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He woke me up again just after midday and fed me the medication I’d brought home from the hospital. Then, because Mick had told him I had to take it with food, he took me out and bought me lunch at the chili house across the street. It wasn’t the fun outing it usually was, though. I was tired, sore, and cranky, while he was distracted and staring into space. I made an effort, playfully kicking him to make him laugh, but it was no use. He was in a world of his own and seemed in no hurry to come back.

In the end, I resorted to trying to talk about the one thing I knew would get his attention—the sex we’d had the previous night. It didn’t do me much good, though. He just said he thought he should bottom more. What I didn’t hear was that he
wanted
to bottom more. In my mind, the difference was huge. I’d spent too long believing without question that he
didn’t
want to. Fuck that. I didn’t need him to do it for my benefit. Damn, I didn’t
want
him to do it for my benefit.

Not that I explained as much. I wanted to tell him that it didn’t matter… that it had never mattered and it never would, but I didn’t. We weren’t great at verbal communication—we never had been—and true to form, Ash spent the rest of the conversation being so evasive I ran out of patience and called him a dick. If it wasn’t for the massive bruises he knew I was sporting, he probably would have ditched me when we got home, but he didn’t. Instead, he crawled into bed beside me and pulled a pillow over his head. I fell asleep tracing the faint white lines on his wrist, the ones he thought were hidden by ink, and wondered what the hell was going on in his head.

Now the apartment felt lonely when I ventured out of the bedroom, dressed for a party I really didn’t want to go to. Though we spent a lot of time apart, it was rare that I found myself truly home alone—at least, awake and alone. I missed Ash, despite knowing he was just a few blocks away from me. With his artwork still pinned up all over the place, I saw him everywhere, everywhere except where it truly mattered.

I wandered into the kitchen and swallowed a handful of pain meds before I locked the prescription-strength codeine away for safekeeping. I shut the cabinet and an old tattoo design caught my eye. Most the sketches around the apartment were new, but the Romany drawing was an old antagonist Ash had been reworking for as long as I could remember. I traced the pencil sketch with the pad of my finger. It was an old gypsy woman with her mouth and eyes sewn shut, and it had script in a language I didn’t recognize running through it.

Fratele meu, pentru totdeauna….

I had no idea what it meant, but it looked amazing to me. I’d always thought the piece was startlingly beautiful, but what did I know? Ash put everything he had into every design he drew, and he was a grouchy motherfucker when he couldn’t get it right. He told me he’d worked on the gypsy sketch for years and he still wasn’t happy with it. Looking at it, I thought there might be some recent changes, darker shading around the eyes, perhaps. Maybe
that
was behind his weird mood.

Sometimes it felt like there was an invisible cord between us, binding me to Ash even when we weren’t together. I felt that pull as I stared at his work, and though an evening with Ellie’s narrow-minded sister was the last thing I needed, it wasn’t long before I dragged my sorry ass out of the apartment and into the night.

Ellie buzzed me in to her building and met me by the elevator. I caught her as she threw her arms around me, just in time to stop her squeezing.

She giggled. “Oops, sorry. Ash did tell me, but I forgot. Are you okay?”

“I’ll live,” I said dryly. “What about you, little lady? Enjoying your party?”

“Mmm-hmm.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me along the corridor with a tipsy smile. “It’s good. Megan’s boyfriend is a bit of an idiot, though. I don’t think Ash likes him… which reminds me….” She stopped a few feet away from the door. “What was going on with you yesterday?”

Out of habit, I shrugged vaguely. Ellie was Ash’s best friend, and sometimes she understood him better than I did, but I was pretty sure he didn’t talk to her about sex. In fact, I was pretty sure he didn’t talk to
anyone
about sex. Ellie poked me in the chest, hard enough to make me wince and remind me that I hadn’t answered her question. “Nothing really, sugar. You know I get my crazy on when I’m sleep-deprived.”

Though clouded by alcohol, Ellie was suspicious. “You’re as cryptic as he is when you put your mind to it. Lucky for you, I’m a little bit drunk, but you can’t fob me off forever, mister.”

She opened her mouth to say something else, but my cell phone cut her off. I pulled it from my pocket as Mick’s name flashed up and stepped away from her to take the call, motioning for her to go back inside. “Hey,” I said warily. “What’s up?”

“Worry not, asshole; we don’t have to go in.”

His familiar, easy voice relaxed me enough to grin. It wouldn’t have been the first time we’d been pulled in on our days off. “What do you want? I’m kind of busy here.”

Mick snorted
.
“Sure you are. How’s the ribs?”

“Black, blue. It’s hard to tell.”

“I bet they are,”
Mick said, though I could hear the laugh in his voice.
“You need to stay off your feet for a few days, let ’em heal.”

I rolled my eyes, waiting for him to get to the point. Though we were friends, it was unlike him to call on our days off. Besides, I was still pissed at him for ratting me out to Ash. I didn’t feel much like shooting the breeze with him.

He took the hint eventually
.
“There’s a red alert out on the kid from last night. They checked with all the relatives in the city, and no one has her. Her grandmother has reported her missing.”

“How old?”

“Three. They think the guy stashed her somewhere, then came back to finish the job. There was a machete at the end of the hallway too. You’re lucky it was only the bat he brought back.”

I digested the implications of what he was saying and felt a cold rush creep over my skin. The guy had clearly been a lunatic. Faced with him armed with a machete, we wouldn’t have stood a chance. “So I guess it’s all over the news now?”

“Yep,”
Mick confirmed with a weary sigh.
“Every damn channel. And they’re reporting that he attacked a city paramedic, so you might want to tell Ash before he hears it somewhere else. I tried to spare him the gory details, but—”

“You shouldn’t have told him anything at all.”

“Fuck you. I was worried, and I knew he would be when he saw the state of you…” He broke off with an exasperated sigh. “Look, I called him so he knew to keep an eye on you. I didn’t tell him much about how it happened, just that you’d gotten a bit banged up. You’d want to know if something happened to him, wouldn’t you?”

I echoed his sigh. He was right, but explaining the whole story to Ash wasn’t going to be pretty. He was freaked enough already, and he only knew what Mick and I had told him—next to nothing. He was going to flip his shit when he heard about the rest of it. The missing child worried me too. We’d been first on scene, and even though I knew it was ridiculous, I couldn’t help fretting that maybe we should’ve done more to locate her. “Do you think—”

Mick cut me off before I could finish. “We did our job, dude. Maybe if the CPD had paid attention, it wouldn’t have gotten this far. From what I heard, it wasn’t the first call to that place. They should’ve warned us before we got there.”

“Yeah, I suppose, but the kid could’ve been right there, all along.”

“Maybe,” Mick conceded. “But at the same time, he could’ve brought his damn sword back and killed us all. The police wouldn’t have known to look for a kid then, at least not as quickly as they did.”

I hummed a vague response, but I wasn’t convinced. The whole thing had been a clusterfuck from the moment the call came in, and no matter how bad things appeared, there was always room for them to get worse.

In my ear, Mick blew out a breath. I could hear his kids playing in the background, but in my daze of reflection, I’d almost forgotten he was there. “If the search is still going on when we get back on shift, we’ll deal with it then,” he said. “Get some rest, okay?” He hung up.

I stared at the blank screen for a minute before I got a grip and shoved the phone back into my pocket. I’d wandered back along the corridor during the conversation. With a heavy sigh, I leaned on the stair rail and stared down at the four-story drop. It wasn’t the first time a call had turned into something unpleasant, but it didn’t get easier. Just knowing we’d failed to prevent something messed with my head. We weren’t the police, but I’d seen too many horrible things to pretend I didn’t know how badly the scenario of a missing child could end.

“Gonna jump, fucker?”

I spun around to find Ash behind me. He was twirling a beer bottle in his hands and wearing a pair of jeans so old I couldn’t remember if they were mine or his. They hung low on his hips, and damn, they sure looked good on him. I swallowed thickly, instantly distracted by the sight of him. “Nah,” I said absently, “I was just on the phone. You okay?”

He nodded, his lips turned up in a faint grin. “Sure I am,” he said. “But shouldn’t I be asking you that? How’re the bruises? Still sore?”

I shrugged. “A bit, but I’m not on again until Wednesday; they’ll be all right by then.”

His tentative smile widened considerably. “Four days off, huh? What are you going to do with all that free time?”

I pretended to think long and hard about all the things I liked to do best. “Eat, sleep… maybe some other stuff….”

“Oh yeah? Like what?”

I grinned back at his devilish smirk. “You’ve got a one-track mind. I’m going to see my mom on Monday. You should come; she misses you.”

“Can we go after work?”

I nodded. “Sure. She’s got Spanish class in the morning anyway.”

Ash laughed and shook his head. “You’re so behind; she’s doing pottery lessons now.”

Well, okay, then
. I’d never been able to keep up with my mom. She couldn’t keep track of my erratic schedule either, and Ash took most of her calls. He didn’t seem to mind. In her own, unique way, she was as eccentric as he was, and they shared a deep bond.

Ash took advantage of my silence and stepped a little closer, his eyes suddenly intense. “Were you talking to Mick about the kid?”

“You already heard about that, huh?” I hedged pointlessly.

Ash rolled his eyes. “Now who’s being evasive? Yeah, I’ve seen it. You could’ve told me about the machete.”

Damn. He didn’t read newspapers and he didn’t watch the news, but one look at his face told me he already knew everything I hadn’t told him and more. A TV in a store window, or maybe he’d passed a newspaper stand. It didn’t really matter anymore.

“I didn’t know about it. Mick just told me. When did you see the news?”

“While you were sleeping,” Ash said shortly.

He folded his arms across his chest, looking pissed, perhaps even more pissed than he had that morning, and I wondered idly if that was why he’d left me alone in bed. “Is that why you left?”

His frown deepened. “What? Why would I do that?”

Or maybe not.
I glanced around, stepped even closer to him, and put my hand on his arm. “Never mind. Look, I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know, okay? You probably know more than I do.”

He nudged me with his shoulder and sighed softly. “It just freaks me out knowing that guy was anywhere near you with a fucking machete.”

“He wasn’t,” I said, stretching my aching back out slightly. “It was stashed down the hall. I never even saw it.”

“You just saw the baseball bat, huh?”

“Not really. I was kinda busy. Just forget about it, okay? It’s over.”

His scowl remained for a moment more before he tipped the last of his beer into his mouth and relaxed his face into a lazy grin. He had avoidance down to a fine art, and it meant he also rarely pushed me to talk about anything. It bugged me most of the time, but when it came to my work, I was as willing as he was to let things slide.

We began walking slowly toward Ellie’s apartment. If his leisurely pace was anything to go by, Ash didn’t seem in a hurry to get back inside. “You didn’t have to come tonight,” he said. “Ellie’s tanked. I was going split as soon as she passed out.”

“Sounds good to me,” I said. “Can we get food on the way home? I’m starving.”

He nodded agreeably and pushed open the front door, but then—like magic—Ellie popped up and glared at us through narrowed eyes. “On your way where?”

“Nowhere, darlin’,” Ash lied smoothly. “I’m just going to get Pete a beer. Why don’t you introduce him to Sean?”

He winked as he ducked around us and disappeared into the kitchen. I had no option but to follow Ellie into the dimly lit living room, then as luck would have it, she vanished too, leaving me to face her bitch of a sister alone.

Warily, I looked around the room. Megan was holding court on the couch with her new fuck buddy,
Sean
, beside her. Megan Mills was a strange-looking chick; she had the same thick auburn hair as her siblings, but she lacked their wide, friendly eyes. Hers were small and dull, leaving her face flat and cold, just like the rest of her. It made talking to her a depressing prospect. I moved toward the couch with a suppressed sigh, knowing it was better to get it over with quickly.

I stopped right in front of her and pulled out my best amiable grin. “How are you doing, Meg?”

She barely glanced in my direction, her attention focused on the greasy fuckwit she was draped over. “I’m good, thanks, Pete. How are you?”

“Yeah, good,” I said, but she’d already lost interest. My grin widened enough to look genuine as I moved off. Looked like Megan had no time for anyone who didn’t dance to her drama-queen tune and I came firmly under that category. Relieved, I made my escape and wandered over to Charlie, the middle Mills sibling, who was hiding in the corner of the room about as far away from Megan as he could possibly get.

He stood and shook my hand, grinning like the idiot he was. “She doesn’t change.”