10. Chase
10
CHASE
F uck this day. Fuck prosecuting attorneys and fuck their idiot paralegals who fuck up my cases. And fuck the guilty perp who walked free because of a fucking mistrial.
That’s what I got for not wearing my blue button-up to court.
I shotgunned a cup of sludge and slammed the mug down on my desk. I needed to blow off some steam.
Usually, I’d call up one of the guys and see if they wanted to work out. Actually work out. Not what the rest of the boys told their women we were doing when we were really just drinking beer and shooting the breeze.
Getting laid sounded good, too. It had been a long-ass time since I’d gotten any action. But that wasn’t an option right now because the only woman I wanted was acting like I didn’t fucking exist.
And fucking my palm was getting old.
Chelsea, our sometimes useful but always snarky civilian administrator, dropped a file on my desk. “Who pissed in your Lucky Charms, Brannan?” she asked.
I scoffed and thumbed through the pages. “I’m a grown-ass man, Chels,” I grumbled over another sip of liquid tar. “I eat Froot Loops.”
She tossed her caramel-colored hair over her shoulder and gave me a judgmental once-over. “Eh-heh,” she sneered as she bit her tongue. “Are you on your period or something? Do you need to borrow a tampon? Usually, Steve’s the one acting all crotchety. Is this some kind of Freaky Friday situation?”
“Don’t you have somewhere better to be?” I asked. “I dunno, somewhere like luring small children to a giant gingerbread house where you chop them into pieces and bake them into pies?”
“Spoiler alert,” Chelsea said in a shitty stage whisper. “The kids end up murdering the witch at the end of Hansel and Gretel .”
“Fairytales are fuckin’ demented.” I turned back to the stack of paperwork glaring at me from my desk.
She snickered. “And here I thought you would lecture me about how the kids were within their rights for self-defense.”
“Your husband must be terrified of you,” I added.
Chelsea let out a cackle. “Sometimes I think I’m one pair of boxers left on the floor away from starring in my own episode of Why Women Kill. ”
“I’ll be sure to give you a holding cell with a view.”
I drained the rest of the stale coffee in my cup and finished signing the reports that were due. I had just finished submitting a request for a search warrant when my desk phone lit up.
So help me, God. If it was one of my confidential informants, ready to snitch right when I was about to get off duty…
I snapped up the receiver as I closed out the open windows on my dinosaur of a computer.
“Detective Brannan,” I clipped .
“Hey, it’s Hale.”
Why the fuck was Austin Hale calling me?
“Did you finally decide to get a big boy job and stop playing with wee-woo trucks?” I ragged.
“Yeah, yeah,” he muttered dismissively. “I’ll hit you with a doughnut joke later. Listen, dude, one of your neighbors called it in. Bridget’s outside, and it looks like she’s trying to burn your house down. Usually, I’d go over there and talk?—”
I hung up and headed for the door. When I made it outside, I broke into a sprint toward my house. Getting there on foot would be faster than driving. Friggin’ traffic lights and clueless pedestrians.
Luckily, Beaufort was the size of a postage stamp and I only lived three blocks from the police department.
As I raced past Hannah Jane and Isaac’s house, guttural screams filled the air. One block over, a shiny red Beaufort Fire Department truck poked out, ready and waiting.
Bridget came into view as I catapulted around the bed of my pickup . She stood in the yard, assaulting a plume of white tulle with a garden rake, trying to stuff it into the fire pit. Grunts and throaty staccato screams pierced the air.
“ Hey! ” I bellowed, noticing the box of matches in her hand and a bottle of lighter fluid at her feet.
Bridget dropped the rake and grabbed the bottle, drenching the white fabric in accelerant.
I rushed over like a freight train and wrapped her in a submission hold.
She let out a pained cry, struggling against my arms as tears streamed down her face.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, trying to hold her still. I wasn’t sure if it was her body or her heart that was hurting.
She screamed something unintelligible as she pushed and shoved against me .
I grounded my stance and pulled her into me, cradling her against my chest as she wailed. Deep, heavy sobs racked her body. Her breath was coming in guttural gasps.
I didn’t know how she had this much fight in her. She hadn’t relented in her effort to escape my arms.
“Darlin’, you gotta calm down,” I grunted as she swung her elbows. “Talk.” Dodge. “To me.”
I still had my handcuffs on my belt, but I didn’t want to take it that far.
“Get off me!” Bridget shrieked. “Please! Please, just—” More tears streamed down her face. Her body trembled from a surge of adrenaline and rage. “I want it gone! ” she screamed.
“Bridget, listen,” I said, using the most authoritative tone I could muster. I tightened my biceps around her torso, pinning her arms to her sides. “I’m not gonna hurt you, Bee. But we need to have a talk. You hear me?”
“ I want it to burn !” she cried.
“Trust me, darlin’, I’ve thought long and hard about handcuffing you, and what a sight that would be. This isn’t how I imagined it.” I grunted as I pulled her back to my chest with one arm below her clavicle, then grabbed my cuffs. I held them in front of her. “Are you gonna tell me why the hell you’re trying to burn my house down?”
She didn’t answer, but her body softened against me as some of the fight vaporized from her.
“I didn’t want the first time I got to hold you to be like this, darlin’,” I said gently.
I had wanted to do this in the hospital. To scoop her up in my arms and hold her. To take her pain away. To be her rock and her shield.
Bridget fell apart, crumbling into my chest as tears sluiced down her cheeks. I put my handcuffs away and wrapped her in a bear hug. She tucked her hands between us and rested her cheek against my heart.
“ Please ,” she begged after a few minutes of sobbing. “I want it gone.”
I peered over her head to the fire pit. I had an inkling of what it was.
The other possibility was that she had bludgeoned a pageant queen and stolen her gown. The thing was covered in shiny white satin, sequins, and rhinestones.
It was ugly as sin.
“Want what gone?”
“My wedding dress,” she squeaked through gritted teeth. Hatred glowed off her skin like lethal radiation. “It was the dress I was going to wear to marry him. And it would have been the dress you buried me in.”
Fucking hell.
There was a growing damp spot against my dress shirt, but I didn’t care. I pressed a kiss onto the crown of her head. Gently, I tipped her chin up, forcing her to look at me. “Darlin’, I would love nothing more than to see it burn. I will light that bitch on fire myself, but you and I are gonna have a talk first.”
“Chase,” Bridget whimpered.
“No arguing.” I held her a little longer, rubbing gentle circles on her back.
Every so often, I would kiss her forehead or temple. It was as close as I’d let myself get for now. She was still bruised, though it looked like she had makeup on today.
Carefully, I cupped her cheek, brushing away a stray tear with my thumb. “Can I see those pretty green eyes?”
She looked up at me. Deep pools of emerald and sage glittered with inner torment and suffering.
“Beautiful,” I murmured as I pressed my forehead into the top of her hair. I closed my eyes and inhaled. Bee always smelled so fucking good. Like lavender and honey. Sweet to the soul. “You gonna run off if I let go of you?”
She shook her head.
I pulled back and eyed her warily.
“I promise,” she whispered.
I knew I was being demanding at the moment. I had given her as much space as I could, but it was clear that space didn’t help her. I didn’t want her to think I was a wicked dictator like Kingsley, so I tried to give her a say in the matter.
“Where do you wanna talk?” I asked. “We can go inside the cottage. We can sit out here. We can go in the house. If you wanna go on a drive, we can hop in the truck.”
“Outside,” she said through her sniffles.
“Okay.” I dropped one last kiss onto her head.
I figured as much. She had gone back to work, but I got the notion that she still didn’t like feeling trapped in a room. “I’m gonna grab Luna. You gonna be alright for a few minutes?”
Bridget nodded, choking back the emotion that had bubbled up in her throat. “I’m gonna…” She blew out a breath. “Clean up.”
“Go on,” I urged gently, nudging her toward the cottage. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
I waited until Bridget had closed the cottage door to scoop up the matches and lighter fluid. The way she had been spraying it around, she would have enveloped the dress, herself, the cottage, and my house in one massive fireball.
I rounded the corner of the block and found Austin Hale leaning against the side of the fire engine. Only the bottom half of his turnout gear was on. Probably had all the single ladies peering out their windows with binoculars.
He looked up when he heard my footfalls slapping against the concrete sidewalk. “Scene secured?” he asked .
I nodded, lifting the match box and fluid bottle. “Yeah. Look, I, uh—I appreciate the call.”
“Figured it wasn’t so much an arson matter as it was a personal one.” He offered his hand. “I’m glad she has you in her corner.”
I gave him a nod as we shook hands. “She’s got a lot of people in her corner.”
He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “We should get back to the station.”
“Hey,” I said as he turned to load up in the fire engine. “Next time I see you at the bar, beers are on me.”
Hale gave me a two-fingered salute and shut the door.
I used the walk back to the house to calm the anger boiling inside of me. I wasn’t angry at Bridget. I wanted to murder Kyle Kingsley for whatever he had done to her.
Not just to her body. Whatever he had done to her mind.
Bridget and I had known each other since we were kids and not once had I ever seen her so unhinged.
I let Luna out to do her business before walking over to the cottage. I was prepared to have to use my spare key but, to my surprise, Bridget opened the door.
“C’mon, darlin’,” I said, gingerly sliding my hand to the small of her back. “Let’s have ourselves a bonfire.”
I managed to find a bag of sand in the tool shed and poured it into a bucket to keep by the fire pit. I grabbed the fire extinguisher out of my kitchen and the smaller one from the cottage.
Bridget grumbled, saying it was overkill when I hooked up the hose and pulled it across the yard to have it at the ready.
“Not my fault you tried to deep-fry my lawn,” I said as I handed her a glass of tea.
I had offered wine, but Bridget said she wasn’t drinking because of the prescriptions that were in her system. She was sitting on the wicker loveseat a safe distance away. Luna sat in the grass in front of her, guarding her favorite human.
I would have called my dog a traitor, but those treats didn’t just magically appear when I’d whisper a command to go see Bridget. It was my own fault that my dog loved my girl more than me.
“You ready, darlin’?” I asked as I grabbed the box of matches.
“Let it burn,” she whispered, her eyes devoid of emotion.
I struck the match and tossed it onto the wedding dress without even a moment of hesitation. I stepped back and watched as flames licked up the white fabric, eating up the lighter fluid as it consumed the gown.
I wanted to take a picture of it and plaster it on billboards from here to the Tennessee border. I wanted Kingsley to know that he didn’t win.
He never would have won.
I took a seat beside Bridget without asking permission. She didn’t seem fazed by it. Probably because she was fixated on the flames searing the sky. The sun was setting, painting the horizon in vibrant oranges and reds.
For Bridget, the heavens burned.
I draped my arm around her shoulders and pulled her to my side. “I love you, darlin’,” I began as the fabric popped and sizzled in the fire pit. “And I’m here for you while you’re walking through this.”
She tilted her head, resting it on my shoulder, but said nothing.
We sat in silence, watching as piles of satin, tulle, and something called a crinoline turned to ash.
“What happened today?” I asked as I grazed my fingertips along her bare arm. Goosebumps cropped up on her skin, so I pulled her a little closer. Something else had been eating at me, so I added. “And what happened the other night at the bar? ”
“What do you mean?” she asked softly.
“I was sitting in the parking lot waiting for you to finish your shift. You walked out of the bar, saw me, and gave me this little smile, and then you froze. And… Fuck. You looked straight up terrified, Bee. You looked at me like I was a fucking monster, and then ran .”
A lone tear streaked down her cheek. I reached over and wiped it away, savoring the feel of her silky skin in my hand.
“I just wanted to make sure you got home safe,” I said.
“It’s just… It’s complicated. And today, I was looking through all the boxes, trying to find some fresh clothes,” she said. “I saw the dress bag folded up between two stacks and…” Her voice trailed off into a whisper. “ And I lost my mind .” She swiped at another tear. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey, don’t apologize,” I said. “You have the right to feel however you need to. I’ll give you the space to work through those feelings.” A sharp pop came from the fire pit as part of the wedding dress disintegrated. “Safely,” I added, pressing my lips to her temple.
“He’s in my head,” she whispered so quietly, so petrified, it gutted me. Bridget closed her eyes as if she was trying to block it all out. “Every god-awful thing he said to me plays on loop in my mind. Just when I start to feel good, his voice comes in. It’s like I’m still trapped in that house.” A look of heartbreaking despair crossed her face. “I’ll never escape it.”