I was dreaming about paper, the kind of paper we use at the office to print out depositions and permit applications, flying around me. It was everywhere, a hurricane of paper, and some of it was touching me, soft touches on my shoulders and my back. I brushed my hand over something on my side, trying to stop the tickles that the touch was causing. It wouldn’t stop. And then a warm hand was sliding over my belly, moving down to touch that little button that had the power to turn my body into a boneless heap. I shivered as pleasure began to swirl in my lower belly, my hand moving down there to pull that hand closer against my secret button.

“I want you,” a deep voice whispered against my ear and that’s when I knew I wasn’t dreaming the touches.

I opened my eyes, expecting to find myself in the small room at the back of the guest house on my family estate. Instead, I was staring at stark cinderblock walls, no windows to offer even a hint of light other than what came from the nightlights hidden in the floor vents.

The safe room.

And then it all came back to me.

Bo and West and Violet Mitchell.

But there was time for that later.

He was touching me, his fingers creating magic between my legs. His mouth was making patterns on my shoulder, his tongue, his teeth joining the party from time to time. I twisted a little, drew his mouth up to mine. Morning breath had no meaning to me at the moment. I just wanted him. I didn’t care about anything else.

His hands were wide enough that when he spread them across my belly they seemed to reach from one side to the other. I can’t begin to explain how good it made me feel to know that, how petite and protected I felt with his hands on me. I wanted to be held like that for the rest of my life, wanted to be able to melt into him and know he’d be there to hold me no matter what.

It wasn’t just the pleasure he created when he was inside of me. But that wasn’t anything to shake my head at, either.

He slid inside of me with surprising ease, his body fitting against mine almost perfectly. And those hands…I loved the feel of his hands on me. He knew where to touch me, knew how. He could read my body like a blind man could read braille. And his movements were perfection, doing things to my sense of reality that was familiar and strange all at the same time. I wanted to touch him but he had me trapped, refusing to allow me to do more than go for the ride. And a beautiful ride it was.

I curled up against him when it was over, listened to his heart beat in his chest. He was staring up at the ceiling, tension that hadn’t been there before making his muscles feel like lines of steel against my pliant body. I watched my fingers move slowly down his body, playing in the thin line of hair that led from his navel to the base of his cock, swirling my fingertip in the thicker bit of hair there. He shifted a little, drawing my hand back up to his chest.

“It’s going to be okay.”

He brushed the hair from my face, tugging at the hairband that had held my braid in place before the day and sleep had wiggled it free. Playing with it restlessly between two fingers, he leaned up and kissed the top of my head.

“I love you.”

I sat up a little, saw defeat in his eyes.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Say goodbye.”

“Remy, we both know how this is going to end. It doesn’t matter if the guy set me up. I still hit him.”

“But it wasn’t aggravated assault. At the worst, it was simple assault.”

“I appreciate that assessment, Ms. Counselor, but it doesn’t matter what we think. There’s a warrant out for my arrest and, like you said last night, I can’t hide out here for the rest of my life.”

“I’m going to fix this. You just have to trust me.”

He touched my face, brushing my dark hair back again. “I do trust you. But even you can’t create miracles.”

“We don’t need a miracle. We just need to find a way to make a crooked cop back off.”

I climbed out of bed and began fishing around for my clothes. Bo sat up and watched, a little déjà vu bouncing through my head when I caught him watching me with that glow of desire in his eyes.

“You’re insatiable,” I said, tossing a sock I’d found tangled near his shoes at him.

“Only for you.”

“Go take a shower. Do something productive while the rest of us work on your case.”

“Like what?”

I shrugged. “Monitor the security feeds. Listen to the comms. I don’t care.”

He groaned, climbing out of the bed and wrapping his arms around my waist, lifting me up off the floor.

“We need a shower first.”

“Speak for yourself.”

“Are you refusing to have a shower with me, Ms. Stone?”

I didn’t have to think about that one. I’d be crazy to refuse. And it was one experience I was damned glad I hadn’t passed up!

*

One of Jack’s guys was in the control room when we walked in, a guy named Sebastian. He nodded with respect to me and stood, offering his chair immediately to Bo.

“Where’s Brent?”

Sebastian looked at me, hesitation in his eyes. But Bo made a little gesture and he immediately answered.

Clearly, I was not considered part of the team unless one of the men in my life gave permission for me to be kept in the loop.

“Brent went back to his hotel to check on his lady friend. And Jack went home to sleep.”

“Did they send someone to Violet Mitchell’s house?”

Sebastian again glanced at Bo, making me curse under my breath. “It was my suggestion that they do it. Surely you can simply tell me if they did!”

Bo bit back a smile as Sebastian cowed a little under my reprimand.

“Yes, ma’am, they went to her house and they brought back several digital recorders and video players. Brent has them up in his office.”

That was all I’d wanted to know. I spun on my heel and grabbed the key to Violet’s room from the file cabinet.

“Remy, do you think that’s a good idea?”

“I just want to talk to her.”

I went to Violet’s room, closing and locking the door behind me in case one of those male Neanderthals got the idea to follow me. Violet was on the bed, curled into a ball and snoring softly in her sleep. I stood by the door and watched for a few minutes, wondering if waking her would only cause her to go into a rage. But she must have felt me watching her because she stirred.

“Second Year?”

“Yeah, it’s me.”

I walked to the bed as she sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Her hair was wild and she was still missing her shirt, but she looked a little more like the Violet Mitchell I’d known this morning. The wildness was gone from her eyes.

“How are you feeling?”

“Wondering where the fuck I am.”

“You’re in a safe room under my brothers’ business.”

She looked around for a moment, a little blush of shame touching her cheeks as she took in the mess. “I don’t like being in unfamiliar places,” she said softly.

“I understand.”

“And they gave me a shot. I don’t like that.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

She slid her hand into mine. “Thank you for coming to see me.”

“How are you today?”

“You mean am I lucid?” She smiled a little bitterly. “I am.”

“Good. I need your help.”

She sighed, lifting her hands to run her fingers through her tangled hair. She wasn’t able to do much—her restlessness having put knots in it that would take a strong brush and a few hours of patience to get out—but it seemed to make her feel better. When she was done, she rested her hands in her lap and focused on me.

“You were being gaslighted by Vincent West. He was trying to drive you to a breakdown so that you would be discredited if you went to the state attorney general with something you saw on his desk.”

Violet tilted her head slightly. “Gaslighted?”

“He hid digital recorders and video players in your house, your car, and around the office in order to make you think you were being haunted by the man who attacked you in college.”

Violet paled, but she seemed to stay with me. In fact, I thought I saw a spark of relief in her eyes.

“Recorders?”

“The digital recorders held vulgar speech by a man that was meant to remind you of the attack. The video players displayed the blood and photographs on the walls of your bedroom to push you over the edge. And when you tried to take pictures of them to prove their existence, he must have gotten to your phone and replaced the photos with ones that showed the room without the projections.”

She lowered her head, a sob suddenly shaking her shoulders. I was afraid she was going into another fit, but when she looked up, she was smiling despite the tears rolling down her cheeks. She threw her arms around my neck and laughed.

“Thank you! Thank you so much!”

I hugged her back, relieved that she was still with me. That she was still lucid.

“Violet,” I said after a few minutes, tugging her arms away from my neck, “I need to know what you had on him. I need to know what he’s so afraid of.”

She paled a little. “But it’s over now. You know what he was doing.”

“But we need more. We need to stop him from coming after you again, from coming after me and the people I love.”

She tilted her head a little. “They pulled you over.”

I nodded. “And they’ve issued an arrest warrant for my boyfriend.” It felt weird to put that label on Bo, but it was the best I could come up with right now. “I need to stop them. I need to stop West.”

She stared down at her hands for a long moment. Then her eyes came slowly up to mine.

“I knew from the beginning that West used certain methods that would be frowned on by moral people, but everyone in law enforcement tends to blend that line between legal and illegal. We have to do what we have to do to get the bad guys, right? Like Mad Dog. I always knew that West used them to threaten people he couldn’t touch in any other way. But I told myself he did that to protect people, to keep crime under control in the city. And that was okay.”

She hesitated, her eyes on her hands again. She was breathing a little shallowly, like she was beginning to hyperventilate. But then her breathing slowed and evened out.

She looked at me, her eyes wide with tears.

“I’m a good person. I’ve done things I regret, but I’ve always had a justification for that, you know? We all do. But the way he justified the things he did…it just wasn’t right.”

I took her hands in mine. “What did he do, Violet?”

She closed her eyes. “I loved him, you know. He was the first man in a very long time I trusted enough to fall in love. And he was worse than the man who hurt me. Worse than them all.”

I just held her hands, waiting for the pain to leave her. I knew it would never completely leave. She’d always feel the darkness of trusting the wrong person. But I waited until it was bearable.

“He’s laundering money. It’s this huge, complicated process that only a certified accountant—or a corporate lawyer—would be able to recognize. He takes money from illegal sources—Mad Dog’s drug sales and a protection racket he’s got his beat cops running—and he’s laundering it with such brilliance that even I didn’t recognize what the paperwork was telling me the first time I saw it. But I kept seeing these papers on his desk and after a while it finally began to reveal itself to me.”

She looked at me, her tears flowing free. “He said he loved me, but the second he saw me with those papers and I asked him how he could do it, he tossed me out of his house on my ass and told me to never come back. And then he did this.” She waved one hand around the room. “He tried to drive me insane by using the deepest, darkest secret I held. I’d never told anyone the truth about what happened to me except him. Not even the doctors who treated me back then.”

“I’m sorry, Violet.”

She shrugged. “My mother always said I had shitty taste in men.”

She laughed and I couldn’t help but laugh along with her. And then I hugged her, hurting for this woman who’d been so utterly damaged by someone who was supposed to love her. Wasn’t that the thing about love? It could lift you up and help you sing, but it could just as easily drop you without warning and shatter every bone in your body.

“Could you find my duffle for me?” Violet asked as I got up and prepared to leave the room. “I’d like to shower.”

I nodded. “I’ll get it. Is there anything else I can get you?”

She shook her head. “I think I’ll be okay now.”

I thought so, too. There was already more color in her cheeks.

I left the room, locking it behind me as much for her safety as anyone else’s. I was sure she would be lucid from here on out, but there was no way to be sure. Once the genie had come out of the lamp…but we would definitely get her help as soon as all of this was over.

I found her duffle in the storeroom, placed there by some well-meaning employee, I was sure. I lifted it up and a sudden memory swept through my mind: Violet going into her home office and taking a sheaf of papers out of a safe. I remembered my dream, too, the papers floating all around me.

It was all connected, wasn’t it?

I opened the bag and searched through the clumps of clothing, telling myself that I was doing the right thing. Violet was still weak. She didn’t need to see anything in this bag that might set off another trip into delusion.

My fingers brushed the papers that had been shoved to the very bottom of the bag. I pulled them free, setting the bag on the floor and looking the papers over as I leaned back against the wall. I was a little confused at first, reading the names of a dozen different companies, deposit and withdrawals from a dozen more banks, following the money until, slowly, it began to make sense.

These were the papers Violet had seen in West’s office. She’d made copies.

Good girl!

I went back through them, almost unable to believe what I was seeing. I’d have to sit down with a calculator and a highlighter, but I was pretty sure I knew what I would find. This was evidence gold.

We had him!