Page 9 of A Captive Situation

“Wait. What?”

He ignored me, leading me to his squad car. He put me in the back seat, a hand to the top of my head guiding me inside. When the door shut, reality slapped me in the face.

Well, shit.

Being detained by a New York City cop hadn’t been on my tourist bucket list. It was now. Check that off.

I looked out.

The little rat dude ran past the car, my sandwich in his mouth.

Chapter Four

Jake

The second I stepped inside the station, thereshewas.

The woman from the subway. The same woman I’d not been able to get out of my head. She was like a fly, buzzing around me, poking at my thoughts. I’d been on the train that day because Shorty was still in town. I knew he was going to get banished. It was inevitable because he was a pain in the ass on his good days. He was never going to change, and Ashton would want Shorty as far away from his woman as possible, but I wanted to make sure I got all the information out of him that I could about my cousin.

Christ.

My cousin. That was all a shit show by itself, but Nicolai was dead. And my fucking family decided to take a vote and appoint me as the new head. It was a farce. The whole thing. I had a shit ton of family members. Some were cops. Some were in the oil business. And then I had a section that was Mafia, except most of those uncles all lived in Maine. They ran the business from there, which was a joke by itself.

I was a cop.

Fuck.

Ihad beena cop. I wasn’t anymore, not for two days now. There’d been a short period of time I considered going up to Maine and takingover the business. They gave me the power, but I started thinking about it, really thinking about it.

I hated the idea. Loathed it, in fact.

If I was going up there, it would be to destroy the family from inside. I had no allegiance to them. Not one fucking bit. They’d stood by when my parents died in a car accident. I’d just turned eighteen. Justin wasn’t far behind me, and no one stepped up to help us out. No fucking way was I going to let my little brother go into the system. We lived in Maine back then, but I took him on.

I packed him up and we went to the city, where I joined the academy.

Being alive for Justin had been my main purpose for so long. Then he died and for the last six months, I found new purpose in finding his killer. My fucking cousin, Nicolai. That’s who killed him. It was another nail in their coffin, as far as I was concerned.

Who else knew about it? I didn’t believe that no one else knew. Nicolai might not have been the one who pulled the trigger, but he was the reason behind it. Then there I was. A cop who no longer wanted to be a cop. I’d been forced to walk the line between good and bad, needing to choose the dirty side at times, but fuck’s sake. No one knew my world.

Justin was gone.

I’d been finding solace at the bottom of some bourbon bottle, then scraping myself out of whatever one-night stand’s bed that I went home with for the night.

I was heading to the bar to do just that when my phone started ringing. Recognizing the number, I contemplated not answering it. It kept ringing, and I cursed, knowing she was just going to keep calling. I greeted her with a growl. “Shit’s over between us, Laila. Leave me the fuck alone.”

She was silent for a beat before sniping, “Jesus, your ego is inflated. Not calling you because of that, asshole.”

I frowned. “Why are you calling?”

Laila was another cop. She and I had tangled naked together enough times over a few months that she started thinking we were in a relationship. Hell. Maybe we were, but that was the time my brother’s body was pulled from the water and nothing had been the same again for me. Laila didn’t just fall to the sideline. I’d punted her ass across the continent, as far as I was concerned. It’d not been the nicest thing, but my mind frame didn’t give a fuck.

“I got one of your cousins here.”

“Not interested—” I started to say. Any of my cousins, I didn’t give a fuck about them either.

I heard shouting in the background, and Laila cursed on her end. “Jesus Christ. She said she’s family. I’m doing you a solid. You can come down and pick her up. We won’t charge her if you do.”

“Her?” I quieted.

---