Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Jude
Five years ago
F ury boiled in my veins as I watched him do it… again.
Kurt’s arm caged a woman sitting at the bar, clearly touching her. She’d already brushed him off once, but I hadn’t registered it when it happened. I’d thought maybe he’d cracked a lame joke or… something. Anything other than hitting on a random woman at a bar when he’d given an engagement ring to Jess.
But then the scene shifted into slow motion, and he crowded closer, dipped his head, and whispered something in the woman’s ear. She straightened, and I instantly knew.
“Hey, man. Food’s here,” I said, hand on his shoulder and not so gently pulling him away.
His head whipped to me with a scowl until he registered who it was—not a random guy encroaching on his conquest, but me. Yeah.
“Right. Yeah. I was just telling Ally here to have a good night.” He winked at her with a sly smile and shoved off the bar with one hand, snatching his beer and moving toward the table we’d chosen twenty minutes ago when we’d walked in.
I parsed through what to say—what words to use instead of punching him directly in the face.
“Damn, that girl just said the nastiest?—”
“Don’t start.” He spun stories like no one else. It was how he won people over—all that charm and ease with words. Skills I didn’t possess, and after witnessing how they could poison things, never cared to develop.
“Come on, man. You don’t start. We were just talking.” He chuckled like it really was all fine. Like sliding your hand around someone else and whispering in their ear wasn’t a betrayal.
I waited until he stopped avoiding my eyes, and then I held his gaze.
“Don’t pull that BS, or I’ll tell her.”
The easygoing smile twitched, and his friendly mien hardened, his chin jutting out. “Not your business.”
“It’s my business if you’re going to hurt her.”
He swore. “She’s mine, Beast. I know it kills you, but you can’t go looking for reasons to break us up.”
How had I ever cared about this guy? How had I ever loved him like a brother? I’d had so few people in my life as a kid—grandparents and a few neighbors. I’d never felt unloved, never felt the lack of parents who’d died when I was a baby because my grandparents had loved me so well. But Kurt was a constant through grade school, then high school, joining the Army, and now EMU, and it’d mattered to me that we’d traveled so much road together. I’d spent a lot of years looking away from all the crappy things he did, but lately, I couldn’t.
“This has nothing to do with that. If you don’t want to be faithful, break it off.”
He scoffed. “You’d love that.” His slick smile returned. “Don’t worry. I’ll make Jessie happy, and you don’t need to worry your tiny brain over how it happens.”
I’d accepted he wasn’t the man I’d grown up thinking he was a while back, but I’d still had hope for him. We were stuck on a temporary assignment together and had a whole week to work one-on-one, with literally no one else with us. So me storming out and leaving him here would only slow things down. I’d never wanted to screech out of a parking lot like I did tonight.
We watched the game. My team won and things were looking up, right until I said I was ready to go. He’d switched his attention to another game and blew me off. “Nah, I’ll stay. I’ll grab a cab home.”
I should’ve insisted he come with me, but he was a grown man and obviously didn’t want my opinion. I took off, promising myself I wouldn’t worry about what he was doing. It wasn’t my problem. He and Pop had a relationship, and I assumed she trusted him, and vice versa. Granted, I couldn’t imagine her doing anything to break someone’s trust because she had more integrity in her little finger than Kurt had in his entire body, but oh well.
When he texted an hour later saying he couldn’t get a cab and asked if I’d come get him in twenty, I pulled on my jeans and drove the ten minutes back to the bar to get him. He didn’t come out right away after I found a spot in the busy lot near the back, so I stayed in the rental car waiting, tension knotting in my stomach, my foot tapping impatiently.
After waiting a full five, I figured maybe he’d gotten to chatting with someone and didn’t realize how the time had passed. It wouldn’t have been unusual for him, and though I didn’t mind indulging that side of him from time to time, especially on missions when it benefited us for people to be charmed into giving information, it didn’t apply now. I wanted to get back to the hotel and put this night to bed.
He wasn’t at the table and the waitress already had someone new sitting there. Nearly all the tables were full, which made sense for a Saturday night. No Kurt at the bar either, and then my worry notched up again.
Maybe he’d drunk too much and was sick in the bathroom. Maybe he’d passed out. He’d only had a few beers while I was here, but sometimes he could be volatile, and he’d done this before—let me leave then called me back to get him when he’d gotten so sloppy, finding any other way home wouldn’t have been an option. It’d been years since something like that had happened, but I ducked into the men’s room to make sure. No dice.
Maybe he’d gotten a ride after all? I checked my phone, messaged him again, and pushed open the back door to see if he’d exited and was waiting by the truck.
The first thing I heard was a feminine voice saying, “No. No!”
Kurt’s back was to me, but I could still make out the smaller figure pinned to the wall in front of him.
Kurt swore violently and pulled back just enough to cock his hand and slap the woman across the face—hard enough I could hear the contact as I saw it. A sharp cry came from the woman who reached for her cheek with one hand as she attempted to shove him away with the other.
My world collapsed into a pinprick of focus as all worry and tension and anything else dropped away, and I moved. She pushed him with both hands now, her head straining as far from Kurt’s as she could, turning to the side as he pressed his face into her neck.
“Come on, sexy, don’t worry about that, just?—”
I grabbed him by the shoulder, then instantly hooked an arm around his neck and tightened, slamming a fist into Kurt’s face and releasing him as he stumbled back. The woman stood alone now, curled into herself and quietly crying.
I approached her with hands up. “You okay?”
Kurt was on one knee with his head hanging, expletives and blood spewing from his face.
“I’m, um, I’m?—”
“Is someone here with you?”
Her chin wobbled. “No.”
“That’s okay. Did you drive?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay to drive now?”
She nodded. “Yeah. I only had two beers all evening. I had dinner between. I’m good.”
“Do you want to call the police? This was assault. I can be your witness.”
She shook her head vehemently. “No. No. I don’t want that. He didn’t—I just want to leave. Can I leave?”
The pleading in her voice made my stomach pitch. “Of course. Go.”
She grabbed her purse from the ground where it’d fallen and bolted around the corner of the building. I paced to Kurt and hauled him up .
He launched in. “You son of a?—”
“You don’t want to talk to me right now.” I pulled him along by the back of his shirt and shoved him against the passenger side of the truck where he hit with a little too much force. Hopefully, he didn’t dent it, but if he did I’d make sure he paid for it.
He got in, and the second his door closed I started driving, the familiar motions of flicking a blinker, turning the wheel, easing on the gas a balm to the blur of feelings threatening to break through.
By the time we reached the hotel, I’d decided. I turned off the vehicle and got out. He dragged himself out, his shirt bloodied enough it’d look alarming to the front desk clerk, but I’d let that be his problem, too.
I turned toward him and resisted the urge to smash my fist into his face again. My voice shook with barely shackled rage when I said, “You assaulted that woman.”
“She flirted with me all night. When I go to kiss her, she doesn’t want it? That’s not assault.” He turned his head and spat.
“It is the definition of assault, and if she contacts police, I’ll give a statement.”
He looked me dead in the eye and swore violently. “Whatever. This was nothing. Usually women give it up without a problem, and they should. They gonna get better than me? No. They should be so lucky.” He wiped his bleeding face on his shirt, then whined. “Some friend. Some brother. ”
“I’m not your brother and I’m not your friend anymore. It’s been a long time since we could say that, and I think you know it. I’m a teammate, and I’m reporting this to the unit and?—”
“You can’t do that. That’s breaking a code between?— ”
“There’s no code that says I lie for you when you’re hurting people.” And he’d just admitted to cheating multiple times, so that wasn’t even touching his infidelity.
He snorts. “This is about Jessie.”
This jackass had no idea. “No. It’s about you thinking you can take what you want, even when someone tells you not to. We do actually have rules about that, and I’m reporting it. It’s up to you how you want to explain yourself.”
He let loose another round of foul language and sneered at me. “You’re pathetic.”
All the anger rose in me then and I pulled him to me by the bloodied front of his shirt. I had six inches and probably forty pounds on him, but I didn’t need my size to intimidate. He was trash, and he needed to understand what I would do. That I wouldn’t let him hurt anyone again.
“Pathetic is cheating on your fiancée. Pathetic is hearing the word no and thinking it means anything else. Pathetic is thinking I don’t have enough backbone to end you because you couldn’t even point to North with the help of a compass. You’re done , Spangler. Get your affairs in order.”
I released him and he stumbled back, then launched a bunch of insults I didn’t stick around to hear. Three days later, we were back at the unit and I reported him.
In the past, something like this might not’ve been a career-ending issue. There’d been a nasty history of people covering up for each other. But they’d worked on cleaning house. Leadership had agreed if they were going to give so much power and access and funding to the unit, they had to make sure the men and women who were a part of it had a moral compass. So these “little incidents” that used to get brushed under the rug as boys being boys, or whatever other bullshit, were now intolerable. By the end of the day, Kurt Spangler had shocked everyone by announcing he’d be moving off the teams and into the school house while transitioning to retirement.
The only person not shocked? Yours truly.
The person most taken aback? Heartbreakingly, it was his fiancée.