I felt the shudder go through Cope, but I still couldn’t look at him. Heat bloomed in my cheeks, and I struggled to beat it back. “Roman came back around about six months later. Said he’d cleaned up his act and was going to meetings. He seemed…better. But I wasn’t about to trust him with Luca. So, I let him come to my apartment, but only when I was there. To help Luca with his homework or for dinner. I didn’t want Luca to lose his dad.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Sutton. You were doing your best,” Trace said quietly.
It felt like acid burned the backs of my eyes, but I forced myself to keep going and get it all out, once and for all. “Roman came over one afternoon and didn’t stay long. He seemed distracted. I stepped out to take a call from my boss and was gone for five minutes tops. When I came back, everything seemed fine, but Roman made an excuse about having to leave. He stole Luca’s tablet, the necklace my grandmother gave me, and some other jewelry—anything he thought he could hock quickly.”
“Bastard,” Cope ground out.
“Everything else was just stuff. But that necklace was all I had left of my gran. It was one my grandfather had given to her. It had a bumblebee on it because she always used to say, ‘I love you more than bees love?—’”
“Honey.” Cope finished the phrase for me, having heard me say it to Luca countless times, but the single word was pained. “I’m so damn sorry, Warrior.”
But I wasn’t done. And if I didn’t get it all out now, I worried I never would. “There was a knock on the door that night. I thought it was my friend from down the hall, but it wasn’t. It was two enforcers from a Russian organized crime family. They said Roman owed them and that I had to be a warning. They beat me. Broke my ribs and collarbone, split my lip. Doctors had to remove my spleen. And all of that while my little boy slept just feet away.”
That was the thing that finally broke me: the memory of just how easily they could’ve gotten to Luca. It was a miracle that Marilee found me and called the ambulance and that my boy had slept through it all with no harm coming to him.
Tears streamed down my face, dripping from my chin and sliding down my neck. Cope didn’t wait. He moved in one swift motion, slipping into the bed beside me and gently holding me to him. “You’re safe, Warrior. You’re both safe.”
But I could feel the fury pulsing through him in blasts of brutal rage and knew Trace felt the same when he spoke. “Tell me the Baltimore PD got them.”
“They got the enforcers. They’re doing fifteen years and had to pay a small settlement. But their boss, Petrov? He didn’t get a thing because they didn’t turn on him.”
“Fucking hell,” Cope swore as he dropped his face to my head, nuzzling me as if he needed to make sure I was still there.
“I knew I had to get away from there.” I hated the tremor in my voice, but there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. “Out of Petrov’s and Roman’s reach. I already had sole physical and legal custody of Luca. Roman didn’t even show up for the hearing.”
“I remember reading about this somewhere.”
Trace’s words finally had me looking up, only to find fury written all over his face.
I swallowed hard, reminding myself that the fury wasn’t directed at me. “Roman wasn’t a player who got a lot of press. He was good but not a superstar. Though when everything happened, it hit the media.”
Cope stiffened, pulling back. “That’s why you didn’t want to go to the funeral. Because you didn’t want to be recognized. Didn’t want him or the garbage he got mixed up with to know where you were.”
I forced myself to look at Cope. Just twisting in the bed had fresh pain surging to the surface, but I did my best to ignore it. “I’m sorry. It was stupid. I should’ve been there for you from the beginning. I?—”
“Bullshit. You should’ve stayed right here. I’m the selfish bastard who forced you into something you weren’t comfortable with. Put you at risk. How can you even stand to look at me?”
33
COPE
I staredinto the starry night and took a deep breath of the air that always seemed to help me find peace, but I was reaching for it harder now as if it was just out of my grasp. Gripping my phone tighter, I walked farther into the grass surrounding my pool. “Were you able to start today?”
“Cope.” Shep used my name as a chastisement, like putting a toddler in his place. “We just finished the plans. We still need the supplies to be delivered and?—”
“But you said the demo might be able to start soon,” I pressed. I needed this. Needed to be doingsomethingwhen the past two weeks had been nothing but powerlessness. Sutton was healing and had even returned to work, but Trace had nothing. Not a damn thing that might lead us to whoever had hurt her.
Between Trace’s and Anson’s contacts at the bureau, we had a damn good picture of Petrov and his operation. And all of it turned my fucking stomach. But that knowledge had nothing on the photos I’d found of Sutton’s bruised and battered face. Pictures that had become public record during the trial of the two men who had assaulted her.
Those images flashed in my head, haunting me like they had every single day since I’d seen them. Sutton. My warrior. Broken. For no other reason than she’d fallen for a weak man. Some part of me knew it wasn’t weakness; it was an illness, but I couldn’t connect with that part of me when I knew Roman Boyer had gotten Sutton mixed up with the men who’d caused her untold pain.
“Cope,” Shep snapped.
“Sorry. I’m listening.”
He let out a long sigh. “We’ll get the apartment renovated. It’ll look amazing, but all that takes time.”
I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me. “Okay.”
