Chapter 48 #2
I grab her face and smash my lips back onto hers. She bites me, but the pain doesn’t faze me as I push us both back until we knock my desk.
Still, I keep kissing her.
I fumble to place the gun on the desk and shove it far away so I can grab her waist, set her down on my desk, and kiss her senseless.
“Why? Why did you do this?” she whispers, between maddening kisses.
“Isn’t it fucking obvious?” I grit, sucking on her bottom lip. “I’ve fallen for you. And that’s exactly how you planned it, didn’t you?”
Her eyes widen in shock, and she pulls away, lips still red, stained with the same lipstick she used to bury her enemies … now slathered all over my face.
She’s so beautiful, it’s mesmerizing, and I can’t stop touching her face to gently wipe away the excess lipstick I messed up.
“How did you know?” she asks.
“When you said you trusted me, I knew,” I respond. “You made me a pawn in your game long ago. With the lipstick stain on all the bodies … you were looking for someone to find you. Me.”
A smirk more cunning than any I’ve ever seen before forms on her face, and my God, it brings chills to my body.
“Yet you still did exactly what I’d hoped you’d do …” she muses.
I throw her back a lopsided grin. “I had no choice. Keeping you in jail would’ve destroyed me just as it was destroying you.”
She licks her lips, like she’s possessed by the fact that she’s managed to sway me, a cop, from doing his duty. Precisely how she envisioned it from the beginning.
And it is insane.
It’s absolutely fucking insane, but I’ve been converted.
Justice used to be my calling, but my justice has a female form, and it is the end of me as I once knew it.
I tower over her, but in her presence I feel trivial. “José was a suspect I was hunting for a very long time. I just didn’t want to risk it. But when I found out what happened to you … I knew I had to find a solution. He was the perfect end to the madness you’d spun.”
A wicked smile forms on her face. “You chose to lie for me.”
“It wasn’t a lie. He was guilty of many things, including murder,” I respond, placing my hands beside her on the desk. “Just not the random string of lipstick murders all around the city.”
She grabs my tie and starts playing with it, just like she did when she first came into my apartment. “How did you get him to confess?”
“I gave him a choice. Go to prison and keep the secret or die. It was easy from there.”
The smirk on her face grows wider. “Connivingly evil … So unlike you, Detective Foley.”
“I’ve done worse things,” I reply.
“You let me get away with a crime.”
“After what those men did to you, they deserved everything you gave to them,” I say.
“What about Bob?” she asks, tilting her head.
“You didn’t kill him, did you?”
She shakes her head, and I already know it must’ve been Xavier or Orion.
“But if I tell you who did, you would put them in jail …”
“And then you’d kill me,” I reply.
She bites her lip, and it’s so tantalizing that I want nothing more than to slam my lips right back onto hers.
But I need to set the record straight first. “Your boys actually helped me.”
Her brows furrow. “What do you mean?”
“They were there in the clinic when I tried to apprehend Samuel.”
Her pupils dilate. “They … know?”
I nod. “Everything.”
Her face contorts, almost as if it hurts her to have a weakness at all, so I tip up her chin. “They love you more than anything. Those boys would jump into the fire for you if you told them to. They will be there for you.”
“Unlike you?”
I sigh out loud. “I’m … not like them.”
She snorts. “You think I like you because you’re like them? Fuck no, I like your stubbornness, and your unwillingness to surrender to anyone.”
I don’t care that she called me stubborn and unwilling. All I care about is that one sentence before. “You like me?”
Her lips part, but no words spill from her mouth, and then her cheeks get all rosy. I’ve never seen her this flustered.
“Like an old enemy I keep running into,” she adds with a playful grin.
I lean in to graze my lips past hers. “An enemy you can’t keep your hands off …”
“An enemy who’s still got all the dirt on me,” she whispers back against my lips.
I pull away and grab the papers we both found all over my office, stuff them into the trash, then throw in my lighter to watch it all burn right in front of her.
“What about the digital copies?” she asks.
“Deleted.”
“And your coworkers? Won’t they ask questions?”
“All evidence points to José.”
“You mean you planted the evidence and got rid of the real ones?”
“Everyone wants the Bones Brotherhood gone, not just you. People are happy José is caught. No one cares about the truth.”
She jumps off my desk. “I care. They’re not gone. And Samuel certainly isn’t.”
I go to my knee in front of her, and she sucks in a breath as I reach into her boot and pull out a knife, holding it up for her to take. “You want justice? Then take it.”
She slowly reaches for the knife. “You won’t try to stop me?”
“I’ve tried … many, many times …” I mutter, slipping her boot off her foot.
I kiss the same leg she just thrusted into my balls.
“Consider this my apology for hunting you.”
When she grabs the knife, she immediately pushes the blade underneath my chin. “You will find him for me, won’t you?”
I lean in closer as the blade tips up my chin and pushes my lips apart.
“I will do whatever it takes to bring you the revenge you need.”
The darkness on her face is like an aphrodisiac crushing my light. “Good boy.”