"The damage was done the moment our eyes collided."
~Xavier De Luca
***
One life-altering night ignites a soul-scorching passion between a gangster and a good girl...One that could burn everyone they know and love to ashes.
Loyalties and legacies...
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It was agonizing to leave Grace on that sidewalk.
Pure unadulterated rage still simmered in my veins just thinking about Cillian manhandling her. Seeing her face pucker when he yanked her down the walkway like a ragdoll broke the tentative hold on what little composure I had left.
Worse, I couldn't unsee the reproach in her expression.
It was as if our eyes met through my tinted bulletproof glass. She'd looked right at me. As if she'd seen me, the real me, and it superseded my focus
She knew I was a monster. Of course, she did. Cillian probably told her the sort of man I was the moment I was gone.
I was well on my way to throttling the life out of that carrot-topped-twerp in broad daylight, but her tragically beautiful face gave me pause.
She'd already buried her brother. Killing someone else she cared for would only make things worse, no matter how much satisfaction it would bring me.
Instead, out of an abundance of caution, I directed my very surprised driver to move on. Tony shot me a sideways glance for good measure as he readjusted in the passenger seat to watch the road.
Our little coast-by did, however, give me the opportunity to study the new detective on Gannon's case.
He looked like every other beat-cop that graduated to a desk with his all-American jawline and tidy dishwater-blonde hair.
That corn-fed motherfucker may have fooled an innocent soul like Grace, but not me. He enjoyed the insidious power of his badge as much as the next cop on the nasty streets of Los Angeles.
"What's his story, Tony?" I asked.
Something in detective Nowak's trained expression had me trying to remember where I'd seen those observant khaki eyes before.
"The kid?" Tony slung an inquisitive look over his shoulder.
"No, the badge," crossing my legs, I relaxed as my driver, Samuel, wound us away from the scene.
"Brian Nowak," Tony nodded before taking a sip from his water bottle. "He's new, but if he's on the take, he ain't with us. His background's clean as a whistle. Far as I can tell, the guy moved here from Stockton about six months ago, but that's where it gets weird. We couldn't find an academy graduate with the name Brian Nowak in the county. I'm having our guy widen the search to state-wide."
We had paid associates in the police department. Lots of them. Ones that could bring us back the type of information we might need, or make something unflattering 'go away,' but Detective Nowak was too new to peg apparently.
That, in and of itself, made me mindful.
"He could be from outta state," Tony suggested, "But I don't like it."
