Chapter 5 #2
She cringes, and her hand falls away from my dashboard.
“I technically wasn’t lying,” she tells me, shoving her hands under her thighs as though that could somehow keep me from getting to the bottom of this.
“I was coming out of the morgue, misjudged my stride, and slammed my shoulder straight into the metal edge of the door. Hurt like a bitch.”
I narrow my stare on her. “You’re still lying to me, Harper-Rayn. We’ve got a long drive ahead of us, so I suggest you start talking. Otherwise, I can guarantee that this is not going to be a comfortable ride for you.”
Harper glances away, and the guilt flashing in her eyes is more than enough to tell me that I’m heading down the right track. The only question is, why does she feel the need to lie about this? What’s she keeping from me?
“It’s . . . It’s really nothing,” she finally says, the shift in her tone like a silent plea for me to drop it. “And you’re going to think I’m insane.”
I shake my head. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
She lets out a shaky breath, and I give her a moment to string her thoughts together. The seconds turn into minutes, and just when I’m about to demand answers, she shifts in her seat and glances toward me. “Do you still work as an active SWAT officer? Like being called out to scenes every day?”
I nod and glance down at the black tactical pants and boots I’m still wearing from my shift. “What gave it away?”
She rolls her eyes and huffs again. “Are you going to be an ass the whole way home? Or are you going to chill the fuck out at some point?”
“Well, damn, Morticia. Tell me how you really feel.”
“Just answer the question.”
“Yes,” I respond with a sigh. “I’m still an active SWAT officer. Team leader to be exact. I’m in the field every day. But I don’t understand how that has anything to do with your shoulder ending up black and blue.”
Harper ignores me and continues with her line of questioning. “How common would you say stalkers are? And I don’t just mean someone sending threatening letters with newspaper cutouts like in the movies. I mean, how often are women getting slaughtered by crazed, sick men?”
Slaughtered?
My head whips toward her, and I bring my truck to a screeching stop in the middle of the empty highway. “The fuck are you talking about? Is someone stalking you?”
Her eyes go wide, and she looks around in a panic. “What the hell, Knight? You can’t just stop in the middle of the road. Someone will run into us.”
“I’ll stop wherever the fuck I want. Now answer the goddamn question. What the fuck is going on? Is someone stalking you?”
“No—I . . . I don’t know,” she finally says, her tone filled with an odd mix of fear and exasperation.
“It’s just something kinda weird happened at work last night.
It’s the first time anything like it has happened, and to be completely honest, I don’t know if it was real or if I just made it all up in my head, but it freaked me out. ”
“Start talking, Harper. I’m not fucking around this time. Give it to me straight.”
“Can you at least pull over to the side of the road? I don’t feel like becoming roadkill tonight.”
I groan and hit the gas, moving over just enough to satisfy her before fixing her with a heavy stare and completely cutting the engine to make a point. “The fuck is going on?”
“Okay, so last night—”
“In the morgue?”
“Yes. I was working on a report—”
“Alone?”
“Jesus. Yes. Are you going to interrupt every sentence that comes out of my mouth?”
“Only if you don’t hurry up and give me the information I’m looking for.”
Harper scowls at me. “You’re impossible. You know that right? You’d think as a trained officer, you’d have a little more patience with shit like this.”
I grip the steering wheel, white-knuckling it as I try to find my composure. “For the love of all that’s holy, Morticia. Tell me what the fuck happened in that morgue.”
Her eyes blaze with fire, and I have no doubt that she’s itching to argue, but she thankfully gets on with it, sensing that I’m reaching my boiling point.
“Okay, so I was writing up a report when I got this strange feeling that I was being watched. I had shivers going down my spine and goosebumps everywhere. It freaked me out, so I looked around but couldn’t see anyone, and my desk is right by the door.
Nobody could have come in or out without me knowing, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. ”
“Okay,” I say, trying to calm myself. “Then what happened?”
“I figured it was all in my head, so I went to the bathroom and splashed water on my face, but when I came back, there was a black rose just lying in the middle of the autopsy table.”
My back stiffens, and I stare at her.
“A black rose?” I question, my mind instantly reeling, going through all the stalking cases I’ve ever worked on and trying to see if anything rings a bell, but there’s not enough to go on. I’ve never had a case where the suspect has left a rose before, particularly a black one.
“It was messed up, and I didn’t want to hang around to find out how it got there, so I ran. Which is how I caught my shoulder on the door, by the way. I wasn’t lying about that.”
“Fuck. Give me your phone.”
Her brows furrow, but she hands it over, and I immediately put my number into her contact list, not even bothering to check if it’s already there.
“I’ll check it out,” I tell her. “But if anything like that happens again or if you feel unsafe, even if it’s just a feeling, you call me.
Understood? I’m turning your location on and sharing it with me, so I’ll know where to find you if I have to. ”
“You don’t need to do all of that,” she tells me. “It was probably all in my head. Working alone in a morgue was bound to get to me at some point.”
“I’m not just offering you a ride home to be a good guy, Harper,” I say, handing her phone back. “This could potentially be your life. Don’t fuck with that. If there’s some guy out there, and your life is at risk, I need to know about it.”
She nods, and I push her on it, certain that she’s going to shrug my warning off, just as I’ve seen so many young women do in the past. “Promise me, Harper. Tell me you’ll call.”
“I’ll call,” Harper vows.
I hold her stare for a moment longer, and seeing a strange uncertainty within her eyes, I turn and focus on the road ahead, giving her a moment to breathe.
The thought of someone stalking this girl makes me feel sick, but realizing that there’s not a damn thing I can do to help her right now, I let out a breath and start the engine before pulling back out onto the deserted highway.
We drive in silence, and the heaviness sinks around me.
I itch to reach out to her, to tell her it will be okay, but how the hell can I possibly promise that?
I don’t know if it’s going to be okay. I don’t even know if any of this is real.
I’ve never wanted someone to be delusional more than I do right now, and up until she told me about the black rose, I could have almost believed that it was all in her head.
Time passes quickly in our weighted silence, and before I know it, I’m pulling up to the curb outside her apartment complex, not a word exchanged between us since the highway.
“Umm . . . thanks,” Harper says, glancing toward me, only to look away as fast as humanly possible, an awkwardness settling between us. “I—wait. How did you know where to go? I never told you where I live.”
Ahh fuck.
I was too caught up in my thoughts that I forgot to pretend that I had no idea where she lives.
I didn’t even attempt to ask her for directions.
“Uhh. Elias pointed it out to me a few years back. Guess it just stuck,” I lie, knowing damn well I searched her information the second I realized she’d rented an apartment and had no one else looking out for her.
I’ve kept an eye on her for years, checking in from afar just to make sure she was doing all right. Not that I would ever tell her that.
“Oh, okay. Well, umm . . . yeah,” she mutters, grabbing her purse and double checking she has all of her things before swinging the door open.
She starts climbing out when I call after her. “Are you going to be okay? Do you need me to do a sweep of your apartment?”
The fuck was that? A sweep of her apartment? What the hell is wrong with me? Are these the kinds of lows I’d sink to just to get inside her home? What’s going to happen then? I’ll accidentally trip and fall straight into her tight little cunt?
I’m such a piece of shit.
“No, but thanks,” she says, climbing out of my truck. “I’m a big girl. I can handle myself. Besides, I felt fine at home last night. It’s just work that messed me up.”
“Okay,” I say, nodding toward her phone in her hand. “Don’t forget. Call me if you need me. And in the meantime, try not to get slaughtered by a crazed lunatic.”
“Ha. It’s not a crazed lunatic I need to watch my back around,” she says as a wide grin stretches across her face. “It’s my mom. After humiliating her in front of all of her bitch friends, I’m going to have to sleep with one eye open.”
“Well, if I happen to get a call in the middle of the night for a hostage situation, at least I know who it’ll be for.”
Harper laughs. “Very true, but promise, if it comes down to having to take her out, do me a solid and let me take the shot.”
“Well, shit, Harper. That got dark fast.”
“I work night shift in a morgue, spending most of my time with my hands inside rotting corpses. Not to mention, I may or may not have a stalker. That wasn’t dark.
It barely scratched the surface of the gray area,” she says, stepping back from my truck and closing the door between us.
And with that, she offers me a small smile before walking around the back of my truck and heading straight up the stairs to the main entrance of her apartment complex.
I wait just a moment, making sure she gets in alright.
Then after entering her access code, she pushes the door open before pausing and glancing back.
Another small smile crosses her face, and after her fingers flutter in a soft wave, Harper disappears inside, leaving me more fucked up than ever before.