn’t waste their time on Sebastian after a few weeks when he was still underage, so why would they give a shit about a sex trafficking ring?
We made our way back to the office where Conrad agreed to meet us with the Russian lady. He’d been taking care of her since I last saw her, seeing as he was the only single bloke out of the lot of us, and we hadn’t heard a peep from him, so she clearly wasn’t giving him trouble. Now that this was all over, though, we could send her home with the warning not to come back.
The sun was setting, the rays shedding its last light through the city buildings with the air rapidly cooling the way it did this time of the year. My body hurt; between my long cop hours and the PI gig, and River, too, I was exhausted, but in a different way than before this thing with River happened. I was happier, and my pains were the good kind.
Slater glanced at me from the corners of his eyes, his fingers tapping on the steering wheel as he pulled into the parking spot in front of our building. Our office was one of the few that was one-story, with the others like towering giants around us.
“Bet River’s happy now,” Slater said, grinning at me.
I nodded, staring out the windshield at a golden retriever puppy that bounded past the front of the truck, attached to a leash that was held by a handsome dark-haired man. Another man walked beside him and their hands were locked together. I smiled at them and how obviously happy they were. Slater waved at them, and they waved back enthusiastically like maybe they knew one another, but they were too busy chasing after their dog to stop.
“Honey, slow down.” The dark-haired man laughed, pulling the leash gently to make the puppy come bounding back to them.
“I suppose River would be, yeah,” I finally answered Slater.
“So what happens now between you two?” Slater hopped out, slammed his door, and then jerked open the back door of his truck, dragging a backpack out and slinging it over his shoulder, and I followed, climbing from the cab.
