Chapter 31
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Lina
The silence in the interrogation room was a living thing.
It pressed against my eardrums, crawled over my skin, settled like cold ash in my lungs.
Roberts had just dropped a bomb in the middle of the room and walked out as if he’d done nothing more than mention the weather.
A body. What the club did with a body. The words kept circling, jagged and poisonous, cutting a little deeper every time they came back around.
I stared at John. He sat rigid in the chair, one wrist cuffed to the table, his jaw locked so tight the muscle fluttered under his skin.
His eyes were closed, not in calm, but in retreat—as if he could shut out the room, the questions, the truth itself, if he just held still long enough. Something inside me snapped.
No. Absolutely not. I wasn’t going to let him disappear behind that hard, empty mask and leave me alone with fragments.
I leaned forward and slammed my palm against the metal table.
The crack split the room open. John’s eyes flew open instantly, dark and alert, and for one sharp second I saw the man underneath the silence—the one coiled tight, dangerous, cornered.
“No,” I said, my voice cutting through the room like broken glass. “You do not get to shut down on me. Not now. Not when I’m the one standing between you and a prison cell.” I leaned in farther, every nerve in my body humming hot and raw. “I need to know what the hell he meant, John. Right now.”
John held my gaze for a long, punishing beat. Then he gave the slightest shake of his head. “It’s club business,” he said. His tone was flat, stripped of emotion, which somehow made it worse. Like whatever truth sat underneath those words was too dark to touch in open air.
Rage flashed through me so fast it felt white.
Blinding. Purifying. I shoved back from the table and came to my feet so violently the chair shrieked across the floor.
“Club business?” I repeated, each word sharper than the last. “Club fucking business? Fuck you, John,” I snapped.
My hands were shaking now, not with fear, but with the sheer force of holding myself together.
“Fuck you, your club, your rules, and whatever code you think still matters in here.” I planted both palms on the table and leaned in until my face was only inches from his.
“You want me to defend you? You want me to get you out of this?” My voice dropped low, dangerous, stripped down to steel.
“Then you tell me what the hell I’m walking into.
Because I cannot save you from something I can’t even see. ”
His jaw tightened until it looked carved from stone.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t shift. Didn’t even blink.
He just stared at me with those unreadable dark eyes, and for a terrifying second, I had the sickening sense that if I pushed any harder, whatever was buried under that silence might come up bloody.
Then his gaze flicked upward. Just once. Quick. Precise.
I followed the movement without thinking, and that was when I saw it—the camera tucked near the ceiling, black and small and almost easy to miss if you weren’t looking for it. The red light was on. Recording. Watching. Listening. Roberts wasn’t gone. He had only changed vantage points.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. Every reckless question I’d thrown at him could become a noose if I wasn’t careful. Anything he said in this room could be twisted, extracted, weaponized. I straightened slowly, forcing every jagged emotion back behind my ribs.
Think, Lina. Not like a woman. Not like a mother. Not like someone who still loves him in spite of every reason not to. Think like a lawyer.
I took one measured breath, then another.
By the time I spoke again, my voice was calm.
Clinical. Professional enough to cut. “O’Rourke has enough to keep you in lockup until a bail hearing on Monday,” I said, as if we’d never come close to the edge a second earlier.
“Apparently, Ms. Cooper did her due diligence. There are photographs documenting her injuries, and a rape kit was performed.”
John went rigid so fast it was like watching a steel trap snap shut. Every line of him hardened. His shoulders locked. His jaw clenched until a muscle ticked beneath the skin. When he spoke, his voice came out low and jagged, thick with fury barely leashed.
“I didn’t rape her.”
I held his gaze and gave a single nod. “I know.”
And I did.
I believed him with a certainty that lived somewhere deeper than reason.
But belief didn’t mean a damn thing in a courtroom.
Belief wasn’t evidence. Belief didn’t keep a jury from convicting.
Evidence did. Facts did. Paper trails, photographs, swabs, testimony.
And right now, all of it was stacking against him like bricks in a wall.
“But someone did,” I said quietly, each word deliberate. “And right now, she’s naming you.” I leaned forward just enough to make it clear I wasn’t asking for comfort, and I sure as hell wasn’t offering any. “You want to tell me why?”
A harsh, humorless scoff left him. His expression darkened, something ugly moving behind his eyes. “How the fuck would I know?” he snapped. His voice turned rougher, more dangerous. “She was nothing but a club whore. Yeah, I fucked her. But I didn’t rape her.”
I didn’t flinch.
Didn’t blink.
Didn’t let the ugliness of the words register on my face, even though they scraped at every nerve I had.
I’d heard worse.
A lot worse.
Courtrooms had taught me that monsters didn’t always snarl, and victims didn’t always speak cleanly.
I’d spent years listening to the filth people did to each other, sorting truth from panic, lies from trauma, rage from shame.
His language didn’t shock me. What unsettled me was how fast he reached for contempt—as if cruelty might put distance between himself and whatever was really hiding underneath this.
I leaned back in the chair and crossed my arms, forcing my voice into something flat, controlled, and professional. The only way to survive a moment like this was to make it clinical.
“Look, John,” I said. “Right now, the police have your balls in a vise, and I can’t do a damn thing until I get you out of here.
” I let that sink in before I continued, “Until then, you are going to behave. You are not going to provoke the cops, you are not going to mouth off, and for the love of fucking God, you are going to keep your goddamn mouth shut. Am I clear?”
For a long moment, he just stared at me.
The silence stretched tight between us, alive with everything he wasn’t saying. His eyes were dark, unreadable, but not empty. There was something in them—rage, yes, but something else too. Fear, maybe. Or the kind of buried truth that only showed itself when the walls started closing in.
Then he gave one short nod.
“Good.”
I stood, gathering my briefcase and straightening my blazer with slow, measured movements. I needed the ritual of it. Needed the structure. Something clean and precise to hold on to in a room that felt like it was thickening with every breath.
“In the meantime,” I said, my tone calm again, almost cold, “I’m going to find out what I can.”
I reached the door and put my hand on the handle, but something in me refused to leave it there. I turned back.
Our eyes met.
And for one second—one raw, dangerous second—I let the mask crack.
I let him see what sat underneath all the polish, all the legal composure, all the carefully sharpened control. The fear. The anger. The steel.
“And as for the other thing,” I said, narrowing my eyes, “I will find out. One way or another.”
His jaw tightened hard enough to show the strain in his face. But he didn’t argue. Didn’t deny it. Didn’t even look away.
He just nodded once.
That was worse.
I knocked on the door. A uniformed officer opened it, and I stepped out into the fluorescent chill of the hallway. The door shut behind me with a heavy metallic thud that sounded too final, too much like something sealing closed.
I stood there for a moment without moving, my briefcase clutched in one hand, my pulse beating hard enough to make my fingers tremble.
A body.
What the club did with a body.
The words coiled through me like smoke, dark and choking.
I didn’t know exactly what they meant yet, but I knew enough to understand this much: whatever truth sat underneath them was bad.
Bad enough that John had buried it behind silence.
Bad enough that even now, with his freedom hanging by a thread, he still wouldn’t hand it over.
And I had just tied myself to him anyway.
To a man with dangerous secrets.
To a man who was the father of my daughter.
To a man I still loved despite every reason in the world not to.
And if I was going to protect him—protect Tatum, protect what was left of my family—I needed to know exactly what kind of darkness I was stepping into.
Even if the truth gutted me.