Page 15 of The Vigilant

It was those tattoos that captivated me. The need to decipher what each meant. The flowers on her shoulders. The vine around her left wrist. The wasp on her right. And something…something delicate, two sets of mirrored dots and lines sweeping down hersternum and curving underneath her robe—underneath each of her breasts.Her pierced fucking breasts.

Fuck.

A deep groan broke from my chest. There was no hiding them—she made no attempt to hide them. And goddamn, there was no way to hide how fucking hard it made me.

Fuck.

I’ll let you know.

I furiously sent the message and let my phone drop onto the desk so I could stand and adjust my cock that now throbbed painfully.

God, I was a fucking asshole. Desiring my dead friend’s daughter.

Jon’s daughter.

I had to keep reminding myself of him—of who she was to him, so I wouldn’t forget what she could never be to me.

“Ty?”

I turned and sat, swallowing a curse.How long had Harm been standing in the doorway?

“Come in.” I clicked the mouse furiously, my screen dark from being idle for so long.

“You alright?” he asked, closing the door and leveling me with an assessing stare.

Harmon Keyes was trained to be just as perceptive as I was. A quality I’d appreciated and admired right up until this moment.

“Just trying to figure out how to…handle Sutton,” I admitted.

I’d been honest last night when I told Sutton I was messaging Harm to explain what happened. While I felt like I had the situation with Sutton under control, Harm needed to know. As a precaution. And because I didn’t want to feel like I was hiding her.Like there was a reason to keep her to myself.

“What did you find out?” Harm banded his arms over his chest.

“Not much. Not enough,” I grunted, my throat tight.

I looked at the notepad on the desk, scribbles of events and timelines, trying to make sense of what I knew about Sutton, but somehow only highlighting everything that was still a void.

“She was released from juvie about four months ago and has been living at a hostel and working as a seamstress.”

I still couldn’t reconcile the last time I’d seen her, standing beside Angela at Jon’s funeral, with now. How many fucking things had happened to her in the last five years? Her mom dying. Juvenile detention. Parole.How many of them could’ve been avoided if Jon hadn’t died?

“And her mom?”

“Murdered.” My jaw tensed.

“Damn.”

As soon as I’d placed the grocery order last night, I’d immediately searched for Angela’s obituary. Imagine my surprise when my scan also resulted in a police report.

Sutton hadn’t lied that her mother was dead. She’d chosen not to share Angela had been murdered by her drug dealer boyfriend.

“Yeah.”I winced. A year after losing her father, her mother was gone, too—taken by a different yet traumatically similar violent suddenness. “I had no idea…”

And why would I?I was close with Jon, not with Angela or Sutton. I only knew about Sutton by proxy. By stories and smiles and regrets of a good man who’d missed most of his daughter’s life because of his own demons.

Still…secluded in my world of vigilante justice, I’d completely missed that Jon’s daughter became an orphan on the brink of eighteen.

“So, the officer said she violated her parole?” Harm asked.

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