“If I had, he wouldn’t be my former fiancé.” If looks could kill, Grey would be a bleeding mess on the floor. Then Bree caught Eric’s eye, and the same blade sliced through him.
He wondered what she saw when she looked at him now. He wondered how she could stand to look at him at all. He’d had everything in the palm of his hand. And then it all fell apart.
The plan had been to protect her. From Zane of all people. The irony killed. Eric wanted to keep her at arm’s length while he worked on getting the dirty cop out his unit; then he’d get her back. It had been a stupid plan; his ego wrote cheques his fiancée couldn’t cash. He had been so blind. What kind of woman would let herself be pushed away with no explanation without fighting back? None he wanted to go out with. He’d been so wrapped up in protecting Bree from Zane, he forgot to protect her from himself.
Unfortunately, his Bree was a smart cookie. She remembered that part, and took care of it herself. She took his words at face value and moved on like he told her to. Eric kept thinking the case would wrap up, and he’d catch Bree before she got too far down the road from him. It didn’t. Now Bree was doing fuck-knew-what with fuck-knew-who while he was exactly where he started, crazy in love with her and willing to do whatever it took to make her happy. At this point, that meant staying away even if it killed him.
“Do you know what happened to Constable Zane after you filed your report?”
“No, I had no contact with him after that day. I made sure of it. My engagement ended soon after,” Bree told the court.
Eric didn’t stick around to listen to more; he’d heard more than enough. He slipped out while the prosecutor and Zane’s lawyer argued with the judge over some point of law that wasn’t going to matter anyway. Zane was going down, with or without Bree’s testimony. They may not believe she’d withheld information from the cop she intended to marry, but Eric knew she wasn’t lying.
Adam joined him in the corridor. A pair of brown eyes that matched Bree’s stared him down. “This is fucked up,” Adam said.
“Did you know? That Bree knew Zane was dirty?” Eric demanded.
“Of course not.”
“You’re her brother.”
“You were sleeping with her. If she told anybody, it would have been you,” Adam said.
The various lawyers and civilians walking through the white stone corridor gave them a wide berth. A pair of pissed-off, armed cops? They had all the privacy they needed.
A third man joined them. Trent Holland—Dutch to his friends—was an unhealthy shade of tomato. “I think we can safely say we screwed the pooch on this one,” the Homicide inspector said. “How did we not know your sister was involved in a federal investigation into Zane?”
“Because she kept her mouth shut the way she was supposed to,” Adam said.
It didn’t speak well for the unit that the RCMP had been running a separate investigation into a WPS sergeant, in addition to the force’s own internal investigation. The Homicide unit already had a black eye about one dirty cop. Now it looked like the rest of them hadn’t escaped suspicion.
“What are you going to do about Bree?” Adam asked.
Because, in the end, what had happened with Bree was on Eric. He didn’t know what he was going to say exactly, but he and Bree were going to have a very uncomfortable talk.
