Page 19 of Kingston
“You’re not going to give me any trouble.”He nodded before he could get his head to understand that this man would and could kill him if he just snapped his fingers.“No, you’re not.I’m going to put you in a lock hold and you’re going to cooperate with the officers.”
Before he could figure out what a lock hold was, the big man had his arms around his neck andhis hands shoved up behind him.He couldn’t breathe, much less move, when he was held like this.As soon as the officers got close enough to touch him, Jason kicked out, using up all the air he had in his body and passing out.
When he woke up, he was not just in his cell, but he was chained to the bed as well.All his things were boxed up outside the cell.Not that he could get to them, not how he was chained up, but he knew that as soon as he could, he was going to sue the department for abuse.That was the only thing that he could think of to say why he’d ended up in his cell again.
As he moved around, there was enough chain for him to stand up, but not much more.He felt the only thing that hurt was his head.And it was pounding like someone had used him for a punching bag at some point.It wasn’t a sickening one, but it hurt badly enough that he thought he might be if he had to move around too quickly.Christ, who had that man been?
~*~
“What if you had gotten hurt?”Tucker told Skye that he was an immortal, that he might have broken a nail, but nothing more would have happened to him.“I don’t care about your stupid nail.I’m talking about being hurt really badly.Immortality doesn’t keep you from getting hurt, you know.”
“I didn’t want the officers to get hurt, so I was a distraction for him.I never thought that I’d have to wrangle him, too.But he went down pretty easily, and no one was hurt.Not even me.”She said she was still upset with him.“If it helps you at all, I talked to Kaida about it, and she was fine with me helping them out.She did care, however, if I broke a nail while helping them.”
“Because she’s in love with you.”He asked her if she loved him, too.“I do, but like I said, it doesn’t negate the fact that you could have been hurt.”
“I promise you the next time the police need my help, I’ll ask you first.”She smacked him on the arm.“That hurt.See?You hurt me more than I was hurt helping the police.He really wasn’t any trouble.I was surprised that he went down so easily.After hearing him talk about how badass he is, I expected more of a fight from him.But all he did was kick out, and that was it.”
“Ms.Savage, he might well have gotten one of our guns in that mess.It’s happened before, I’ve heard.You think that someone is going to be a pussycat, and you find out that they’re meaner than a rattlesnake.And slick too.He would have done us some serious damage had he gotten a hold of one of our guns.Or even if he was to have gotten one of us in a choke hold like Mr.Tucker was talking about, then we’d have had to pull our guns out and shoot him.That would have been messy, and a dead man would have been on the courthouse floor.Can you imagine the mess all that blood and bullets would have done to the floor in there?”She could only stare at him as that was the most anyone of them had said in all the time she’d been around them.“All I’m saying is that without his help, it would have been a mess of a mess.We’d be mopping up blood from now until the building needed to be replaced.”
Tucker was all right, and that was what she should have been focusing on, but she could still see the evil in Jason’s eyes when he was being held by Tucker.Shivering, she knew that she’d have to keep an eye on Kings to make sure he didn’t try to one-up his cousin.He’d do something equally terrifying for her, and she’d have to smack him around a bit, too.
They had stayed for the rest of the hearing.Or pre-trial, whatever they wanted to call it.Jason was going to prison.Of the forty or so places that he’d given them where people were buried, the police had already dug up half of them.And they were precisely where he said they’d be, too.
Some of the bodies had been shot, and some had had their throat slit, according to the medical examiner who had started on the bodies.There were a few that had been strangled, too.She didn’t know how they could tell that on a body that had been in the ground for as long as some of them had been, but she wasn’t going to quibble.He had confessed to killing them, and that’s all she cared about.
“Did you ever think about what he might have done to you had you been killed by him?”She asked the officer why he’d say something like that to her.“Just wondering.He’s a nasty man and a killer.I, for one, am glad that he’s been caught before he could do any more harm to anyone.I wonder what drove a man like that to kill.From all accounts, he’s been doing it since he was in his twenties.What is he now?Forty-five?Fifty?”He looked at her.“Makes you wonder what’s going through hishead all the time.Don’t it?”
She walked away from the officer.He was too much for her.As soon as she got outside in the cooler weather, she put her face up to the sun and let it warm her suddenly cold skin.He might well have killed her, and that right now was all she could think about.
“Skye?”She turned and smiled at Kings.“We were going to grab some dinner and head home if you want.I know that movie you wanted to watch on television has finally dropped to be streamed.”
“I just want to spend time with you and Trevor.”He said that Trevor was spending the night with the troop tonight.“I forgot about that.I wish he could get out of it.Seeing Jason today has made me realize how lucky we were to have run into you, and you saved us.”
“You’re still worried about Tucker, aren’t you?You know that they had his back?Nothing would have happened to him even if Jason had gotten away.He’d be dead, which is what I think he wanted to happen, but Tucker never would have been harmed.He would have stepped back had he not been able to hold him, and that would have been the end of his involvement in the whole thing.”She said that Jason wasn’t a normal prisoner nor a normal man.“No.He’s not.But like I said, the police had his back and nothing would have happened to him.”
“Let’s go home.”She waited in the car while he went in to get their dinner.They were going to have to start eating at home more, or they’d be as big as houses soon.Then she remembered what Kaida had told her about not being able to gain any weight unless they were breeding.She put her hand over her still flat belly and smiled.“I wish I could count the days until you get here, love.I don’t even know if I can get prenatal care with you being part dragon.”
When Kings came back, he told her about the woman he’d been talking to about birthing baby dragons.She was coming to visit next week to see how she was doing and to give her any information that she could.She wasn’t a dragon either, but had birthed five of them when her husband had been alive.The only reason that she’d not been immortal like most dragons was because she’d not figured that her husband loved her enough for all eternity, and regretted that ever since.
“When she didn’t want to be immortal, he had someone take his immortality away so that they could live out their life as a couple.Then, about five years after that, he was killed in a car accident that took the lives of three other people.She said that she regretted it since then that she didn’t have him around forever.”She told him that it was a sad story.“It is, isn’t it?When I heard her story, I wanted to hug her tightly and tell her that it would be all right.”
“I’m going to do that very thing when we see her.”The drive home was made in record time, and once they were there, she had Kings light the fireplace, and they ate their dinner right there in the middle of the floor, close to the flames.She seemed to be cold forever, while just Kings feet would get cold.He said he felt it through his entire body when that happened.“Tell me what will happen to Jason now.”
“You mean other than he’ll go to prison?He’ll be put on a watch so he doesn’t kill himself.He’s confessed to not wanting to go to prison again, and this will be his third time.I don’t know which one he’ll go to be incarcerated in, but that’s where he’s going to be headed.”Skye asked how long did he think he was going to get.“I’d say at least a few life sentences.Whether or not he’ll get parole or not is going to be the big question.He took more than one life, so it’s hard to say what will happen with that.”
“But you’re sure he’s going to get prison.”He pointed out that he’d threatened a sitting judge, too, and that wasn’t going to go over all that well.“I’d forgotten about that.He did say he was going to get him if that’s what it took for him to get out of going to prison.To be honest, when he said that, I wasn’t sure what he was talking about.If he were to have done that, they would have killed him.I guess that’s one way to get out of going to prison.Do you really think he would have done that?”
“I do.It would be his third time going back.I don’t know what that means, but he’s had to have had a good view of what prison life is like because of that.”She nodded, feeling like they should change the subject.“How about we get some of our work done for this week and get to bed early for tomorrow?It’s supposed to rain all day with spits of snow perhaps by midnight.”
It took her a while to get caught up on the things that she’d put off for the last two days.Workingfrom home, she was still missing a lot of the house in what needed to be done.The other bedrooms were finished up now, and Trevor had a lovely desk that he’d been wanting.Getting her work done took a bit longer because she kept stopping to think about what Tucker had done for the police.
While she knew that he was an immortal, she had still worried about him being involved.What if the next time the police needed his help, and it was a more dangerous person they were dealing with?Or the person actually was armed?A gun could do a lot of damage when someone was desperate.She knew why he’d done it, it was really to save the officers from being hurt, but the next time, he might not be so lucky.While thinking of Tucker, she went to find Kings to tell him that she loved him.
His head was bent over his desk, and he looked to be working really hard.It wasn’t until Ace spoke that she knew he was on the phone with someone.They were going over the list of things that needed to be seen to when he became mayor.The special elections were in about ten days, and it looked like he was going to win.If Trails’ desperate attempts to get out there with the people were any indication, he knew that Ace was going to win as well.
Instead of bothering him about her insecurities, she went to her office again.Doing the books for the dragons wasn’t all that difficult, but she wanted to make sure that she was on top of it all the time.They spent a great deal of money every day, keeping up with charities and the like, so she made sure that there was still money in the bank if they wanted to pay for a candy bar.It would never get that bad, but it was something that she wanted to keep on top of every day.
Letting time get away from her again, she was headed up to bed around midnight.But she’d gotten a great deal of work done, more than she’d thought that she would have when she first sat down, and was looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow.While she rarely slept past eight o’clock, she thought that sleeping in until ten would be heaven.Smiling as she brushed her teeth, she was sliding into her bed at just after twelve-thirty when Kings joined her.
