Chapter 1 #2
“Boss, I’m pretty sure HR need to sign off on—”
“HR have signed off on it. Both of you were sent letters. Emails. Left voicemails asking you to come in for a meeting. Fuck, boys, they even put a Post-it note on your stash of Red Bulls in the sodding fridge. Didn’t you read any of them?”
Taylor could feel the other officers’ eyes on the back of his head. “We moved house recently,” he said, trying to contribute to the conversation.
After the landlord kicked us out for having the music too loud. And setting the shed on fire. And pissing off the local MP. Fuck. Shit.
Taylor leant forwards. “This isn’t fair—”
The boss let out a loud bark of laughter, one that cut through the room like an iron rod to the skull.
“Isn’t fair? What isn’t fair? That you get given the cushiest firearms job in the nick but still choose to doss about all day every day? It isn’t fair that you’ve shagged two thirds of the omegas in the station and broken up more marriages than I’ve had hot dinners.”
“Hey now! We’re all consenting adults,” Taylor said, ignoring the way Johnny’s fingers tightened around his knee.
“It’s called professional integrity, PC Campbell. It’s literally in the code of fucking ethics.” The inspector stood up, ripped a poster off the wall and stabbed it with his finger. “Do. Not. Shag. Your. Colleagues.”
Taylor huffed and crossed his arms. “Well, it doesn’t quite say—”
“Especially the ones that are mated!” the boss continued, totally ignoring Taylor’s protests. “Jesus Christ, you two are a fucking disgrace.”
Something popped in Taylor’s chest, like a pin hitting a cartridge inside a gun. Johnny gripped his knee so hard his nails scraped Taylor’s skin through the fabric of his combat trousers.
Disgrace. You’re a fucking disgrace.
Those had been Taylor’s daddy’s words.
Before Taylor could stop himself, he stood, the chair clattering to the ground again. “Say that a-fucking-gain,” he snarled, driving his fist into the desk, fangs fully out.
He shouldn’t have done that. Damn, he should not have done that, but the computer virus was gobbling up his rational thoughts again.
Johnny stood, wrapping a hand around the nape of Taylor’s neck and hauling him out of the office. Gasps and shouts bounced down the corridor, but Taylor only growled and flung his arms out like a kitten shadow boxing.
The colours in his brain lit up at once, swirling together until all he could see was red. Red. RED.
Johnny snarled, shoving him forwards and manhandling him down the corridor.
They bumped along the wall, all shoulders and elbows as they almost toppled over a water dispenser and sent a potted plant out of an open window.
Luckily, all of upper management were out for meetings that afternoon, otherwise they’d have probably lost more than their jobs.
“Easy,” Johnny said, palm growing heavy on the back of Taylor’s neck. “Easy.”
He squeezed, like he used to when they were teenagers. When Johnny was just the lanky black kid who’d moved from Cameroon, and Taylor was the angry ginger problem child with no friends.
“Fuck you,” Taylor growled back.
Johnny let out a tense laugh and twisted Taylor’s arm behind his back, dragging him down to the locker room in an arm restraint so perfect that even the College of Policing would have been proud.
Taylor thrashed, but by the time they reached the bottom of the stairs the fight was draining out of him.
The stench of stale sweat hit him like a wet sock to the face, and the rows of blue metal lockers shuddered as Johnny walked him to the end of the line—to numbers 336 and 337. He shoved Taylor into them, the cheap metal buckling against his back.
They stood there for a moment, forehead to forehead, chest to chest, the heat rolling off them in the air-conditioned basement.
“Get a grip on it,” Johnny growled, squashing their noses together.
It being Taylor’s anger, his inability to regulate his wolf’s rage when it clouded every part of his judgement. Usually, when he was at work and the uniform was on, he could turn his anger inward, store it all up in those Kevlar plates for when they let loose in woods. But out of it… not so much.
Grounding, grounding, grounding. Ground yourself, Taylor Campbell, and if you can’t, find someone who will.
That was what the therapist had told him when he was nineteen, in that stuffy office with the lumpy sofa.
Well, grounding sounded great and all, but even balloons needed someone with enough mental clarity to tie the fucking string.
“I wanna run,” Taylor snarled, pressing his face into Johnny’s, daring his wolf to come to the surface.
“Not a fucking chance. You shift now, your wolf will take over and you’ll end up tearing up half the fucking police station.”
“I won’t,” Taylor said, letting out a long breath. As much as he hated to admit it, he had his dad’s temper. “I promise I won’t lose it.”
Johnny stared at him, their eyelashes practically tangling, they were so close. Johnny’s scent was sharper, more bitter than usual which meant he was stressed to high heaven.
Johnny wasn’t wrong—it’d happened before. When they were teenagers he’d ripped up the park at the back of his nan’s house. Steaming and feral after his daddy had punched him in the mouth and broken one of his fangs.
After, Johnny’s mum—an omega no taller than five feet—had looked Taylor’s dad dead in the eye and said, “We’re moving to West Newton, and we’re taking your son with us.”
“Nail polish or bracelets?” Johnny finally said, still trapping Taylor against the locker.
“Ngh. Neither,” Taylor mumbled.
“You ain’t running, big boy, so what’ll it be?”
“I said neither.”
Taylor shoved Johnny away, making him stumble back and hit his legs on the bench that ran between the rows of lockers. Taylor made a break for it, rounding the corner into the shower block. It stank of cheap shower gel and stale semen, because night shifts in West Newton really were that boring.
Groaning, he gripped the edge of a sink, running his palm around it and concentrating on the cold, smooth porcelain. “Fuck. Fucking fuck, FUCK,” he shouted, slapping the mouldy tiles and glaring into one of the hazy mirrors.
He barely recognised himself. The arrogant, cocksure persona he’d carefully curated over the years was nowhere to be found. His reflection did not smile back at him, did not grin, or smirk, or wink in a way that had everyone wrapped around his little finger.
No. The Taylor who looked at him now was drawn, overly pale, and the bright ginger hair he’d inherited from his mum was dull as brick dust. And his eyes… Fucking hell, his eyes looked dead. Just two flat orange discs that had once been the bright amber of his wolf’s.
Shit.
When had he stopped taking care of himself? When had he stopped taking the job seriously? He ripped off his stab vest and flung it against the wall.
“What the fuck are we gonna do, JP?” he said, stalking back into the locker room. “They took our guns.”
Johnny didn’t look up. “I know,” he replied, voice soft as he straddled the bench. He had a cluster of plastic pots between his knees and was separating a handful of beads into each of them. Taylor knew what he was doing. Acting all cool, trying to draw him in so he’d focus on something else.
Well, he was not fucking having it.
“I told you, no bracelets.”
Johnny sniffed, dropping the final few beads into the pot. “No? Okay, well, I feel like purple today.” He gave a tight-lipped smile as he slid two bottles of nail polish across the bench. Midnight Sky and Damson Dream.
Taylor growled. “No.”
Johnny shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He leant forwards and picked up the bottles, shaking them and twisting off the lids.
Taylor began pacing, thumping every other locker. Partly from the simmering anger in his gut, but also to ward off anyone else that might be thinking about coming down there. Inspector be damned.
“I mean, where the fuck does the boss get off treating us like that? Acting like we haven’t been in the job for nearly ten years, like we’re fucking probies that don’t know our arses from our elbows?”
Johnny sighed and began swiping the brush across his thumbnail, already making a mess of his cuticles. He was doing it on purpose, Taylor knew that.
Johnny’s eyebrow twitched. “Sure, but you can’t argue that our heads haven’t been in it since Sam died. I mean, when was the last time we went out on an actual job? When did we last have a roll around, or go on a proper raid? Shit, dude, you can’t deny that we haven’t exactly been on top form.”
Taylor grunted and flung a leg over the bench, dropping onto it in front of Johnny. Two of the pots toppled over, sending beads clattering to the floor. Johnny didn’t reach for them.
“What do they expect?” Taylor asked, slapping Johnny’s hand away and snatching the nail brush from between his fingers.
“We were with her. Sam. She asked us—” Taylor swallowed, the Sam-shaped hollow in his chest beginning to ache again.
“She asked us to go with her, JP. To follow Maya, but we—” He sucked in a sharp breath and pressed his lips together.
He licked the pad of his thumb and cleaned away the excess paint around Johnny’s nail. Johnny had broad, smooth nails, and with each brush stroke Taylor felt his nerves beginning to settle.
“I know,” Johnny replied, voice quiet as he picked up the threads of Taylor’s words. “We got drunk instead.”
Taylor’s hand went still and he gripped Johnny’s fingers.
Samantha had been found at the bottom of a storage chute in the abandoned woollen mill just a few months before.
Hands bound, throat slit, bag over her head.
Taylor thought about the image of her most nights.
Had nightmares about the black and white pictures they’d shown him and Johnny when Major Crime took their statements.
When they’d had to stand up in court and explain why they’d left her alone that night.
They’d fucked up. Worse, they’d been terrible fucking friends.
Taylor swallowed, hard. “What’re we gonna tell the pack?” he asked, glancing up.
Johnny sighed, his steady gaze like a hook pulling Taylor in. “We tell them the truth. That we’re transferring to Falkington for a fresh start. Then, after that, you’re going to let Maman cut your hair, because it’s a fucking mess.”