Luke sat back in the chair beside Quinn’s bed with no less than a dozen feelings winging through his gut. Muted daylight had begun to color the shadows of her bedroom an hour ago, around the same time he’d slipped from her bed to the chair to keep from waking her up. He knew he should feel at least some level of unease at the intimacy he and Quinn had shared. After all, he’d hardly been holding her at arm’s length when he’d been naked and buried deep between her legs, and she wasn’t just some one-night stand. He needed to recreate the distance he’d sworn by for the last ten years. Arm’s length was smarter. Safer. Luke knew this because he’d learned it the hardest way possible, from the person who had been closest to him. Letting people in was dangerous.

And yet he couldn’t force himself from Quinn’s bedroom, and wasn’t that just the very definition of fucked straight up.

He frowned, tamping down the thoughts clogging his brain. Okay, so he was strangely low on caution when it came to Quinn. Fine. But being there for her wasn’t the equivalent of an emotional exposé, and while he might not want to spill his guts, he also wasn’t a dick. He was her partner. Her friend. Despite her insistence to the contrary, she was clearly still struggling with some level of post-traumatic stress from their kidnapping, and Luke had promised to help her. He wanted to help her.

Yeah, she’d asked him to make her feel good, and fuck yeah, they’d gone the mutual route to make that happen. But, while he didn’t think she was experiencing enough PTSD to warrant an intervention, he did get the feeling she needed more than just a couple of orgasms to get right with her demons.

Luke didn’t have to let her in to help her, though. For now, it could just be this.

Quinn shifted, a soft sigh moving past her lips as she rolled over in her sleep. They hadn’t talked much after he’d returned to her bedroom post-sex, although oddly, they hadn’t really needed to. He’d simply done what had felt right, gathering her up beneath the covers and holding her close. The whole skin-on-skin thing had led to another round of incendiary sex not long after, but again, Luke had wrapped his arms around her afterward, and Quinn had let him, both of them drifting off to sleep together. His eyes had popped open an hour ago in spite of the pre-eight AM hour—thank you, occupational hazard—so he’d just skinned into his jeans and grabbed a medical textbook from the shelf full of them over her dresser and gotten good and comfortable in the chair by her bed. Quinn’s cat, Galileo, had moseyed on in to nestle in the covers beside her after Luke had gotten up, so the pair of bright green eyes currently snagging his attention from the bottom of the bedroom doorway? Yeah, can’t say he’d been expecting those.

“Hey there.” His whisper was barely a sound—a fact that seemed to be much appreciated by the lean, almost lanky black cat currently giving him a full perusal from his sentry spot. After a handful of minutes, Luke went back to reading about the guidelines for rapid sequence intubation. He was still keenly aware of the cat, especially when the little guy edged closer, finally settling directly between the spot where Luke sat and Quinn’s bed, as if he wanted to keep an eye on both of them and couldn’t decide between the two.

“See you met Max,” came Quinn’s sleep-heavy voice, and Luke’s heart smacked him upside the rib cage.

He covered his surprise, although the whole heavy-lidded, mussed-hair thing she was rocking did nothing to lower his heart rate. “I think it’s more like he let me stay.”

“She,” Quinn corrected gently, sitting up in her bed with a yawn. “And yeah, she had a rough life before I rescued her, so she’s pretty skittish. I’m surprised she came out while you’re here. She must like you.”

“Actually, she seemed to be checking on you.”

Quinn lifted a shoulder, her eyes dropping from his by a fraction, but it was enough. “I’m fine.”

Nope. Not this time. Luke closed the textbook in his lap, placing it carefully on the nearby dresser before leaning forward to look at her. “Look, I’m not trying to pick a fight with you.” He gave her a second to digest that truth before unloading the one that would sting more. “But we both know you’re not fine.”

Her blue eyes flashed in the early-morning sunlight slanting in past the blinds. “Yes, I am,” she said. Still, her tone refused to back up the words, and as much as it made Luke feel like a limited-edition dickhead, he pushed back.

“I’ve watched you be fine for the last seven months. What’s going on with you now”—he paused to gesture to the way she’d defensively yanked the covers over her tank top-clad shoulders even though the move had sent a sucker punch right to the middle of his chest—“isn’t that, Quinn. You’re not fine.”

“I…” She trailed off. Pressing her lips into a tight line, she closed her eyes. “I want to be fine.”

Emotion threatened, doubling up and growing teeth at the sight of the unshed tears brightening Quinn’s stare when she reopened her eyes to look at him.

“But you’re right. I’m not. I’m scared.”

She aimed her whisper at the yellow and white covers in front of her. Luke fought the abrupt and very real urge to rip back the blankets and sheets, to hold her close and do damn near anything necessary to wipe the fear from her face.

Quinn needed room to let her emotions out. And even if it killed him, he needed to give it to her.

“I just…I keep waiting for this feeling, this terrible sense of dread to fade, you know?” she asked, her sights still locked on the blankets puddled around her. “I thought work would make things better. Maybe take my mind off being scared and help me focus. But this stupid fear keeps following me like a cloud. I can’t get rid of it no matter what I do.”

“Your fear isn’t stupid,” Luke said. Christ, she’d had a gun to her head. Ice had threatened to kill her and everyone she loved. If fear wasn’t a legitimate response to the memory of that, he had no goddamn clue what was.

Quinn, however? Didn’t look so convinced. “It is when it keeps me from doing my job. God, Luke, I can’t even get through an entire shift without wanting to throw up. The only two things I’ve ever been able to rely on no matter what are the job and the people in that fire house, and now I don’t have either.”

Confusion washed over him. Not having her friends, he got—Sinclair had been wildly clear about not letting so much as a whisper drop about the kidnapping and the subsequent investigation the intelligence unit was currently up to their eye teeth in. But…

“What do you mean, you can’t rely on the job?”

Quinn crossed her arms over the front of her tank top, Luke’s confusion backsliding into something a lot more visceral at the sight of the uneasy flush climbing her cheekbones. “Garrity wouldn’t clear me for work unless I agreed to go back and see him again.”

Ah hell. No wonder she’d been so fully off-center when she’d returned from the guy’s office two days ago. “Did he say why?”

“No. But be clearly feels like we have some unfinished business that needs to be talked out before I’m okay to do my job without a weekly check-in.”

“Maybe,” Luke allowed. But Quinn already seemed to know the score, and frankly, as much as he wanted to help her, he wasn’t about to bullshit her in order to do it. “But he also clearly doesn’t think you’re totally unfit to be on the rig, otherwise he never would’ve let you go back to Seventeen at all, right?”

Her chin lifted as if the thought hadn’t occurred to her. “Oh. Well, I guess not.”

“And you feel like you’ll be okay to be back on ambo tomorrow?”

“Of course,” Quinn said, zero wiggle room in her tone. “I mean, yeah, this whole thing scares the shit out of me, but I wouldn’t put anyone’s health at risk just to make myself feel better. I want to get back to normal and take care of people again.” Now her voice did soften, the waver traveling on a direct path from her words to Luke’s gut. “I’m just so tired of feeling scared and alone.”

“You’re not alone.”

Pushing to his feet, he covered the space between the chair and her bed in a pair of strides. Yes, this was dangerous, and yes, he knew he should be exercising a hell of a lot more caution—or at the very least, not cupping Quinn’s beautiful face and brushing a kiss over her addictively soft lips.

But right now, in this moment, as he sat here in front of her and listened to her admit the fears that had been weighing so heavily on her shoulders for the past week straight, Luke didn’t give one shit about caution.

“I’m your partner, remember?” he said, pulling back just far enough to look her in the eye. “I’ll be with you at the fire house, and if you need me outside of Seventeen, I can be here, too.”

Slowly, she nodded. “I would really like that.”

Quinn lifted her mouth to his. The kiss quickly deepened, his cock growing hard at the feel of her eager tongue in his mouth and her hands on his body, and as he lay her back over the bed sheets to gain better access to the warm, wet heat between her thighs, Luke swore to himself it would only be this.

* * *

Ice looked at the skinny, strung out blonde in front of him in the alley and contemplated murder. Not of the woman herself—to the contrary, she’d just proved pretty fucking useful, even if her loyalty was way more to the blow she got from Damien than to Ice personally. But if what she was telling him was in any way on the level, he was going to kill someone, and it wouldn’t be merciful.

“Start at the beginning and tell me again.”

The blonde—Cheryl? No, wait, Cherise—shifted her weight from one cheap stiletto to the other, picking at the already chipped polish on her stubby fingernails. Ice had exactly one more go-round with the intel before this chick went into full on tremors. Not that he wouldn’t get her high as a motherfucking satellite to get the information he needed, but still. Pumping her for details he could actually use would be a hell of a lot easier if she was at least relatively sober.

“I was hanging out down on the pier last night, getting down with the usual Friday night crowd,” she said, and Ice easily made the translation to her giving ten-dollar blowjobs and scoring whatever pharmaceuticals she could snort or shoot up. Not that he was offended by that—after all, business was business.

“Okay,” he said, and Cherise continued.

“Around nine thirty, I got hungry, so I went to Three Brothers. You know, the pizza place? It’s over by that bodega. They make, like, the best calzones.”

Ice nodded, wanting her to get the hell on with the important shit, but not so much that she screwed up exactly what she’d seen and heard. “I know the place.”

“Right. Well, I was sitting in the back, minding my own business and stuff, when these two people I’d never seen before came in and started talking to Carmen. She was working behind the counter. I know her from back when she used to be one of Bobby D.’s girls, like a year and a half ago, before he went up the river for killing that one chick. Anyway”—Cherise took a cigarette from the wrinkled pack in her purse, her Day-Glo pink lighter snicking softly as she lit the thing and blew a stream of smoke toward the brick wall over Ice’s shoulder—“these two kinda caught my attention because they looked a little too clean to be on the pier on a Friday night. They seemed awful chatty, like maybe they knew Carmen or something. The woman was asking her how’s business, and the guy ordered a couple of slices. Tipped her real good, too.”

Cops. Nobody tipped the counter help at Three Brothers unless they were getting something in return.

“Did you hear any specifics from their conversation?” Ice asked, turning over the possible scenarios in his head. Just because he wanted to rip a path down to North Point’s pier and beat the truth out of this ex-hooker directly didn’t mean it was a smart move. With only a week to go before this deal with Sorenson shook out, he had to be more careful than fucking ever. Plus, if she was working an honest job, and a shit one at that, chances were high this Carmen bitch didn’t know anything useful, anyway. He’d certainly never heard of her. She wasn’t one of his boys’ regulars, for sex or for drugs.

Cherise took another sharp drag from her cigarette. “Not a lot. They kept their voices low enough that I couldn’t make out much. But I did hear Carmen say she didn’t know anything about no guy named Damien.” The words made Ice’s exhale just a fraction easier as she continued. “The only guy I know by that name is right there.”

She paused to point at Damien, who leaned against the graffiti-covered wall at the mouth of the alley, standing guard over Ice’s conversation. It might be the middle of the day, but a man couldn’t be too careful.

“When I told him these two randos might have been asking about him, he got all jumpy,” Cherise said, shrugging her too-bony shoulders. “Didn’t even want the blowjob he paid for. Just dumped me in his car and brought me here to you.”

Ice tilted his head. At least Damien had had the mental capacity to realize this probably wasn’t a coincidence. They’d been as careful as possible to cover up all signs of the drive-by and kidnapping, scrubbing both the flophouse and the abandoned warehouse of any potential physical evidence. Ice had been left with no choice but to dump Jayden’s body—burying the guy in his backyard had hardly been a fucking option. But he’d chosen a remote location hours from Remington, one he knew would remain undisturbed for a good, long time.

So now all he had to do was figure out if those goddamn paramedics had gone squawking to the 5-0, or if Damien had stirred up some crap of his own that had gotten him noticed.

First things first. He had to put a proper ID to these asshole cops. “Can you tell me what these two looked like?”

“The woman was Hispanic. Long dark hair, leather jacket. I remember, because I liked it. The guy was a redhead. Sorta big. Nice ass. Oh!” Cherise’s eyes brightened beneath the heavy layer of makeup weighing them down. “His name was weird, like one of those last names you use as a first name. Hollander, or something stupid like that. Carmen gave him a bunch of attitude and I heard her say it. But to be honest, I thought she was pretty stupid not to be nice to him. A guy like that, who’s hot and giving her money?” Now her eyes glinted, her mouth curling into a mercenary smile. “If it were me, I’d be riding that shit all the way to the bank.”

“I have no doubt you would,” Ice said, all truth. “You were smart to come to Damien with this, Cherise.”

“Yeah?” She cocked her hip, her thin black miniskirt riding higher over her thighs. “How smart?”

Ah, a negotiation. Ice’s cock stirred at the prospect. “Smart enough for me to get you high right now. Or…”

“Or?”

“We could strike a deal. You know this woman who works at Three Brothers, right? Carmen?”

Cherise nodded. “We’re not real close, but I know her good enough. Yeah.”

“Get some information about how she knows these two and exactly who they are, and I’ll give you a whole lot more than a one-time high.”

Cherise took a step forward, crossing her arms over her skimpy top to push her tits front and center. “I’d be listening a whole lot better if you’d say a number.”

Oh, yeah. Between the prospect of outsmarting these cops and the promise of punishing whoever was responsible for the sudden spotlight, he was definitely fucking hard now.

Ice rattled off a number that made Cherise smile. “That’s for reliable information. Don’t even think about giving me the runaround or double-crossing me.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” she purred. “But I want half upfront and the high right now. Then you’ve got yourself a deal, sweetheart.”

Of course she’d had to rely on an endearment, because he hadn’t told her his name. Shit, between his sunglasses, his hoodie, and her post-high fog, she hadn’t even gotten a halfway-decent look at his face.

“You drive a hard bargain. I like that,” Ice said, reaching into his pocket for the roll of cash he always kept there and the small baggie of heroin he’d known he’d need the minute Damien had called him, and bingo. Cherise’s pupils dilated, giving away her despair.

Peeling off a few bills, he held the money and the H just out of her reach. “But I drive an even harder one, so here it is. You’ll get your high and your half upfront, but we’re going to have to start on an even playing ground, and right now, you owe me.”

“What?” Cherise blinked, and if Ice had been in possession of a soul, he might have actually felt bad for her. But she’d chosen to negotiate with the wrong businessman. He wasn’t about to walk away from a deal without every single thing he’d damn well earned.

“It seems you still have an unsettled debt with Damien.” He let his eyes drop to her mouth to get his meaning all the way home, his cock standing straight up as she parted her lips in realization.

“What, for the blowjob? He said he wasn’t interested, remember?”

Ice laughed. “Oh, I remember. But it was bought and paid for, and Damien is my associate. You answer to him, he answers to me. Which means you owe me for your payday. So get on your knees and pay up like a good girl. Otherwise I’ll make it so you can’t score so much as a goddamn aspirin in this city ever again.”

And as she undid his jeans and started sucking him off with that not-so-clever mouth, Ice grabbed her hair, fucking her face hard enough to make her gag as he thought of nothing but revenge.