Chapter 20 Violet
VIOLET
Xmet me outside the police station, looking like a treat for my tired, red-rimmed eyes.
He immediately put his arm around me and drew me into the warmth of his chest. “What did they say?”
I shook my head, my nose brushing against the soft fabric of his shirt. “Not much. They’ve made a missing person’s report.”
“Did you tell them about her dad having Mafia connections?”
I drew back, my mouth in a straight, unhappy line. “They don’t believe that’s true.”
He frowned. “Why not?”
I shrugged. “They made inquiries into her parents. They’re business people in the city. No criminal record.”
“So? Doesn’t mean they aren’t shady as fuck.”
“Try telling the Providence Police Department that. They didn’t come right out and laugh directly in my face while telling me I watch too much TV, but they weren’t far from it. They kept questioning Dax over whether they’d had a—and I quote—‘lovers’ tiff.’”
“That probably explains him storming out with steam blowing from his ears a few minutes ago. He didn’t even stop when I called his name.
I was ready to take him off our Christmas card list—you know the one we’re sending as a family with Reginald the duck and Harold the ugly cat—but I guess we can still send him one since he’s a bit stressed right now.
” He rubbed his hand over his face. “I really wouldn’t want him to miss out on that. ”
I put my arms around his narrow waist and hugged him harder, breathing in the scent of his cologne. “You are so ridiculous.”
“I know,” he whispered, pressing his lips down onto the top of my head. “But I hate when you’re sad. I don’t know how else to help, other than to make you laugh.”
I snuggled against him. “It’s okay. This is exactly what I need.”
“Yeah, this,” he agreed. Then pulled back and grinned down at me wickedly. “This, and cat snuggles!”
I widened my eyes. “Did you pick up Harold?”
“Without you? Never. But the shelter did call. He’s all up-to-date with all his shots, the vet has checked him over, and we’re allowed to go pick him up. You want to come?”
In that moment, with Nyah missing, the police, unsurprisingly, doing nothing, and my nerves a complete and utter mess from everything else, going to pick up an ugly cat with him felt like the easiest thing to say yes to.
I nodded.
X beamed. “Let’s go get our son. I’ve already named him Harold Nigel Meowington the Third. He’s a duke. His royal portrait is being painted in my head as we speak.”
“Please tell me you’re imagining him in a powdered wig.”
“Obviously. With a little waistcoat. And a monocle. Maybe a small sword.”
I sniggered, but he held the van door open for me, and I hauled myself up into it.
Ten minutes and a drive back across the Providence-Saint View border, we pulled up in front of the shelter.
It sat at the end of a cracked asphalt lot behind a discount mattress store, flanked by a crooked chain-link fence.
A hand-painted sign that just said Animal Haven in faded, flaking red letters, announced we had the right place.
Someone had attempted to brighten things up with plastic flowers jammed into old soup cans along the path to the door. It didn’t help. The building itself seemed like it used to be a dentist’s office in the eighties and had been slowly surrendering to mildew and despair ever since.
I pushed through the door, and the woman at the front desk looked up.
“We’re here about a cat,” I informed her.
“Your names?”
I introduced us and waited as her pink chipped fingernails flew across a keyboard.
She peered at the screen, understanding eventually washing over her pretty features. “Oh. You’re here for…” She bit her lip, her gaze flickering to X before coming back to me. “Harold.”
She said his name like someone might say boil. Or like if she said it too loud, she might summon a demon.
X stepped forward. “Yes. I’m his new dad. This is his mom. We’re a very stable, very responsible family unit. I built him a cardboard castle and put sardines in the moat.”
The woman stared at him like she wasn’t sure if he was joking.
Honestly, he probably wasn’t.
She passed us an invoice, laying out his adoption fees and agreement, and X handed over his credit card without a second of hesitation.
Was it my imagination or did the woman breathe a sigh of relief once everything was signed and the payment had gone through?
“Just a moment,” she said cautiously, then disappeared through a back door.
I turned to X. “Do you think he’s going to be as ugly as the photos made him look?”
X leaned in conspiratorially. “I saw a video. He hissed at a toddler and then fell off a shelf.”
“Oh my God.”
X got a dreamy expression on his face, like he was mentally replaying the video. “It was love at first sight.”
When the woman came back, she was holding a small, beige-ish bundle of rage wrapped in a towel.
It hissed and squirmed in her arms, and the woman fought to keep a hold of it.
He lunged his teeth toward her hand, and she squeaked.
“I’m just going to put him down here, so he has a bit of room…
” She let him go then fled to the perceived safety of her desk, half crouched behind it like she was afraid Harold might come after her in retaliation.
He didn’t. He just froze to the spot, glaring at the woman like he might be plotting her demise.
Harold was…a lot. One eye slightly askew, like it had been damaged at some point and now didn’t work properly. A torn ear, half his tail missing, and fur like he’d lost a fight with a lawnmower.
His disgust with the woman waning, he turned his attention in our direction. He blinked at me. Slowly. In the kind of crooked way his dodgy eye allowed for.
Then purred.
I raised an eyebrow.
He stretched out one paw, gently, almost politely, even, toward me.
I’d never had a pet. I’d wanted one for as long as I could remember, but my foster parents had barely kept their human occupants alive.
I would have been flogged if I’d dared to bring an animal home.
And Toby had been allergic, so once we moved in together, any idea of keeping an animal had slowly faded away.
But now the desire to hold and love one came rushing back. A tiny piece of my ruined childhood mending inside me.
Despite the clear threat to my life, I reached for Harold instinctively. The moment I had him in my arms, he butted his head against my chin and started rumbling like a tractor engine.
X’s jaw dropped. “You little liar,” he said to Harold. “I watched your YouTube compilation. You drew blood.”
The shelter woman beamed. “Wow. He likes you. That’s…unusual.”
X reached out a finger. “Hey, buddy,” he crooned. “You remember me, right? I sent snacks. And a video for you to watch at night before you fell asleep so you’d get to know my voice.” He shot a look at the woman. “You played that for him, right?”
The woman cringed and shrugged a shoulder.
X had already lost interest in her response, and his finger was closing the gap between him and the cat in my arms.
Harold’s eyes narrowed at X’s finger. He hissed. Violently.
X recoiled. “Traitor!”
I burst out laughing as Harold snuggled closer, curling his claws into my sweater like he owned me now.
“He’s made his choice,” I said, rubbing my face on his head, then instantly regretting it because he smelled horrible up close.
“I’m the one who paid your adoption fee!” X cried at the cat.
Harold bared his teeth.
X’s mouth dropped open. “You ungrateful geriatric gremlin!”
Harold snapped his teeth in warning.
X shrieked and backed up so far he bumped into the woman, the two of them cowering behind the desk.
“Take it back!” he yelled, then pointed a finger in Harold’s direction. “Reginald would never betray me like this!”
Harold hissed again from my arms but didn’t try to jump. He just looked deeply, smugly satisfied with himself.
I scratched behind his one good ear. “You just like drama, don’t you?” I eyed X. “Just like someone else I know.”
Harold gazed up at me, then closed his eyes, like the head scratches were the best thing he’d ever felt.
My heart cracked open wide. He was so ugly. And so mean. And I was already in love with him. “You’re coming home with me. We’re going to get you all the toys your black heart desires. And all the catnip. And you can sleep curled up in a ball at the end of my bed.
X popped up from behind the desk, hair disheveled, and gave me a wounded look. “What about me? Where am I going to sleep when I stay at your place? I draw the line at sharing pillows with something that would eat my eyeballs if I stopped breathing for thirty seconds.”
“You’re assuming he’d wait thirty seconds.”
Harold meowed sweetly.
“Great,” X muttered. “He’s plotting already.”
But as we walked out of the shelter—me cradling Harold like a baby, X keeping a cautious two-feet of distance between them—I realized something:
For a few minutes, I hadn’t thought about Nyah. Or the bodies. Or the killer.
Just me, X, and the world’s ugliest cat, starting a very weird family.
And somehow, that was everything I needed.