But I was at the end of my rope, and something told me that ordering her to stop being such a miserable crybaby and shut up wouldn’t have garnered the results I was hoping for.
Surely, it wasn’t exactly the most tactful, or helpful thing to do.
Luckily for us, Eva had plenty of alphas around that werefarmore emotionally viable than I was.
Indigo, to their credit, was dedicated to making Eva feel at home. So much so that they were, for the time being, ignoring their bruised ego with Marcus and Joon… still. Things in the house were unusually tense. I’d never heard the alpha say so few words in a day.
It was strange; there was a time where I would have celebrated this change. Indigo’s constant yapping did wonders for ensuring that none of us saw any peace. But now?
I was man enough to admit when I was wrong. Without Indigo’s terminally unserious chattering the entire house felt… off.
I didn’t like it, but I wasn’t sure how to resolve it either. Our time with Eva was supposed to give them an outlet, a chance to work through their negative emotions so they could get back on board with the program—that this was a good thing.
That Joon bonding into our pack, no matter with who, meant he was going to be a permanent fixture in our lives.
And now, there was only one piece of the puzzle left to place before our family was complete.
I ducked under the yellowdo not crosspolice tape stuck to the doorframe of Eva's apartment with a roll of my eyes. The door itself was so damaged it didn’t close properly, and the tape? What a joke.
No one and nothing was going to be deterred from entering because of a little yellow plastic. Though, perhaps once they got a look at the disaster inside they’d change their mind anyway.
I adjusted my black latex gloves, nose wrinkling at the crunch of glass—from the shattered mirror that used to hang near her front door—underfoot.
Law enforcement were excellent at embezzling money and harassing minorities without cause, but for the most part I thought of them as being ineffectual high school dropouts who fell prey to targeted ad campaigns looking for men who felt small.
Oddly enough, my solution for building the self-esteem of loser piss babies with no social skills didn’t involve handing them a gun, but perhaps that was just my European sensibilities getting in the way of the good old fashioned American Dream.
Still, when it came to the job that the police were allegedly hired to do—solving crimes—they were so ineffective it made me wonder whether the industrial complex of justice was a money laundering scheme.
When it came to protecting my family, I wasn’t taking any chances. This was a job better left to someone who was sufficiently motivated to find the culprit, and who wasn’t bogged down by bureaucratic nonsense.
Me.
I tried the lightswitch, making the damaged lightfixture overhead spark before it sputtered out entirely.
Great.
Using my phone as a flashlight, I studied the wreckage. In the cover of nightfall, without the steady buzz of activity from the detectives and water remediation workers, the place felt eerie.
Unfinished.
Like a haunted house without the cobwebs.
Paper, glass and potting soil littered the floor in a bed of debris that crunched underfoot as I moved further inside, my nose wrinkling at the smell of Eva’s stale dismay hanging in the air.
Carefully, I picked my way through the living room, wincing a little at Eva's ruined collection of physical games. One thing was clear to me, from the depotted plants to the knife split sofa, this hadn’t been about theft. It’d been about doing the most damage possible. They wanted to scare her. To make her feel hopeless. And when I found out who had done this, the terror that I would inflict upon them would make this look like a new neighbor bringing over a pie.
I passed the kitchen, my lip curling away from my teeth in disgust at the paint scrawled over the cabinets—YOUR MINE WHORE—the grammatically incorrect as well as entirely false message doing nothing but making me angrier.
My nose wrinkled, picking up on the remnants of Marcus’ scent in the hall as I made my way towards Eva’s room. He’d left work early to come to wait for the cops so we could take Eva home, letting the detectives ask their questions somewhere that didn’t more closely resemble the trash island floating in the middle of the pacific than her apartment.
The carpet squished underfoot, loud fans in her bathroom and bedroom running with the intent to dry out the floors and walls.
It was bad luck that it’d been a week day, Eva’s downstairs neighbor was a commuter and went into the office uptown, meaning they hadn’t been home during the incident.Unfortunate, since it meant that their apartment flooded too, once the water from the plugged sinks and shower started to seep through Eva’s floor and into their ceiling.
Credit where credit was due, shoving one of Eva’s dildos into the sink drain to plug it? Inventive.
I was going to shove it through their fucking eye socket.
