Total pages in book: 75
Estimated words: 74875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 374(@200wpm)___ 300(@250wpm)___ 250(@300wpm)
“Takes alcohol to make you talk?”
I shrugged. “My father makes that patient,” I said, gesturing to the schizophrenic man that was glaring at me through the glass, “look like a fairy princess.”
Tate growled low in his throat and stood.
“I’ll be at your house at eight.”
With that, he left, leaving me with a few minutes to breathe.
At least until the pounding on my office door started. “You’re late! We’re late! Everyone will be late!”
Grumbling under my breath, I opened the office door and let him in.
“Sorry about the wait.”
Chapter 13
They are called man hours because a woman would’ve done it in twenty minutes.
-Bumper sticker on a construction vehicle
Tate
I sat in the meeting that discussed the week’s calls, staring at two of three new members that’d arrived while I’d been away.
One was an ex-FBI agent who was as talkative as a fucking honey badger. His name was Parker, and I was sure that one day I’d make the mistake of talking to him when he didn’t want me to, and he’d slit my throat.
The other one was named Rafe. He was like an elusive wraith. I never saw him do his job, yet it always seemed to get done. I never saw him go home, yet he never looked unrested. And honestly, he was the slipperiest motherfucker when it came to tracking him down. He was never where he was supposed to be.
Both of them made me suspicious, but today, I just couldn’t find it in me to care.
I was still fucked up about Hennessy.
Seeing her hair…it shook me.
Knowing that her father had done it. Yeah, that really chapped my ass. I wanted to go fucking kill him, yet she’d gotten that promise from me, knowing that I wouldn’t go back on a promise to her like her father did.
“Are you listening, Casey?”
I let my eyes lazily come to Travis’, and shrugged. “Long fucking day.”
He looked at his watch. “It’s nine in the morning. How fucking long could it be when we’re only an hour into the work day?”
I laughed at that, and even I could hear the anger and pain in the threads of sound that wafted over the room.
“You have no fucking clue.” I leaned my chair back and looked at the ceiling. “I’m fucking wrecked right now, and I don’t know what to do.”
When my head came back up, it was to find all eyes on me.
“Please enlighten us,” Baylor drawled.
He looked lazy, sitting there with his feet kicked up on the table with his arms crossed over his chest. I knew better, though.
He’d always given off that feeling of ease, yet when we were twenty-four, and minutes back from a deployment, I’d seen him go from looking relaxed to having a man six inches off the ground for shoving a girl—Krisney—and causing her to hit the ground.
He may not like her—cough, cough, bullshit—but he didn’t want anyone else to hurt her either.
Though, I had a feeling that Baylor had done that because of his brother, who’d been in an eerie calm, as he watched her fall.
See, Reed Hail had once, a long time ago, dated Krisney. They’d been happy and in love, and then they found out that Krisney’s brother had been raping their sister every time he came over to the house to stay the night with their other brother, Tobias.
The moment that it all went down, Reed had dropped Krisney like a piece of trash, and all the other brothers had, too.
I could see where they were coming from in all of that, but I knew that Krisney was a good girl. She’d always been at Hennessy’s side, and now that I thought about it, I realized that she had been every single time that Hennessy’s hair had been hacked off.
And it’d happened a lot.
I remembered a lot when she was younger, looking at her and wondering who the hell had been doing her hair. She’d just get it to a manageable length, and then she’d hack it off what looked to be with a hacksaw—or a fucking hunting knife, like she’d told me he’d done last night.
Just like that, I was mad all over again.
“Jesus Christ, Tate. You’re going to fucking break my goddamn table!”
I instantly let go of the table, and looked down at the dented plastic.
“This is a shitty fucking table if I can dent it,” I told him. “And God.”
Travis rose his brows at me.
“Any day now would be great.”
I brought my hands up to my head and sifted my fingers through my hair.
“Fuck!”
They waited.
I sat forward, put my hands on my knees, and stared at the ground.
“Y’all know Hennessy Hanes?”
“Your psychologist?” Baylor rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you know we do.”
I clenched my fists and stood up. I’d made it to the door before I turned and paced back in the opposite direction.